Court Opinion

ID: 9686152
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 15:31:32.656333+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:15.280010
License: Public Domain

AUSTIN, District Judge
(dissent).
Because great weight and stress has been given to the fact that the challenged 1954 constitutional amendment received approval of the Illinois electorate by a substantial majority less than nine years ago, a more thorough understanding of the legislative history which preceded that choice is necessary.
*239The original constitutions of thirty-six States, including Illinois, provided for the election of both Houses of their bicameral legislatures on a vote for vote basis. The three constitutions of Illinois prior to 1954 provided for selection of both Houses on a population basis and further provided for reapportionment each decade, based on the decennial census, to preserve the vote for vote principle. For ninety years, while the rural areas of the State, in the 101 counties outside of Cook, contained a majority of the voters, there was assiduous compliance with the constitutional requirement of reapportionment. During that period, the minority urban voters made no request for control of one of the legislative Houses to “protect our minority interests”, nor did the rural majority ever suggest that such a provision would be fair and just.
As the 20th Century started, a population trend developed which threatened rural control of the legislature. To meet that threat and abate it, the rural legislators in both Houses wilfully and illegally for more than forty years forswore their constitutional duty to reapportion the State contrary to what they had done before their control was threatened.
Although bills to reapportion, pursuant to the constitution, were introduced during that period, at most sessions of the legislature, the rural oligarchy, voting as a block, defeated each one. Repeated but fruitless appeals were made to both State and Federal Courts to compel compliance with the constitution. In this atmosphere of frustration and hopelessness the present constitutional amendment was conceived. In effect, the ultimatum of the feudal barons to the urban majority was this: We will restore to you one-half of the constitutional rights we have withheld for forty years if you will abandon forever the other half of those rights. It was with a spirit of resignation, with the gun to their head, that the weary majority capitulated. Although constitutionally entitled to a whole loaf, they accepted a crumb. This is the “compromise” solution alluded to in the opinions of my colleagues.
This constitutional amendment fails to provide for reapportionment of the Senatorial Districts, despite future population changes, and forever cedes to. the rural minority 60% of the Senate, and with it, the attendant veto power over the will of the majority. It constitutes in my opinion invidious discrimination. The implementing legislation redistricting the State’s Senatorial Districts, is even less defensible. At the present time, less than 29% of the voters of Illinois elect a majority of the Senate.
Distinction is sought to be made on the ground that the acknowledged discrimination is not based on race, ethnic background, or economic position, and therefore, is not invidious. However, the test of invidious discrimination is not limited to these factors alone.
In Donovan v. Holzman, 8 Ill.2d 87, 97, 132 N.E.2d 501, 507 (1956), the Illinois Supreme Court said:
“It is clear that the purpose of separate senatorial and representative districts was to insure popular representation in one house, and insure downstate control in the other.”
In regard to the present Senatorial apportionment, I find most apt the words of Justice Clark in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 258, 82 S.Ct. 691, 732, 7 L.Ed. 2d 663, (1961):
“If present representation has a policy at all, it is to maintain the status quo of invidious discrimination at any cost.”
As has heretofore been indicated, less than 29% of the population of Illinois can elect a majority of the Senate. In Sims v. Frink, 208 F.Supp. 431, (D.C.Ala. 1962), the Court held that a plan of Senate apportionment, where only 19.4% of the electorate could elect the majority of the Senators, was invidiously discriminatory. In Moss v. Burkhart, 207 F.Supp. 885, (D.C.Okla.1962), invidious discrimination was found where 26% of the people elected the majority of the *240lower House of 20% elected a majority in the Senate. After remand of Baker v. Carr, supra, a proposed new Tennessee plan of Senatorial apportionment, more representative than is presently provided in Illinois, was held to be “utterly arbitrary and lacking in rationality. Its only consistent pattern is one of invidious discrimination.” [206 F.Supp. 341, 348 (D.C.Tenn.1962)] In Thigpen v. Meyers, 211 F.Supp. 826 (D.C.Wash.1962), the election of a majority of the State Senators by 35.6% of the State’s population was held to be invidiously discriminatory. In Scholle v. Hare, 367 Mich. 176, 116 N.W.2d 350, the election of a majority of the Senate by 28% of the people was deemed invidious.
Courts in other reapportionment cases have held that the fact that an electorate has recently rejected measures to reapportion the legislature according to population or approved a plan nearly identical to that adopted by the Illinois voters in 1954, is not a factor to be considered in determining whether invidious discrimination exists. In the Thigpen case, supra, the voters of Washington, twenty-four days before the court’s ruling, defeated an initiative measure which sought to redistrict the legislature according to population. In commenting on this, the court stated [211 F.Supp. at 832]:
“We are asked to decline jurisdiction because the voters of Washington in the general election of November 6, 1962, defeated an initiative measure designed to reapportion the Washington Legislature according to population revealed by the Federal census of 1960. Our answer is concise and direct. We have no way of knowing whether the measure was defeated because a majority did not desire reapportionment or whether they didn’t approve of the proposed method or whether they didn’t understand it * * * or whether the opponents were better organized' than the proponents. It makes no difference. The inalienable constitutional right of equal protection cannot be made to depend upon the will of the majority.”
