Opinion: More conscience in redistricting

Democratic voters still outnumber Republicans in Florida, 43 percent to 39. Democrats easily won the last two U.S. Senate races. They carried Florida for their presidential ticket in 1994 and fell only 535 votes short of doing the same in 2000. Yet they hold barely a third of the seats in the state House, the state Senate, and the congressional delegation. The disparity is not coincidental.

It owes in major part to how the districts were drawn 10 years ago, and specifically to the cynical deals that were struck between some ambitious black politicians and shrewd Republican strategists. Aided by pressure from the Justice Department and the courts, they colluded to pack Democratic voters into safe districts bordered by others that were overwhelmingly Republican and white.

The results were dramatic. In 1990, Democrats held the House 73-47 and the Senate, 23-17, but only 10 representatives and two senators were black. The roles now are almost precisely reversed: Republicans rule the House 77-43 and the Senate 25-15. However, 16 of the Democratic representatives and six of the senators are African-American, as are three members of the congressional delegation, which was all white until 1992. The party balance would have shifted, of course, even under a neutral redistricting. But not by nearly so much.

Were the gains worthwhile? It depends on who's asked. The black legislators who benefitted may think so. But the issues they and other Democrats tend to support fare markedly worse under Republican rule. For example, the hammer has fallen particularly hard on low-income state workers, many of them black, whose jobs would not have been outsourced if Democrats still controlled the budget.

Considering the background, it is disconcerting to hear from Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, that the odd alliance is beginning to reform as the Legislature prepares for the 2002 redistrictings. Lawson, who is black, said Democrats appear to be trying to shift some black voters from overwhelmingly Democratic districts, which concerns him from the standpoint of "keeping communities of interest together." The Republicans, he might have added, will be trying to pack them even more.

The more important question, though, is what good it does to keep communities together if their legislators have no influence on public policy? That's one of the points that voting rights advocate Lani Guinier tried to make in describing race-based single-member districting as the "triumph of tokenism." But her proposals to replace it with more sophisticated forms of proportional representation have been largely ignored.

The rules have changed since 1992 but the consequences are unclear. Though the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected race-based districting, it still allows lines to be drawn for political effect. Nor has it ruled how far or even whether legislatures can dilute the voting strength of minority districts, which is prohibited by the Voting Rights Act. Yet some dilution appears inevitable. In Rep. Frank Peterman's House Dist. 55, for example, half the voting-age population are black and two-thirds are Democrats, odds so daunting that no Republican even filed in 2000. But the new census means that the district will have to be substantially redrawn and enlarged in 2002 to meet the one-voter-one-vote standard. There are few blacks left in any adjacent district. It's hard to guess how that will play out, but important to note that the Republicans will be calling the signals.

Thereafter, however, it will be up to the Supreme Court. Voters of all races and all parties, whose interests are often ignored by a Legislature that is far more conservative than the sum of its constituents, can only hope for more conscience on the part of lawmakers, and more healthy skepticism on the part of the court, than was evident the last time.

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