I was reading about some cases like Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims on the issue of state legislative apportionament policies.
It’s clear that some states had legislative districts of disproportionate voting weight - the amount of legislators they elected was not proportional to their population. Farmville and Big City might both elect one state Senator despite the fact that Farmville has 10,000 people and Big City has 500,000. The argument was that this gave people in Farmville votes that were fifty times as effective as the votes of people in Big City. The court held that this was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and ruled that legislative districts should be approximately equal in population.
The problem as I see it is that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t explicitly prohibit legislative districts of unequal population. The Supreme Court interpreted the amendment’s general prohibition against unequal protection to include a prohibition against unequal districts.
I have no problem with the court interpreting the meaning of the text - that’s its job. But I think it got this specific interpretation wrong.
Because the Constitution clearly does not regard unequal legislative districts as unconstitutional - in fact it mandates them. Article One, Section Three says “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State” and Article Two, Section One says “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress”. So clearly the Constitution is not prohibiting the idea of disproportionate districting.
So if the Constitution can mandate that the voters in Delaware and the voters in California can have equal representation in the United States Senate, how can it be unconstitutional for the voters in Farmville and the voters in Big City to have equal representation in their state’s Senate?
The Senate is not the House.
One may argue that the word “apportioned” meant only the number of Representatives allocated to each state within Congress, but the use of the word “apportioned” (along with the statement regarding 30,000 people per district), strongly suggests that the word “apportioned” should be used to determine the size of each district, as well.
Superseded statement from Article I, Section 2.
Remaining statement from Article I, Section 2.
Superseding statement from Amendment XIV, Section 2:
ETA: I am not sure why the court decided that State Senates could not be based on counties and I amy have missed that aspect of your question.
I’m not sure your response was relevant, tomndebb, because the Supreme Court case was about the apportionment of state legislators, not federal Senators or Congressmen. I think maybe you realized that afterwards, with your ETA comment.
It’s actually something I’ve wondered about for a while too, although I don’t think the Court was actually wrong about. I think the Court decided that the Constitution made a specific exception in the case of Senators (the federal kind) from the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. But I’m not sure.
I don’t know if you could say they were wrong, but they could have decided differently. These cases established the idea that a ruling by the SCOTUS was the only way to resolve the issue. Given that (a different arguable point), the reliance on one-man-one-vote, and the equal protection clause makes a lot of sense.
I’m not fond of the argument that the EPC doesn’t strictly prohibit some particular activity.
I don’t see where that implies there are exceptions for matters not specifically stated. And I personally see no value in ‘intent’ arguments.
My questions here would be about the SCOTUS assuming that the states would not have been able to settle the matter. Perhaps striking down the state laws they considered unconstitutional, and then allowing the states to find their own solutions may have been a better idea.
As for the unequal representation for the US congress in the combined Senate and House, the cases you cite applied individually to the state bodies, as they do as well for the federal bodies.
Because US Senate apportionment is mandated in the Constitution. If the Constitution had a section granting states the authority to arbitrarily designate certain tracts of land as equally worthy of representation in their legislatures without regard for population, then doing so would, by definition, be constitutional.
Also, states are unitary entities and are not federal. Local government is not considered sovereign, so one state-defined local jurisdiction has no pretense to equality with another state-defined local jurisdiction. Big City and Farmville aren’t (theoretically) partners in a state government, as states are in the federal government; the state government arbitrarily erected them as legal entities for administrative purposes.
That was pretty much the question. A state can’t have a system where every county has an equal number of senators in the state senate because the counties have unequal populations. But the Constitution mandates each state gets two senators in the US Senate, regardless of the inequality of their populations. How can the court rule it’s unconstitutional for a state to use the same procedure that is constitutionally mandatory for the federal government?
But giving arbitrary administrative districts disproportionate weight in a legislature isn’t a procedure that’s part of the Constitution. Counties and cities don’t have the same relationship with the state government that states have with the federal government.
Even if that wasn’t the case, there are other things that are only held up by a specific constitutional mandate. The president has to be a natural-born citizen, even though a state probably wouldn’t be allowed to require that of its governor. For the purposes of whether or not a state is allowed to do something, what the constitution requires of the state’s federal counterparts is irrelevant.
I can see the argument that states aren’t required to do something just because the national government is. Or that states are prohibited from doing something that the national government is allowed to do. But saying that states are prohibited from doing something that the national government is required to do? I think there’s quite a stretch, especially when it’s not some dual sovereignty issue.
And I don’t understand your claim that “giving arbitrary administrative districts disproportionate weight in a legislature isn’t a procedure that’s part of the Constitution” because it definitely is a part of the Constitution. I even quoated the relevent sections.
I think that the basic idea (not that I agree with it) is that the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment applies to states only and not the federal government. There is no corresponding equal protection clause in the 5th amendment which applies to the federal government.
Although most equal protection violations of the federal government are construed to be due process violations of the 5th amendment, it would be hard to construe the U.S. Senate that way since it is explicitly provided for in the Constitution.
There’s no relationship between the Constitutional makeup of the US Senate and the bodies of the states. Lord Feldon spelled it out quite succinctly. The states are not a union of counties of cities. The principles are completely different.
What about state level age requirements (25 or 30) to be Governor or other elected office? Isn’t that a violation of equal protection for 18 (or 21) year olds?
That is an interesting question. Due process of law might get applied there, but for a matter of holding office as opposed to when you can drink alchohol it seems to be more significant. I wonder if this has ever been challenged at the federal level.
I find the argument interesting and ultimately unsupportable.
The 14th Amendment means one person = one vote so there cannot be unequal political divisions
What about Senators?
It’s complicated
My view is that if the 14th Amendment implies 1 person/1 vote then it necessarily changes the Constitution to make any popular election (such as for the Senate) follow the rules. I think *Baker v Carr *is a perfect example of a judge ruling on what the Constitution should say and not what it does say.
Little Nemo, I used to agree with you. It seems like an argument from parallels would take us to a different result than the majority opinion in Reynolds v. Sims. But that’s an appeal to strict construction, not to equal protection, & I think equal protection is more important than what some constitutional framer wrote. While I’m not nuts about the idea that SCOTUS has to sign off on any new state election procedures, it beats rotten boroughs.
Now if only we could do something about now-archaic state boundaries.
I’m bemused that, after a century of adding a state every few years, the USA stopped adding states generations ago. The population distribution continues to change, but the state lines don’t. So what was once a sparsely populated western state may now be an arbitrary grouping of disparate population centers–which our predecessors would have sensibly split up.
Well California suffers electorally on a national basis. Internally, they seem ready for civil war over water rights and tax issues. I liked the original plan to have the western border of the original colonies extend to the Pacific. Wouldn’t help Little Rhody though, we’d still be a smudge on the way to the Cape.