Transcription
Hey everybody. Welcome back. Baker versus Carr is a landmark Supreme Court case, one of the most important ever. Help me out and smash that like button as you get settled in. [Music] This is a messy case with a lot going on, and there's some new vocab, but I'll help you get through it.
First, the facts. This case involves the state of Tennessee. Now, according to the state constitution, Tennessee's legislature had to be reapportioned and redistricted every 10 years following the census. The purpose of reapportionment is to ensure that each district is made up of roughly the same number of people, and then redistricting is the act of drawing new districts to reflect population shifts. Well, it turns out that the state hadn't bothered reapportioning the districts since 1901—nearly 60 years before this lawsuit began—and during that time, the population of Tennessee had dramatically shifted. So some urban districts had 10 times the population of some rural districts, but each district had the same amount of representation in the state legislature. This Charles Baker guy sues, and we've got ourselves a case.
The most direct issue before the court was: Does the federal Judiciary even have jurisdiction to rule on cases about apportionment and redistricting? Jurisdiction refers to the ability to decide the case. So, rather than ruling directly on whether Tennessee's Congressional map was okay or not, the court first had to decide whether Baker could even sue in federal court in the first place. By a 6-2 majority, the Court held that apportionment and redistricting challenges are justiciable in federal court because they raise non-political questions. That super boring sentence is actually one of the most important things the court has ever done.
So what does it mean? So what the court did here was to say that federal courts are allowed to settle exactly the kind of dispute that was in front of them in this Tennessee case involving apportionment and redistricting issues. That's a huge deal. Prior to Baker versus Carr, the court explicitly stated in a 1946 ruling that courts could not hear this sort of case because the case involved a political question, meaning that it should be left to politicians, not judges.
We're going to start with a dissenting opinion in this case since it relied on the precedent at its core. Are two hugely important issues: voting rights and how much power does the Supreme Court have? A dissenting opinion written by Justice Felix Frankfurter states: "Public confidence must be nourished by the Court's complete detachment in fact and appearance from political entanglements and by abstention from injecting itself into the clash of political forces and political settlements." Basically, he's saying that this is a political issue that the court has no business inserting itself into. To the dissenters, because this is a political question, it needs to be answered politically. Further, he argues against what he sees as judicial activism, claiming that the court is empowering itself at the expense of the states and the democratic process. So the dissent says the courts have no business trying to settle this issue. He goes on to say that the appellants have the right to vote and choose their representatives; they're just mad that they don't have more of them. So the dissent: that's just politics. Political questions have political solutions, so do better politically. This is classic judicial restraint, arguing that the matter should be left to the democratically elected branches of government.
The majority, however, overturned precedent, reasoning that the courts can rule on unequal apportionment and redistricting plans that may violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, meaning that this is a constitutional issue and affirming that the appellants had a right to sue, basically because the districts were of such unequal size, even though people from different districts were each allowed to vote, their votes were very unequal in how much power they held. While the majority didn't directly strike down the Tennessee map in this case, it allowed the appellants to challenge the map in District Court as a potential violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The majority opinion by Justice Brennan wrote that the Tennessee policy of not redistricting was offensive to the 14th Amendment and points out the obvious unequal resulting representation. He further stated that the right to vote must be free from arbitrary state action. The message was clear: since the state was violating the equal voting rights of its citizens, the court had a duty to step in and ensure the equal protection of the law.
This case led to a series of additional cases over the next few years that use the power the court said it had in Baker to strike down unequal apportionment and redistricting policies throughout the country. The court did this by formulating the one-person, one-vote principle of equal representation. This principle means that in Congressional elections, everybody's vote has about the same amount of power as another person's vote. It's been used to protect minority voting rights and banned malapportionment, or drawing districts of very unequal size. So, even though the court didn't directly do those things in Baker versus Carr, its impact and legacy have been huge. Further, it serves as a pivotal case in the debate over judicial power between advocates of judicial restraint and judicial activism.
All right, that's it for this one. Until next time, this has been a Money Production. Thanks again for watching. I really hope that it helped. If it did, go ahead and smash that like button, subscribe, and ring the bell if you haven't already, and check out the ultimate review packet. I'm super proud of it; it's already helped so many students in AP Gov; it'll help you too. And I will see you in the next video.