Second, Justice White wrote that irrespective of what the Voting Rights Act may have required, what the state had done did not violate either the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth Amendment. Moreover, the creation of a certain number of districts in which minorities were in the majority was reasonable under the circumstances. Justice White noted that this requirement was not dependent upon a showing of past discrimination and that the states retained discretion to determine just what strength minority voters needed in electoral districts in order to assure their proportional representation. First, because the redistricting took place pursuant to the administration of the Voting Rights Act, Justice White argued that compliance with the Act necessarily required states to be race-conscious in the drawing of lines so as not to dilute minority voting strength. Justice White, delivering the judgment of the Court, based the result on alternative grounds. The Supreme Court approved the districting, although the fragmented majority of seven concurred in no majority opinion. In the process, a Hasidic Jewish community previously located entirely within one senate and one assembly district were divided between two senate and two assembly districts, and members of that community sued, alleging that the value of their votes had been diluted solely for the purpose of achieving a racial quota. These districts were drawn large enough to permit the election of nonwhite candidates in spite of the lower voter turnout of nonwhite citizens. Carey, 5 New York State had drawn a plan that consciously used racial criteria to create districts with nonwhite populations in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act and to obtain the United States Attorney General's approval for a redistricting law. 1 Although the Court had previously accepted the use of suspect criteria such as race to formulate remedies for specific instances of past discrimination 2 and had allowed preferences for members of certain non-suspect classes that had been the object of societal discrimination, 3 it was not until the late 1970s that the Court gave plenary review to programs that expressly used race as the primary consideration for awarding a public benefit. Often the issue is framed in terms of reverse discrimination, in that the governmental action deliberately favors members of one class and consequently may adversely affect nonmembers of that class. Of critical importance in equal protection litigation is the degree to which the government is permitted to take race or another suspect classification into account when formulating and implementing a remedy to overcome the effects of past discrimination. United States Library of Congress, The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |