1034
Stevens, J., dissenting
other than as a means of accomplishing its compelling interest of creating majority-minority districts in accord with the Voting Rights Act. The goal was, by all accounts, achieved, for these districts would certainly avoid liability under § 2 of the Voting Rights Act.33 For reasons that continue to escape me, however, the plurality simply insists that the lack of compactness in the districts prevents them from being "narrowly tailored" solutions to the State's interests.
The plurality uses two premises to reach its conclusion that compactness is required to meet the "narrow tailoring" requirement: (i) § 2 would not have been violated unless a reasonably compact majority-minority district could have been created; and (ii) nothing in § 2 requires the creation of a noncompact district. I have no quarrel with either proposition, but each falls far short of mandating the conclusion that the plurality draws from it. While a State can be liable for a § 2 violation only if it could have drawn a compact district and failed to do so, it does not follow that creating such a district is the only way to avoid a § 2 violation. See generally Shaw II, ante, at 946-950 (Stevens, J., dissenting). The plurality admits that a State retains "a limited degree of leeway" in drawing a district to alleviate fears of § 2 liability, ante, at 977, but if there is no independent constitutional duty to create compact districts in the first place, and the plurality suggests none, there is no reason why noncompact districts should not be a permissible method of avoiding violations of law. The fact that they might be unacceptable judicial remedies does not speak to the question whether they
33 Even if the Court in Shaw II is correct in asserting that North Carolina's District 12 would not have allowed the State to avoid liability under § 2, see ante, at 916-918, no such plausible argument could be made in these cases. The core of District 30, for instance, contains more than half of all the African-American population in the district, and coincides precisely with the heart of the compact community that the State reasonably believes would give rise to a § 2 violation were it not placed in a majority-minority district. The same facts are true with respect to the Houston districts.
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