If unconstitutional racial politics need deploying, go for it, said recently the head of Monroe’s City Council.
At its May 12 meeting, the Council voted on a measure held over previously that would reapportion its districts mid-cycle. The move stemmed from a vote last year to spend considerable taxpayer dollars on such a task, passed by the Council’s black Democrat majority. One motivation for this would be to come up with a map with four majority-minority districts out of the five in order to add another black Democrat via 2028 elections and create a veto-proof bloc.
Yet the ordinance that came forth months later merely shifted a handful of districts between the only majority-white district with its neighboring majority-black district. And by the time the Council brought the measure to a vote, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that, absent demonstrated intentional racial discrimination in mapmaking, use of race in drawing maps was invalid.
So then voted upon, it met with abrupt rejection. After the meeting, Democrat Chairman Rodney McFarland opined that he was pretty sure the Council should redraw things to make all five M/M districts, in response to the state’s corrective measures to the court’s ruling that will reduce the state’s two if six M/M districts to one, with him alleging that effort was discriminatory. Thus, the high dollar/low change recommendation was confirmed as a feint in case the Court, as had been widely expected, would rule the state race-based map unconstitutional, leaving open the possibility of much more disruptive – and now determined unconstitutional – reapportionment attempts.
McFarland didn’t shy away from rhetoric designed to divide the city. “I’m going to fight for my people. I’m going to fight for what’s right. An eye for an eye – and you know what the rest says,” said the pastor of the Greater Free Gift Missionary Baptist Church since 1989.
Unfortunately, McFarland doesn’t seem to understand that he doesn’t need to confine his policy-making efforts just to his “people,” but owes service to all Monrovians. Worse, in his rush to conjure injury out of nothing – in no way does the incoming state map detract from any voter’s ability to vote for a preferred candidate – he doesn’t seem to comprehend that to change the city’s map to all five M/M districts would be unconstitutional under the revised jurisprudence, and even to create four M/M districts might be problematic.
Unlike the state of Louisiana, Monroe has developed into fairly racially concentrated areas, roughly the north side with mostly white residents and the south side overwhelmingly with blacks, in a city with a population 65 percent black. In fact, besides the three hugely M/M districts, District 2 actually has a black plurality already. With those numbers, this opportunity district very well could see a black Democrat elected in 2028 with current Republican Councilor Gretchen Ezernack term limited.
While the Court has held that partisan gerrymandering remains constitutional, another implication of the Callais decision is that race as a criterion cannot masquerade as partisanship, which can be ascertained when reviewing how well other traditional criteria, such as district compactness and togetherness of communities of interest, get utilized in a map. Because of the dispersion of Monroe’s populations, a five M/M map would create weirdly-shaped districts that do great violence to communities of interest, waving a red flag to the judiciary that what’s really going on is unconstitutionally apportioning voters by racial quotas.
As it is, demography is such that even a four M/M map through boosting black residency in District 2 starts to get constitutionally suspect by these criteria. If black Democrats want to create a veto-proof majority, finding a good candidate in 2028 for that district seems likely to pay off with much less risk.
Regardless of constitutional arguments and the questionable nature of any plan besides the current, McFarland should be ashamed of injecting race into the conversation. It’s a divisiveness that has held the city back and will do so in the future if McFarland or others cater to this behavior for political purposes.
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