Mayor-to-be Bobby Rush was quick to claim victory in last week’s court ruling on City Council elections, quick to demand thyat Mayor-to-be-replaced Richard Daley “rise above his pettiness” and change the ward map so a few white aldermen would be replaced by black aldermen. That, Rush said, would be fairness.
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Well, hold on. If Rush stopped to read the decision by a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, he would find that the court didn’t find anything was necessarily unfair.
Courts are having a depressingly hard time with these decisions over racial fairness in elections. In the 1960s, voting rights victories were scored over clear outrages such as poll taxes and literacy tests used to disenfranchise poor blacks. Today, we just see a mind-numbing series of seemingly contradictory and nearly unfathomable judicial rulings.
The Supreme Court in 1996 seemed to turn the clock back on minority voting gains, rejecting five congressional districts in Texas and North Carolina that the court said were drawn explicitly to elect minority lawmakers. But just last year the high court seemed to turn on its heel, allowing Illinois’ bizarrely shaped 4th Congressional District, held by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, to survive a court challenge.
So it should be no surprise that the 7th Circuit’s ruling on the Chicago ward map borders is, well, puzzling.
Here is what the court said: There might be, there could be, racial discrimination in the map of Chicago wards, but it all depends on whose calculator you use.
The simple way to count, of course, would be to figure out how many black people, white people and Hispanic people live in Chicago, and apportion the City Council accordingly. The 1990 census found that Chicago was 38.6 percent black, 37.9 percent white, and 19.6 percent Hispanic.
If you did that, blacks would be quite fairly represented right now in the council, but Hispanics would be shorted by three aldermen. Hispanics should be outraged.
But wait a minute. Children can’t vote. So children can’t be denied voting rights. So why should they be counted? Throw ’em out. That’s what the appellate court did.
So you throw out the kids and you consider the voting-age population of whites, blacks and Hispanics. In that case, blacks have one too many aldermen and Hispanics are short by 1 1/2 aldermen.
Not so fast, the court said. What about those people in Chicago who aren’t U.S. citizens? By the court’s calculation, that includes 40 percent of the Hispanics in Chicago. They can’t vote. Throw ’em out.
So now that we’ve cleared out all those Chicagoans who don’t count, we get to something called the “citizen voting-age population.” Aha! By that calculation, the court finds there might be a measure of racial discrimination in the makeup of the Chicago City Council.
It amounts to 2 percent.
Under the favored calculation of the appellate court, whites and Hispanics are doing just fine in the City Council. The problem is black representation. It is off by 2 percent.
Citizen voting-age black Chicagoans make up 40 percent of that population, but they have only 38 percent of the seats in the City Council. Two percent. That’s one seat.
Keep in mind that it has taken six years of legal fighting to reach this remarkable day of reckoning.
Except, it’s not even a day of reckoning. The appellate court allowed that a 2 percent solution might not even be necessary.
The Voting Rights Act says, “. . . nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” The appellate court kicked this back to the district court to decide.
Now, here’s the really odd thing. While the lawyers and judges and politicians have been haggling for years and years, the public has come up with its own 2 percent solution.
It’s there in the 18th Ward on the Southwest Side, which in the legal wrangling is considered to be a “white” ward. It had a 54 percent black population in the 1990 census. That number, no doubt, has grown. But the lawyers are still using 1990 census figures in their 1998 court wranglings. And there’s a legal benchmark that says a district has to have at least a 65 percent minority population to be considered a district that would elect minority candidates.
Look what has been happening in the 18th Ward while everybody has been arguing downtown.
In the 1998 Democratic primary for governor, against three white opponents, Roland Burris got 60 percent of the vote in the 18th Ward. Jesse White got 67 percent running for secretary of state, and John Stroger got 79 percent running for Cook County Board president. They are all black.
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Now there are legal benchmarks, and there are election results. The attorneys for the city, who cited those election figures in their bid to get the appellate court to rehear the case, makes a very good argument.
There’s no guarantee that the 18th Ward will elect a black alderman next year. It has a white alderman, Thomas Murphy, who has been popular with blacks and whites. But the showing by Burris, White and Stroger proves that the opportunity to elect black candidates is there in the 18th Ward.
After six years and millions of dollars in legal fees, the people have come up with the 2 percent solution.
Case closed. No charge.