On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:45:14 -0800, Rick Hasen wrote:

And would the Republicans in Texas be doing so out of
racial animus, or 
out of animus against "black and Latino, as well as
Anglo Democrats, 
nationally as well as in Texas"?  If the latter, is
Section 5 the proper 
remedy?  In other words, if in fact it is partisan
motive, rather than 
racial motive, that animates packing reliably
Democratic minority voters 
into districts, is an anti-race discrimination statute
justified as a 
means for correction?
I ask these questions genuinely, not rhetorically.
Rick

I don't have anything like a complete answer, either
genuinely or rhetorically, but the germ of one line of
thought does spring to mind.

The history in many covered jurisdictions isn't just
denying blacks the vote, but also stamping out the
(white-dominated) political parties that the blacks
wanted to vote for.  Most striking is the murderous
violence during and after Reconstruction that was
visited not only on blacks, but on white Republicans. 
And, as I understand the VRA jurisprudence (which is
not nearly as well as many others on this list), the
point of the VRA (at least section 2) isn't to ensure
that blacks and Latinos are elected to office, but that
minority communities can elect their candidates of
choice, whatever the race of those candidates might be.

Perhaps the alignment of race and party isn't quite as
stark as it was immediately after the Civil War,
especially among the varying populations lumped
together under the heading "Hispanic."  But as long as
racial bloc voting continues to exist--and I think that
African-American support for the Democrats is still
around 90%--the deliberate diminution of the power of
the party supported by minorities can be seen as
implicating the interests that the VRA is designed to
protect.  If this diminution is carried out in part by
knowingly diminishing the voting power of a racial
minority that votes en bloc, then I think one could
make a case that even if the motive is "merely"
partisan, it is not without a racial element that is
problematic for voting rights and equal protection,
especially in jurisdictions with a particular history.

After all, there must surely have been some Southern
Democrats in the 19th century who weren't motivated
principally by racism but by a desire to grab power
back from the Republicans so as to preserve, among
other things, policies that entrenched certain economic
interests.  For such Democrats, disfranchising blacks
would have been useful as a means to an end,
irrespective of any animus they may have had toward
blacks.

I don't suggest that these considerations are
conclusive.  But if we're concerned about eliminating
the vestiges of that history "root and branch," then I
think we ought to bear the history in mind.

(Potentially controversial P.S.:  This approach may
have more force if one adopts a certain view of the
GOP's current dominance in covered jurisdictions in the
South, which traces that dominance to a deliberate
"Southern Strategy" of intentional racial polarization
that identified the Democratic Party as the party of
blacks and the GOP as the party of the
counterrevolution against the civil rights movement.)