Bentham's Utilitarianism

One of the books I read this week was Jeremy Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation. In it, Bentham describes the principle of Utilitarianism. To him, this principle is all about the balance of pleasures and pains.

The idea is that an action should be measured by both the intentions and consequences of it. A good action is one that attempts to increase the pleasures or decrease the pains of a person it affects. The overall value of that action, then, can be measured by summing the outcomes it has for every affected person.

So how does this apply to redistricting? Adhering to Bentham's principles of utility necessitates majority-favoring districts. These districts would have to be drawn with maximum compactness, and with no regard for communities of interest. Bentham's ideas would strongly oppose both racial, and partisan gerrymandering, because both types work to strengthen the political power of certain groups beyond what their population figures would prescribe.
 

Why Study Philosophy?

As I have hinted at before, there is no easy way to define fair redistricting. District maps may have strange shapes, or unusual racial demographics, but these things alone do not give clear criteria for defining a fair system.

This is where philosophy comes in. To come up with fairness criteria, I must answer questions like: “Should communities of interest (e.g. African-American communities in the South) be separated among many districts, or kept together in just a few?”, “Should counties be seen as individual communities?”, and “Should redistricting be used as a tool to protect the will of political minorities?” 

I will develop answers to these questions (based on my own opinion) by studying various political philosophies.

Moving Away from Population Gerrymandering

The first Supreme Court opinion I read this week was Baker v. Carr. This 1962 case centers on Tennessee’s redistricting.

In 1901, Tennessee passed the Apportionment Act, requiring the state to redraw state legislative districts decennially after each new US Census. The first reapportionment under this new law took place in 1901, right after the passing of the new act. After this, however, Tennessee failed to follow its own law, and did not reapportion its legislative districts for over sixty years, and the only after the Supreme Court forced it to.

The Court found that the original 1901 reapportionment seemed to follow no formula or constitutional law, and that other reapportionments should have been conducted before 1962.

This ruling created significant precedent, since the court found that it was allowed to rule on issues of state legislative redistricting. With the new “political question doctrine”, the Court created a system for determining whether a political case fell under the judicial branch’s jurisdiction. If the Constitution explicitly granted jurisdiction of an issue to one of the political branches of the government, then this issue entailed a so-called “political question”, and the Supreme Court could not make decisions on it. For all other political issues, however, the Court was allowed to make rulings.

In Baker v. Carr, the Court found that state gerrymandering was not a “political question”, because the issue involved a state’s relationship with the court, not the Federal government’s relationship with it. Even though the US Congress has the power to regulate state apportionment schemes, the court found that Congress did not have power to determine the legality of a particular district map, so the Court could rule on this.

The other major precedent from this case was the use of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment. The Court decided that a seemingly careless reapportionment plan that underrepresented certain voters violated this clause, and was therefore unconstitutional.

The second case I read this week came just after Baker v. Carr.

Reynolds v. Sims was a 1964 decision based upon Alabama’s redistricting. The state’s constitution required decennial reapportionment, with districts based upon population. Much like in Tennessee, Alabama’s state legislative districts had not been reapportioned for over sixty years, and they were clearly in violation of the state’s law. Two plans were put forth by the state legislature as remedies to this issue, and the Court ruled on their merits.

One plan would have changed the number of State Senators to sixty-seven, with one Senator per county. Counties in Alabama, however, had significant population variation between them, so this plan was deemed insufficient.

The other plan would have given one State Representative to each county, then distributed the remaining thirty-nine to more populous counties. The Court deemed this plan insufficient also, because it would have allowed some voters in more populous counties to have only a fifth the voting power of voters in less populous counties.

In asserting that both of these plans failed to meet the necessary criteria, the Court created a tremendously important precedent. It ruled (based on the Equal Protection Clause, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and the 15^th, 17^th, and 19^th Amendments) that the US Constitution implied the right to equal voting power for all voting-eligible citizens. This “one person, one vote” principle effectively made population gerrymandering illegal by requiring that all votes have relatively equal weight. The Court said that all districts had to have almost equal populations.

How Districts are Gerrymandered

In its long history, American gerrymandering has taken on several different forms. Changes in the law resulted in the elimination of certain forms, as well as the growth of others.

For much of this country’s history, gerrymandering issues arose from the unequal distribution of voters between districts. Rural areas were often over-represented in state legislatures because, unlike for US House districts, there was no law requiring that each elected official have the same number of constituents. State legislative districts were created based on geographical features, counties, or other non-population-based factors. This meant that in some states, there were neighboring districts each with one State Representative, but with populations differing by a factor of five. A vote in one of these districts was worth five times as much as a vote in the other.

This week, I studied the Supreme Court decisions that illegalized this type of population-based gerrymandering. These decisions, however, did not end gerrymandering as a whole, since racial and partisan gerrymandering soon became dominant forces on the American political stage.