216 Politics and the judiciary
Court should not intervene because to do so ‘would cut very deeply into the
very being of Congress.’
In 1961 and 1962, however, the Court was faced with a challenge to the
composition of the legislature of Tennessee, which had not been reappor-
tioned since 1901. The state’s electoral districts had remained unchanged
in spite of considerable shifts in population within the state, so that there
were great inequalities in the representation of counties in the state legis-
lature. After long deliberation the Court decided that the equal protection
of the laws clause of the Fourteenth Amendment laid on the federal courts
the duty of ensuring that the states made provision for a fair representation
of the electorate. What constituted fair representation and how it would be
enforced was not made clear in Baker v. Carr, but the decision immediately
provoked an outburst of litigation, in which the constitutionality of state
electoral laws was challenged. The courts were faced with the problem of
determining whether state legislatures were fairly apportioned and of pass-
ing judgement upon schemes for the redistricting of state legislatures. This
led the courts into an incredibly complicated area of the legal and political
structure. If a state’s legislative apportionment was challenged and found
to be unconstitutional, the legislature then had to produce a scheme for its
own reapportionment satisfactory to the federal courts. If the new scheme
was not satisfactory the Court could reject it and demand that a new one be
prepared. The nature of the judicial process is such that, although the courts
could continually reject such schemes until a satisfactory one was forthcom-
ing, they did not themselves have the power, or the ability, to produce their
own plans for legislative apportionment. An example of what then happens
is illustrated by the case of Florida. 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 reappor-
tionment 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 Representa-
tives 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 appor-
tionment. Thus the Supreme Court grapples with the complexities of state
politics, for its decisions may be of vital importance to the groups contending