Segregation Forever?

IT isn’t every day that GOP operatives cheer on the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. Yet many of them couldn’t have been happier on April 18, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor abandoned her longstanding skepticism about racial gerrymandering in a North Carolina redistricting dispute. The Republican National Committee now may proceed with one of its key tasks before next year’s elections: encouraging state- level Republicans to pack as many blacks as possible into the smallest number of congressional districts, thus making more GOP-leaning white voters available for placement in swing districts.

This clever strategy represents perhaps the only issue on which the GOP can make—and has made—common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus. The endangered species here is the white Democrat. Some analysts even believe it wasn’t President Clinton’s health-care disaster or Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America that led to the Republican election sweep of 1994, but the shakeout from the redistricting following the 1990 census: The number of black members of Congress shot up, and so did the number of Republicans. The results were most dramatic in the South. There, seats held by black Democrats rose from 13 to 17. At the same time, Republicans gained 27 seats, and grabbed a majority from the region for the first time since Reconstruction.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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IT isn’t every day that GOP operatives cheer on the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. Yet many of them couldn’t have been happier on April 18, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor abandoned her longstanding skepticism about racial gerrymandering in a North Carolina redistricting dispute. The Republican National Committee now may proceed with one of its key tasks before next year’s elections: encouraging state- level Republicans to pack as many blacks as possible into the smallest number of congressional districts, thus making more GOP-leaning white voters available for placement in swing districts.

This clever strategy represents perhaps the only issue on which the GOP can make—and has made—common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus. The endangered species here is the white Democrat. Some analysts even believe it wasn’t President Clinton’s health-care disaster or Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America that led to the Republican election sweep of 1994, but the shakeout from the redistricting following the 1990 census: The number of black members of Congress shot up, and so did the number of Republicans. The results were most dramatic in the South. There, seats held by black Democrats rose from 13 to 17. At the same time, Republicans gained 27 seats, and grabbed a majority from the region for the first time since Reconstruction.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.