Concurrence Clark Date decided 1964 | Concurrence Stewart | |
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Full case name Reynolds, Judge, et al. v. Sims, et al. Citations 377 U.S. 533 (more)
84 S. Ct. 1362; 12 L. Ed. 2d 506; 1964 U.S. LEXIS 1002 Prior history Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama Majority Warren, joined by Black, Douglas, Brennan, White, Goldberg Ruling court Supreme Court of the United States Similar Baker v Carr, Wesberry v Sanders, Shaw v Reno, Engel v Vitale, Evenwel v Abbott | ||
United states supreme court case profile reynolds v sims
Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964) was a United States Supreme Court case that ruled that unlike the United States Senate, both chambers of state legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. The case was brought on behalf of voters in Alabama by M.O. Sims, a taxpayer in Birmingham, Alabama, but affected both northern and southern states that had similarly failed to reapportion their legislatures in keeping with changes in state population after its application in five companion cases in Colorado, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware.
Contents
Reynolds v sims court case
Historical background
Since the industrialization of America and urbanization of the United States from the Gilded Age onwards, state and national legislatures had become increasingly reluctant to redistrict. This reluctance developed because there existed general upper-class fear that if redistricting to meet population changes were carried out, voters in large, expanding or expanded urban areas would vote for confiscatory wealth redistribution that would severely inhibit the power of business interests who controlled state and city governments early in the century. Of the forty-eight states then in the Union, only seven twice redistricted even one chamber of their legislature following both the 1930 and the 1940 Censuses. Oregon did not redistrict between 1907 and 1960, Illinois not between 1910 and 1955, whilst Alabama and Tennessee had at the time of Reynolds not redistricted since 1901. In Connecticut, Vermont, Mississippi and Delaware, apportionment was fixed by the states’ constitutions, which when written in the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries could not possibly have imagined the possibility of rural depopulation as was to occur during the first half of the century.
Having already overturned its ruling that redistricting was a purely political question in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), the Court ruled to correct what it considered egregious examples of malapportionment; these were serious enough to undermine the premises underlying republican government. Before Reynolds, urban counties nationwide often had total representations similar to rural counties, and in Florida, there was a limit to three representatives even for the most populous counties.
The case
Voters from Jefferson County, Alabama, home to the state’s largest city of Birmingham, had challenged the apportionment of the Alabama Legislature. The Alabama Constitution provided that there be only one state senator per county. Ratio variances as great as 41 to 1 from one senatorial district to another existed in the Alabama Senate (i.e., the number of eligible voters voting for one senator was in one case 41 times the number of voters in another).
Among the more extreme pre-Reynolds disparities claimed by Morris K. Udall:
Decision
The eight justices who struck down state senate inequality based their decision on the principle of “one person, one vote”. In his majority decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren said “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”
Justice Tom C. Clark wrote a concurring opinion.
Justice Potter Stewart also issued a concurring opinion, in which he argued that while many of the schemes of representation before the court in the case were egregiously undemocratic and clearly violative of equal protection, it was not for the Court to provide any guideline beyond general reasonableness for apportionment of districts.
In dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan II criticized the Court for ignoring the original intent of the Equal Protection Clause, which he argued did not extend to voting rights. Harlan claimed the Court was imposing its own idea of “good government” on the states, stifling creativity and violating federalism. Harlan further claimed that if Reynolds was correct, then the US Constitution’s own provision for two senators from each state would be Constitutionally suspect since the fifty states don't have “substantially equal populations”. “One person, one vote” was extended to Congressional (but not Senate) districts in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964).
Aftermath
Since the ruling applied different representation rules to the states than was applicable to the federal government, Reynolds v. Sims set off a legislative firestorm across the country. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois led a fight to pass a constitutional amendment allowing legislative districts based on land area, similar to the United States Senate. He warned that:
“...the forces of our national life are not brought to bear on public questions solely in proportion to the weight of numbers. If they were, the 6 million citizens of the Chicago area would hold sway in the Illinois Legislature without consideration of the problems of their 4 million fellows who are scattered in 100 other counties. Under the Court's new decree, California could be dominated by Los Angeles and San Francisco; Michigan by Detroit..”In many ways, Senator Dirksen's fears have come to pass, with both houses of the Illinois Legislature being dominated by Democrats from Chicago.
Numerous states had to change their system of representation in the state legislature. For instance, South Carolina had elected one state senator from each county. It devised a reapportion scheme and passed an amendment providing for home rule to counties.