BAKER V. CARR
The ideal of one person, one vote motivated the founders of the United States of America to establish a census when they drafted the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Although that ideal has not yet been fully realized—because the census still undercounts racial and ethnic minorities, among others—the country took a giant step closer to equal representation for every citizen nearly two centuries later, during the era of the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. On March 26, 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark
case of Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 82 S. Ct. 691, 7 L. Ed. 2d 663 (1962), that state congressional districts of unequal size were unconstitutional.
In a ruling that Chief Justice EARL WARREN later
called the most important of his tenure on the
Court, Justice WILLIAM J. BRENNAN JR. wrote: “A
citizen’s right to vote free of ARBITRARY impair-
ment by STATE ACTION has been judicially rec-
ognized as a right secured by the Constitution.”
Also significant because it examined the
notion of “political questions” and whether
courts could address them, the Baker case
became a springboard for future APPORTION-
MENT lawsuits. In June 1964, the Supreme Court
ruled on appeals from 15 states that had used
Baker as a precedent, holding that both houses
of a state legislature must be apportioned sub-
stantially on the basis of population.Within two
years, every state had taken some type of appor-
tionment action. By the late 1960s, congres-
sional districts around the country had been
redrawn to meet the Supreme Court’s call for
equal representation, and after the 1970 census,
underrepresented urban areas were finally given
an equal voice in Congress.
Every decade since 1790, U.S. citizens have
complied with the Constitution and counted
themselves. Whereas on its simplest level the
census is a means to document historical
changes in the U.S. population, it also deter-
mines how federal funds, power, political clout,
and representation are divided, or apportioned,
among the people of the United States. It was
the notion of representation, more specifically
equal representation, that compelled Charles W.
Baker and other qualified voters in Tennessee to
bring a lawsuit against Tennessee’s secretary of
state Joe C. Carr, on the grounds that the state’s
1901 apportionment statute (Acts Tenn. 1901,
c. 122) violated the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT of
the Constitution. The plaintiffs argued that
Tennessee’s method of unequally apportioning
the members of the general assembly among
the state’s 95 counties unconstitutionally
deprived people in the state of EQUAL PROTEC-
TION of the laws and was obsolete because of a
significant growth and population shift since
1900.
The plaintiffs’ first round in court brought
failure when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Dis-
trict Court for the Middle District of Tennessee
dismissed their complaint on December 21,
1959 (Baker, 179 F. Supp. 824). The panel dis-
missed the complaint on two grounds: (1) that
the court lacked jurisdiction of the subject mat-
ter because it was a POLITICAL QUESTION and
(2) that the complaint failed to state a claim
upon which relief could be granted.
The plaintiffs appealed, and on November
21, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it
had probable jurisdiction in the matter. This
decision was significant because before the
Supreme Court heard the Baker case, courts had
abstained from addressing apportionment
issues because they were considered political in
nature. In the 1946 Supreme Court case Cole-
grove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 66 S. Ct. 1198, 90 L.
Ed. 1432 (1946), Justice FELIX FRANKFURTER
called apportionment a “political thicket” into
which the judiciary should not venture. The
subsequent ruling in Baker changed that inter-
pretation, stating that federal courts possessed
jurisdiction of the subject, that the citizens in
Tennessee were entitled to relief, and that the
federal district court in the state could settle the
challenge to the apportionment statute of Ten-
nessee.
In addressing the concern of some of his fel-
low Supreme Court justices, who warned that
the matter before them was a political question
and therefore not appropriately dealt with in a
court of law, Justice Brennan carefully wrote—
and rewrote, ten times—his opinion in the 1962
decision. Brennan stated: “The mere fact that the
suit seeks protection of a political right does not
mean it presents a political question. Such an
objection is little more than a play upon words.”
He added that the plaintiffs’ complaint did pres-
ent a JUSTICIABLE constitutional CAUSE OF
ACTION and that the Fourteenth Amendment
did provide judicial protection to the right
asserted. Justices Frankfurter and JOHN MAR-
SHALL HARLAN dissented, stating that Brennan
should not inject the Court “into the clash of
political forces and political settlements.” The
Court’s 6–2 ruling in favor of the plaintiffs
forced state legislatures to reapportion their
seats to reflect population shifts before the elec-
tions that were to occur in the fall of 1962. It also
decreed one person, one vote as part of the
United States’ constitutional heritage and
opened the door to challenging state voting pro-
cedures and malapportionment on constitu-
tional grounds.
In his book Turning Point: A Candidate, a
State, and a Nation Come of Age, former presi-
dent JIMMY CARTER described how revolutionary the Baker decision was in the 1960s and how it transformed state politics, especially southern
politics. Carter wrote that the Georgia state government,
like many others, proposed a number
of stalling ploys, fake reapportionment plans,
and other ways to avoid the shift in political
power that the ONE-PERSON, ONE-VOTE ruling had
been designed to cause. “The beneficiaries of the
[old] system were the ones now charged with . . .
changing it,” he wrote. “At the same time, they
would be reducing drastically the relative voting
strength of their own constituents. It was understandable
that [they] would do everything possible
to circumvent or postpone the effect of the
court’s mandate.” Federal judges rejected the
bogus plans, however, and by late summer 1962,
the state’s political process had been thrown
wide open. Incumbent politicians were suddenly
without districts, and new seats had opened up.
In these circumstances, a few weeks before the
election, Carter decided to run for the Georgia
State Senate.
FURTHER READINGS
Charles, Guy-Uriel E. 2002. “Constitutional Pluralism and
Democratic Politics: Reflections on the Interpretive
Approach of Baker and Carr. North Carolina Law
Review 80 (May).
“A Final Victory Marks the End of a Career.” 1990. National
Law Journal (August 13).
Fuentes-Rohwer, Luis. 2002. “Baker’s Promise, Equal Protection,
and the Modern Redistricting Revolution: A Plea
for Rationality. North Carolina Law Review 80 (May).
“Koohi v. United States.” 1993. Georgia Law Review 28 (fall).
Pushaw, Robert J., Jr. 2001. “Bush v. Gore: Looking at Baker v.
Carr in a Conservative Mirror.” Constitutional Commentary
18 (summer).
Richie, Robert, and Steven Hill. 1999. Reflecting All of Us: The
Case of Proportional Representation. Boston: Beacon.
Rush, Mark E. 1993. Does Redistricting Make a Difference?
Partisan Representation and Electoral Behavior. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
“Some Implications of Arrow’s Theorem for Voting Rights.”
1995. Stanford Law Review 47 (January).
“The Trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs v. Yamasaki:
The Application of the Political Question Doctrine to
Hawaii’s Public Land Trust Dispute.” 1988. University of
Hawaii Law Review 10 (winter).
“United States v. Alvarez-Machain: Waltzing with the Political
Question Doctrine.” 1994. Connecticut Law Review
26 (winter).
“U.S. Supreme Court.” 1990. National Law Journal (June 4).
“When Restraint Requires Activism.” 1990. Stanford Law
Review 42 (July).
CROSS-REFERENCES
Apportionment; Brennan, William Joseph, Jr.; Equal Protection;
Failure to State a Claim; Fourteenth Amendment;
Frankfurter, Felix; Political Question; Reynolds v. Sims;Voting.
