Court Opinion

ID: 9936706
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-09 18:58:34.400501+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:32:43.015122
License: Public Domain

The Legislature did its duty. ("It shall be the duty of the legislature . . . after each . . . decennial census, to fix by law the number of senators, and to divide the state into as many senatorial districts as there are senators . . . ." Art. IX, § 200, Constitution of Alabama of 1901.) The Constitutional Convention of 1901 unequivocally defined what it meant when it provided in the Constitution that the Legislature shall do something. The Legislature is required to do the act the Constitution provides it shall do. "They [the Legislature] would violate their oaths if they did not do so." Official Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1901, p. 1800.
The Legislature has done its constitutional duty; in doing so, it has in no way violated an express constitutional prohibition, such as encroaching on the rights retained in the Declaration of Rights of the Alabama Constitution (Art. I, §§ 1 through 36). There is no Equal Protection Clause in the Alabama Constitution. See Ex parte Melof,553 So.2d 554 (Ala. 1989). Under State law, which is all that is involved here, (4) it is for the Legislature, not the judiciary, to determine whether these senatorial districts are as "nearly equal to each other in the number of inhabitants as may be," because § 43 of the 1901 Constitution provides: "the judicial [department of government] shall never exercise the legislative or executive powers, or either of them; to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."