Colegrove v. Green - Further Readings

Appellant
Kenneth W. Colegrove
Appellee
Dwight H. Green, as a member ex-officio of the Primary Certifying Board of the State of Illinois
Appellant's Claim
That congressional districts in Illinois were disparate in population size, and therefore not truly representative.
Chief Lawyer for Appellant
Urban A. Lavery
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
William C. Wines
Justices for the Court
Harold Burton, Felix Frankfurter (writing for the Court), Stanley Forman Reed, Wiley Blount Rutledge
Justices Dissenting
Hugo Lafayette Black, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy (Harlan Fiske Stone and Robert H. Jackson did not participate)
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
10 June 1946
Decision
Apportionment issues are political questions which must be decided by state legislatures with congressional oversight.
Significance
More than a decade of state legislative inaction following Colegrove finally resulted, in 1962, in the landmark Baker v. Carr decision. In Baker v. Carr the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment renders apportionment subject to federal control,thus overruling Colegrove.
The appellants in Colegrove v. Green were three qualified Illinois voters--including Kenneth W. Colegrove, who gave his name to the case. These three brought suit against a number of state officials in an effort to stop a November 1946 election from taking place before their election districts were reevaluated. These districts, they claimed, had not been redrawn since 1901 and now contained disproportionately large populations when compared with otherdistricts in the state. Citing various constitutional provisions, they askedthe federal District Court of the Northern District of Illinois to declare invalid the provisions of the Illinois law governing congressional districts.When a three-judge panel dismissed their case, Colegrove and the other appellants asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review this decision.
Court Declares Apportionment a "Political Question"
Writing for a divided and diminished Court (Chief Justice Stone had recentlydied, and Justice Jackson was on leave), Justice Frankfurter upheld the decision of the district court. The question of how election boundaries within a state are drawn is not, he declared, one for the courts to decide.

We are of the opinion that the petitioners ask of this Court what is beyond its competence to grant. This is one of those demands on judicial power whichcannot be met by verbal fencing about "jurisdiction." It must be resolved byconsiderations on the basis of which this Court, from time to time, has refused to intervene in controversies. It has refused to do so because due regardfor the effective working of our Government revealed this issue to be of a peculiarly political nature and therefore not meet for judicial determination.

The reason apportionment is a "political question," Frankfurter went on to say, is that it "concerns matters that bring courts into immediateand active relations with party contests."
The so-called "political question" doctrine which permits federal courts to avoid hearing certain cases has its roots in the principle of separation of powers. Certain issues, according to Supreme Court tradition, have been thoughtto belong to the province of the elected branches of government, the executive and the legislative. However, courts can--and do--hear cases involving political issues, and the political question doctrine is sometimes simply citedas justification for avoiding certain awkward issues that might, in fact, bebetter left to Congress or the president to decide.
Malapportionment, the unequal distribution of elected representatives, was one such issue. But when more than a decade passed after Colegrove without state legislatures taking any action, the Supreme Court finally felt obliged to declare, in the landmark case of Baker v. Carr (1962), that apportionment could in fact be addressed by the judiciary. The rationale for doing so was found in the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that citizens of individual states are due equal protection under federal laws. Failure to reapportion electoral districts since 1901 in a state that had seen a considerable population shift from rural to urban areas in the ensuing decades plainly prevented individuals in overpopulated districts from being properly represented. After Baker v. Carr, challenges to outmoded election boundaries could be brought directly into federal court. Justice Frankfurter remained philosophically opposed to what he saw as lawmaking by the courts, and in Baker v. Carr he wrote a dissent denouncing the Court's change of course.
Related Cases

• Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962).
  
• Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964).