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.