Story of Baker v. Carr
Files
Description
Occasionally in all walks of life, law included, there are breakthroughs that have the quality of truth revealed. Not only do such ideas have overwhelming force, but they alter the world in which they operate. In the wake of such breakthroughs, it is difficult to imagine what existed before. Such is the American conception of constitutional democracy before and after the “reapportionment revolution” of the 1960s. Although legislative redistricting today is not without its riddle of problems, it is difficult to imagine so bizarre an apportionment scheme as the way legislative power was rationed out in Tennessee, the setting for Baker v. Carr. Tennessee apportioned power through, in Justice Clark's words, “a crazy quilt without rational basis.” Indeed, forty years after Baker, with “one person, one vote” a fundamental principle of our democracy, it may be hard to imagine what all the constitutional fuss was about. Yet the decision in Baker, which had striking immediate impact, marked a profound transformation in American democracy. The man who presided over this transformation, Chief Justice Earl Warren, called Baker “the most important case of [his] tenure on the Court.” Perhaps the simplest way to understand the problem is to imagine the role of the legislator faced with the command to reapportion legislative districts after each decennial census. Shifts in population mean that new areas of a state are likely to emerge as the dominant forces of a legislature. But what if the power to stem the tide were as simple as refusing to reapportion? It happened at the national level when Congress, realizing that the swelling tide of immigrant and industrial workers had .moved power to the Northeast and the Midwest, simply refused to reapportion after the 1920 census. And it happened throughout the U.S. for much of the twentieth century as rural power blocs in the state legislature realized that reapportioning would yield power to the urban and suburban voters and remove incumbent politicians from their clubby sinecure. When the original complaint in Baker was filed in 1959, the Tennessee Legislature had been refusing for nearly fifty years to apportion the state legislative districts. This was despite the express requirement of the Tennessee Constitution that each legislative district have the same number of qualified voters. As a result, there existed an enormous disparity in the voting strength of individual voters. For example, southcentral Moore County, with 2,340 voters, had one seat in each house of the state legislature, while Shelby County, covering the city of Memphis, had only seven seats for its 312,345 voters. “Districts with 40 percent of the state's voters could elect sixty-three of the ninety-nine members of the house, and districts with 37 percent of the voters could elect twenty of the thirty-three members of the senate.” This pattern of maldistribution of representatives, which existed across the country, resulted from the increasingly urban nature of American life during the twentieth century. As urban areas grew, the malapportionment of representatives increased. Between 1900 and 1960, the voting population of Tennessee grew from 487,380 to 2,092,891. Accompanying this growth was a massive migration from the rural areas of the state to the cities of Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. And, while the Tennessee Constitution provided for legislative reapportionment on the basis of each decennial census, there was no way for the people of Tennessee to compel the legislature to reapportion. The state courts were unresponsive to the cause, and Tennessee lacked any procedure of popular referendum or initiative. Because rural Tennessee legislators, like those in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, California, and many other states, had everything to lose by reapportioning their legislative districts according to the population shift, they stood firm, decade after decade defying the mandate of their state constitution. And “when the movement toward [the cities] began, then swelled to floods at the end of World War II, the political power stayed behind on the cotton flats, the hills and the ridgeland farms.” The only remedy for this profoundly lopsided version of democracy lay in the hands of the very legislators whose political lives depended upon its continued existence. In short, the majority of voters in Tennessee were “caught up in a legislative strait jacket.” Yet it was not until 1962, when the Supreme Court announced in Baker that challenging the constitutionality of a legislative apportionment “presents no nonjusticiable ‘political question,’” that a cure for the disproportionate concentration of power in the hands of rural legislators was finally found. Why were the obstacles to judicial correction of legislative misapportionment so difficult to overcome?
Source Publication
Constitutional Law Stories
Source Editors/Authors
Michael C. Dorf
Publication Date
2004
Edition
1
Recommended Citation
Ansolabehere, Stephen Samuel and Issacharoff, Samuel, "Story of Baker v. Carr" (2004). Faculty Chapters. 935.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/935
