Baker v. Carr

Summary

Tennessee's constitution required the General Assembly to reapportion its seats every ten years according to the number of qualified voters in each county. The legislature did so each decade from 1871 to 1901, then stopped. Over the next sixty years the population grew from about two million to three and a half million and moved toward the cities, but seats were still allotted under the 1901 statute. By 1961, according to the complaint, about thirty-seven percent of the voters elected twenty of the thirty-three senators, and some House districts held eighteen times as many voters as others. Charles W. Baker and other voters from Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga sued Joe C. Carr, the Tennessee secretary of state, and other election officials in federal court, claiming that the debasement of their votes denied them the equal protection of the laws. A three-judge district court dismissed the suit under Colegrove v. Green (1946) and its successors. The appellants argued that the legislature would never reapportion itself, that Tennessee offered no initiative or other route to amend its constitution without legislative action, and that only a federal court could break the deadlock. Tennessee answered that apportionment is a political question committed to the people and their legislatures, that courts have no manageable standard for deciding how much weight each county deserves, and that a dozen decisions had refused such suits. By a vote of 6 to 2 the Court reversed. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. held that federal courts had jurisdiction, that the voters had standing to complain of the dilution of their votes, and that their equal protection claim was justiciable. He reviewed the political question cases and found that they arose from the separation of powers among the branches of the national government, not from the relation between federal courts and the states. He listed six features that mark a political question and found none present here, and he distinguished claims under the Guaranty Clause, which the Court had treated as nonjusticiable since Luther v. Borden (1849). The Court did not decide what standard the Constitution requires or what remedy should follow, and it sent the case back for trial. Justice Felix Frankfurter, joined by Justice John Marshall Harlan II, dissented at length. He called the decision a massive break with the Court's history, saw no guidance for remedies, and insisted that relief from unequal districts must come from an aroused electorate rather than the courts, since the Court's authority rests on public confidence in its restraint. The library text gives extended excerpts of Brennan's opinion and the beginning of Frankfurter's dissent; the concurrences, Harlan's separate dissent and the footnotes are not reproduced. Gray v. Sanders (1963) first used the phrase one person, one vote, and Reynolds v. Sims (1964) required both houses of state legislatures to be apportioned by population. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) the Court held that claims of partisan gerrymandering present political questions beyond the federal courts.

Top Lessons

• Political rights and political questions

  Brennan drew a sharp line: a lawsuit about voting is a political case, but it is not therefore a political question. The doctrine, he said, protects the separation of the federal branches, not the states from federal courts.

• A deadlocked legislature

  Tennessee's legislators were chosen under the very districts the voters challenged, and amending the state constitution required the legislature's own action. The voters argued that only courts could break the circle, while Tennessee replied that the people retained political remedies.

• Neither purse nor sword

  Frankfurter borrowed Hamilton's description of the judiciary in Federalist No. 78 to argue that the Court depends on public confidence and should not enter fights it cannot finish. Brennan answered that deciding the limits of each branch's authority is itself the Court's duty as ultimate interpreter of the Constitution.

• Deciding the door, not the room

  Baker decided only that federal courts could hear the case. It announced no standard of equality and no remedy, leaving those to later cases; Frankfurter thought that was its weakness, while the majority thought it was proper judicial modesty.

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Medical Lens

The opinions deal with legislative districts, standing and the political question doctrine and contain no medical subject matter.