Hard to explain the obvious

It’s hard to prove what, if anything, is in the head of Republican state legislators in Arkansas, even if the effect of their actions is evident.

Were they misbehaving with deliberate discrimination toward Black people? Or were they just trying to lessen the inconvenience for French Hill in getting reelected to Congress, which is politics as usual? Or were they simply being smart-alecks, thinking they were clever when they instead were mean, which is not in itself a crime or a racist act?

These Republican legislators redrew the 2nd Congressional District last year in a way that broke Black residents of southeastern Pulaski County out of the district and split them among the 1st District eastward to the Mississippi River and the 4th District southward to the Louisiana line. Then the legislators added to the 2nd District over central Arkansas an overwhelmingly white and Republican county to the north, Cleburne.

Even French Hill can win easily in that configuration.

A local lawyer, Richard Mays, is representing aggrieved

Black plaintiffs suing in federal court by alleging that the state GOP surgical knife was plainly wielded purposefully to hurt them because of their race — removing them from their natural political jurisdiction and diluting their voting power.

You’re not supposed to dilute deliberately and racially under federal court precedent.

But did the Arkansas Republican legislators dilute deliberately and racially? And, if they did, how can you try to prove it other than to say “just look — isn’t it obvious?”

There are a few national law firms that specialize in these kinds of cases in behalf of the political parties. But they take only cases that might lead judges to order changes that perhaps would flip seats to their favor in Congress.

The fact is that a Republican — any Republican, even Hill — will win in the 2nd District with or without this curious excision. The GOP purpose was to save the Republican candidate some fret. A solid Democrat had been able to get to 45% four years ago. It cost Tom Cotton’s PAC a little money to keep Hill as a minion in the House.

A panel of three federal judges ruled in October that the plaintiffs hadn’t proved discriminatory intent, but had raised a conceivably arguable-enough point that they could have a few weeks to try to offer something more substantive than … well, duh?

The plaintiffs came back last week with … well, double-duh.

I suspect that the Republican purposes were entirely politics and self-amusement. I tend to think they would have run a thin line to the liberal mid-Little Rock enclave of heavily white Hillcrest and shipped it to the 4th and 1st District if they had thought it wouldn’t be such a grotesque gerrymander that the federal courts would look askance.

What they were seeking was dilution of Democrats in the 2nd District, not necessarily Blacks. And they also were seeking the chortling and high-fiving they’d enjoy after sticking it to Democrats, considering that Democrats presumably stuck it to Republicans for decades.

As much as I deplore the brazen GOP assault on Pulaski County, I’m not sure a persuasive federal case can be made that it is a deliberate dilution of Black voting power to move Black residents from a district where they tend to vote on the losing side by moderate margins and split them among two districts where they likely will tend to vote on the side that loses by giant margins.

A fuller explanation of what happened in this affair will require, regrettably, mention of the blessedly gone-from-politics fiddler and champion of fundamentalist intolerance, Jason Rapert.

For the acknowledged purpose of a role in redistricting after the decennial census, he gave up for the session of 2021 the powerful chairmanship of Senate Insurance and Commerce in order to take the chairmanship of State Agencies and Governmental Affairs. That committee would be ground zero for the legislative responsibility and authority in congressional redistricting.

Rapert had complained for years that, a decade before, the state Board of Apportionment redrawing legislative districts and led by two Democrats — Mike Beebe and Dustin McDaniel — had wronged him on purpose, though without negative consequence to him, in reconfiguring his district.

I thought I detected a tone of clever mischief in his explaining that, since some modest adjustment needed to be made owing to population changes, logic called for redrawing from the borders inward to preserve the status quo widely, then to make the necessary equalizing slices and dices in the central county, Pulaski, which only so happened to be easier to work with mathematically in that it contained the highest population numbers.

You’d probably have better luck with an argument that redistricting got done from smug vindictiveness than any scheme to hurt Black people, who were collateral damage.