Following up on this post, Jeff Wice has written a letter to the editor responding to Abigail Thernstrom’s recent oped on the Voting Rights Act (article available here without a subscription). In his letter, Wice writes:

Re: “Emergency Exit,” Abigail Thernstrom, Opinion, July 29, 2005. As counsel to the New York State Assembly speaker and later to the New York City Council Redistricting Committee, I helped guide the 1992 state congressional and the 2003 City Council plan through the Justice Department approval process for Queens, New York, and Bronx counties. The Justice Department, under the first and second Bush administrations, never once interfered with the line-drawing processes. In fact, the Justice Department approved both plans without a question raised.
The Justice Department never “demanded” that New York create “racially gerrymandered” congressional or City Council districts. Both plans were a product of local deliberations. Moreover, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act remains today an effective enforcement tool for the protection of minority voting rights. Section 5’s mandate goes no further than to prevent the retrogression, or weakening, of effective minority voting strength when new plans are required by decennial census data.