Baker v. Carr
"Baker v. Carr" was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 1962 that established the principle of "one person, one vote." The ruling held that federal courts had the authority to intervene in and decide redistricting issues, ensuring that legislative districts were apportioned based on population. This decision significantly impacted the political landscape by promoting fair representation and equal voting rights.
4 Key excerpts on "Baker v. Carr"
eBook - ePub- M.J.C. Vile(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In 1964 the Supreme Court found the districting provisions in that state to be unconstitutional. In the following year the Florida legislature reapportioned the state, but its plan was ruled unconstitutional. In 1966 the Florida legislature again adopted a reapportionment scheme, and in January 1967 the Supreme Court again rejected it as unsatisfactory. This process continued until the Court was satisfied that the state had complied with its ruling. Since the original decision in Baker v. Carr the Supreme Court went on to tighten up very considerably its view of the requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment in this field. In later cases it laid down that the basic rule of ‘one man one vote’ must be implemented for primary elections as well as for general elections, for both the upper and lower houses of state legislatures, for elections for state executive offices, and for the House of Representatives at the federal level. In the case in which this basic principle was first adopted, Reynolds v. Sims in 1964, the Court said that it would not insist on mathematical exactness in applying this rule, but in two cases in 1969, Wells v. Rockefeller and Kirkpatrick v. Preisler, the Court insisted that the states must ‘make a good faith effort to achieve precise mathematical equality’ in apportionment. Thus the Supreme Court grapples with the complexities of state politics, for its decisions may be of vital importance to the groups contending for control of state legislatures. Justice Brennan, when delivering the Court’s opinion in the Baker case, acknowledged that ‘what is actually asked of the Court is to choose among competing theories of political philosophy.’ Having chosen, the Court is then faced with the task of putting that philosophy into practice. The steel seizure case: Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 1952 The rather humdrum title of this case conceals one of the most dramatic, cliff-hanging episodes in the history of the Supreme Court...
eBook - ePubThe Least Dangerous Branch: Separation of Powers and Court-Packing
The Supreme Court in American Society
- Kermit L. Hall, Kermit L. Hall(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Such feeling must be nourished by the Courts complete detachment, in fact and in appearance, from political entanglements and by abstention from injecting itself into the clash of political forces in political settlements.—Frankfurter, J., dissenting in Baker v. Carr, 369 US. 186, 267 (1962). Considering the wide range of issues to which the political question has been applied, it is not surprising that it should have raised its head in suits to compel reapportionment where state legislative and congressional representation was based on considerations other than numerical equality at the ballot box. As the justiciability of malapportionment claims has important social, political and economic consequences, this has proved to be one of the most active and most controversial categories of the political question. Thus, it may be more than a matter of mere coincidence that the earliest apportionment suits were commenced at the threshold of an era in American history which subjected American institutions to a serious re-evaluation. After the 1930 census, approximately two-thirds of the states were affected by congressional reapportionment. States with increasing and with decreasing populations were affected, and many state legislatures were reapportioned. 56 Voters instituted suit challenging the new districts, and several of the cases ultimately reached the Supreme Court. In one of these cases the two houses of the Minnesota Legislature had passed a congressional districting bill and had sent it to the Governor who had returned it without approval. The Minnesota constitution provided that a bill should become law upon approval by the Governor or in the absence of his approval by two-thirds vote of each House...
eBook - ePubJapanese Democracy and Lessons for the United States
Eight Counterintuitive Lessons
- Ray Christensen(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This stance began with Baker v. Carr in 1962 when the Court necessarily pared back the political question doctrine to make it possible to push into the political thicket that Justice Frankfurter had warned against. The Court limited the areas in which it would exercise restraint under the political question doctrine to only six: clear constitutional authority given to another branch of government, the lack of a clear standard by which a court could intervene, policy decisions that are clearly not appropriate for the courts, court actions that would violate respect owed to the other branches of government, unusual situations that require consistency with previous political decisions, and the potential for confusion if different parts of the same government reached different conclusions on the same issue (369 US 186, 217). On its face, Baker v. Carr ’s long list of possible uses of the political question doctrine might have seemed to be a strengthening of the doctrine. However, in the subsequent fifty years of cases, observers have concluded that the political question doctrine is largely dead (Barkow, 2002), or that it is operating in only a few limited areas (Choper, 2005). Curiously, the Court has also manifested the entire continuum of responses from restraint to intervention in its decisions in the areas of malapportionment and gerrymandering. On one extreme, the Court has intervened and regularly intervenes in redistricting to ensure the absolute equality of population of election districts within states. On these issues, the Court is standing in the middle of the political thicket, with court challenges to every redistricting plan expected, even if the legislatures and commissions have learned to anticipate and respond to many of the possible legal challenges that will inevitably be raised. On the other extreme, the Court has stayed steadfastly outside of the political thicket in the area of political gerrymandering...
eBook - ePubJudicial Review and Judicial Power in the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court in American Society
- Kermit L. Hall, Kermit L. Hall(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...On the question of the standard adopted, I believe it is adequate here to point out, as Professor Carl A. Auerbach has thoroughly and admirably demonstrated, that “no reason consistent with the democratic ideals… has been advanced for not effectuating” 86 the Court’s “one man—one vote” principle; that it is paradoxical for the advocates of judicial self-limitation to criticize the Court for helping to make the majority rule effective, because the case for self-restraint rests on the assumption that the Court is reviewing the legislative acts of representatives who are put in office and can be turned out of office by a majority of the people. 87 But the Court also ruled in the 1964 Reapportionment Cases that a system of legislative malapportionment is violative of equal protection even if the product of a state initiative procedure and even if adopted “by a vote of a majority of a State’s electorate.” 88 Is this consistent with the Court’s basic concern under the equal protection guarantee for “democratic ideals”? It must first be asked, what would such a “majority of a State’s electorate” consist of? Suppose that the “majority” of the state’s citizens who voted to under-represent, say, the numerically superior urban population, consisted of a high percentage of the rural voters plus a minority of the urban voters...
