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legislative apportionment

legislative apportionment, subdivision of a political body (e.g., a state or province) for the purpose of electing legislative representatives. In the United States, the Constitution requires that Congressional representatives be elected on the basis of population. State legislatures, not bound by the constitutional strictures, were apportioned according to considerations including population, as well as geographic size, special interests, and political divisions such as counties or towns. This often resulted in unrepresentative, minority control of the state legislature. The state legislatures were responsible for drawing up districts for the purpose of electing representatives to Congress. Gerrymandering often resulted (see gerrymander). In some states legislatures did not redistrict, despite population shifts, for as many as sixty years. This was the case until 1962 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Carr that a voter could challenge legislative apportionment on the grounds that it violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Within nine months of the decision suits for reapportionment were brought in at least 34 states. In 1964, in Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court ruled that population, i.e., the one-person, one-vote principle, must be the primary consideration in apportionment plans for both houses of state legislatures.

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legislative apportionment

or legislative delimitation

Process by which representation is distributed among the constituencies of a representative assembly. In ancient Athens, every citizen represented himself, but throughout most of history representation has been restricted to certain social classes. With the growth of democracy, the extension of suffrage, and the rise of political parties, apportionment had to be methodically and mathematically arranged to ensure that the distribution of legislative seats would most accurately reflect the electorate's will. Territorial apportionment is currently the most common form. Seealso gerrymandering, proportional representation.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Baker v. Carr

Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that retreated from the Court's political question doctrine, deciding that reapportionment (attempts to change the way voting districts are delineated) issues present justiciable questions, thus enabling federal courts to intervene in and to decide reapportionment cases. The defendants unsuccessfully argued that reapportionment of legislative districts is a "political question," and hence not a question that may be resolved by federal courts.

Background

Plaintiff Charles Baker was a Republican who lived in Shelby County, Tennessee, the county in which Memphis is located. His complaint was that though the Tennessee State Constitution required that legislative districts be redrawn every ten years according to the federal census, to provide for districts of substantially equal population, Tennessee had not in fact redistricted since the census of 1901. By the time of Baker's lawsuit, the population had shifted such that his district in Shelby County had about ten times as many residents as some of the rural districts. Representationally, the votes of rural citizens were worth more than the votes of urban citizens. Baker's argument was that this discrepancy was causing him to fail to receive the "equal protection of the laws" required by the Fourteenth Amendment. Defendant Joe Carr was sued in his position as Secretary of State for Tennessee. Carr was not the person who set the district lines – the state legislature had done that – but was sued ex officio as the person who was ultimately responsible for the conduct of elections in the state and for the publication of district maps. The State of Tennessee argued that legislative districts were essentially political questions, not judicial ones, as had been held by a plurality opinion of the Court in Colegrove v. Green (1946), wherein Justice Felix Frankfurter declared that, "Courts ought not to enter this political thicket." Frankfurter believed that relief for legislative malapportionment had to be attained through the political process.

The Court's decision

The decision of Baker v. Carr was one of the most wrenching in the Court's history. The case had to be put over for reargument because in conference no clear majority emerged for either side of the case. Justice Charles Evans Whittaker was so torn over the case that he eventually had to recuse himself, and the arduous decisional process in Baker is often blamed for Whittaker's subsequent health problems, which forced him to resign from the Court.

The opinion was finally handed down in March 1962, nearly a year after it was initially argued. The Court split 6 to 2 in ruling that Baker's case was justifiable, producing, in addition to the opinion of the Court by Justice William J. Brennan, three concurring opinions and two dissenting opinions. Brennan reformulated the political question doctrine, proposing a six-part test for determining which questions were "political" in nature. Cases which are political in nature are marked by:

1. "Textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department;" as an example of this, Brennan cited issues of foreign affairs and executive war powers, arguing that cases involving such matters would be "political questions"

2. "A lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it;"

3. "The impossibility of deciding without an initial policy determination of a kind clearly for nonjudicial discretion;"

4. "The impossibility of a court's undertaking independent resolution without expressing lack of the respect due coordinate branches of government;"

5. "An unusual need for unquestioning adherence to a political decision already made;"

6. "The potentiality of embarrassment from multifarious pronouncements by various departments on one question."

Justice Tom C. Clark switched his vote at the last minute to a concurrence on the substance of Baker's claims, which would have enabled a majority which could have granted relief for Baker, but instead the Supreme Court remanded the case to the District Court. Frankfurter, joined by John Marshall Harlan II, dissented vigorously and at length, arguing that the Court had shunted aside history and judicial restraint and violated the separation of powers between legislatures and Courts.

The large majority in this case can in many ways be attributed to Justice Brennan, who convinced Potter Stewart that the case was a narrow ruling dealing only with plaintiff power to challenge the statute. Brennan also talked down Justices Black and Douglas from their usual absolutist positions to achieve a compromise.

Aftermath

Having declared reapportionment issues justiciable in Baker, the court laid out a new test for evaluating such claims in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964). In Gray v. Sanders, the Court formulated the famous "one-person, one-vote" standard for legislative districting, holding that each individual had to be weighted equally in legislative apportionment. The Court decided that in states with bicameral legislatures both houses had to be apportioned on this standard, voiding the provision of the Arizona constitution which had provided for two state senators from each county and similar provisions elsewhere. (Even the Tennessee constitution, enforcement of which was the original basis for the case, has a provision which prevented counties from being "split" and portions of a county being attached to other counties or parts of counties in the creation of a district which was overridden, and today counties are frequently split among districts in forming Tennessee State Senate districts.) However, "One-person, one-vote" was first applied as a standard for congressional districts in 1964's Wesberry v. Sanders.

Baker v. Carr and subsequent cases fundamentally altered the nature of political representation in America, requiring not just Tennessee but nearly every state to redistrict during the 1960s, often several times. This re-apportionment increased the political power of urban centers and limited the influence of more rural, conservative interests that had benefited from the Supreme Court ruling injusticiable such "political" questions as those of apportionment. After he left the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren called the Baker v. Carr line of cases the most important in his tenure as Chief Justice.