Likewise, in the Scholle case, supra, the Michigan voters in 1952 rejected a constitutional amendment calling for equal representation in the Senate and had at the same election adopted a plan very similar to that which Illinois voters approved in 1954.
The need or wisdom in retaining a bicameral legislature is questioned if both Houses are elected on a population apportionment basis. The best answer to that is contained in a publication of the Twentieth Century Fund, entitled “One Man — One Vote”, collating the views of fifteen constitutional law experts and political scientists as expressed at a conference held in New York City on June 15, 1962:
“Nor is it true that two houses based on population will be mirror images of each other. They will, rather, present different reflections or combinations of the various elements that make up the population. For one thing, one house will have more members than the other, representing smaller districts. The length of terms will differ. In addition, members of one house may be elected from single-member districts, while multi-member constituencies are used in the other house. And, not least, politicians are human beings whose differing personalities produce institutions of differing qualities.
“A number of states offer contemporary evidence that two houses based on population are by no means duplicates of one another. In Massachusetts both houses are apportioned on the basis of population; the two houses are among the most representative in the country. But the House has 240 members, the Senate 40, and even under control of the same party the two bodies man-' *241age to disagree often enough. In Washington and Oregon both houses are based on population; though less disparate in size than the Massachusetts chambers (there are about half as many senators as representatives), the two houses are quite different in political outlook.”
Finally, the last resort of those seeking to justify legislative apportionment such as is involved here is that it is analogous to that of the Congress of the United States where election to the lower House is based on population and the United States Senate is composed of two Senators from each State regardless of the representative population of the States. My Brother Campbell has indicated that he is well aware of the atypical distinctions between the Federal Government and the individual States, and that he is not unmindful of the many cases which have rejected the “Federal analogy” holding that type of apportionment invidiously discriminatory and cites authorities with which I concur.
In addition to the cases heretofore cited, I refer again to “One Man — One Vote”, supra, which succinctly refutes, in my opinion, the contentions here urged:
“A second major point on which the conferees were agreed is that the principle of apportionment on the basis of population is equally applicable in both houses of a state legislature. The fact that all voters have an equal voice in the choice of one house would be no reason to give some voters more weight than others in electing the second chamber.
“The arguments for basing representation in one state legislative chamber on something other than people are the familiar ones: principally, that the rural population has special interests requiring protection by disproportionate voting power. Two further arguments are made.
“First, it is pointed out that in Congress the House represents people and the Senate states. This is said to provide precedent and justification for a similar ‘Federal plan’ in the state legislature, with one house representing people and the other counties or some similar geographic unit. But the analogy is false. The United States was created by thirteen sovereign states, and the Constitution embodies a theory of federalism which divides sovereign power between the nation and the states. A key device for protecting their residual sovereignty was the equal state voice in the Senate. Thus the Senate was a condition of union among a group of states which the Federal Government created by that union has no power to destroy. Counties, [or senatorial districts], by contrast, were never independent or sovereign. They did not create the states but were created by them. They are wholly creatures of the states and may at any time be merged, divided or abolished by state governments.
(Bracketed material added.)
“Federalism as a political theory has had and continues to have value as a device of compromise permitting the joining of lesser sovereign-ties into greater unions; an example in process is the European Economic Community. But to speak of federalism within a state is to reduce a great principle to an absurdity. ‘The United States Senate is both irrelevant and improper as a model for representation within a state.’ Professor Paul David of the University of Virginia has written, because ‘a state is not a federal union of sovereign counties.’ Too often, the argument for a ‘Federal plan’ of representation in state legislatures is bom of simple ignorance of its actual background and implications. At worst, it may be advanced as a disingenuous cover for the disenfranchisement of urban and suburban voters.
*242“Second, it is contended that a bicameral legislature would have no purpose if both houses were representative of population. This argument assumes two propositions: that the only function of bicameralism is to provide contrasting bases of representation in the two houses (i. e., one people and the other ‘area’), and that making both houses representative of population would make the second house a mirror of the first and hence redundant. Neither proposition can be supported.
“The second house has a function quite apart from giving preferred political status to one population group — the function of providing cheeks and balances in the legislative process, of assuring more mature and deliberate consideration before a law is enacted. That was in fact the reasoning that underlay the adoption by many states during the nineteenth century of a population basis for both houses of their legislatures.
“Later in that century, and in this, factors other than population were often introduced, by constitutional amendment or by failure to reapportion. Those who held political power abandoned population representation in order to retain their control in the face of population changes that they saw coming. Such philosophical justifications as the so-called ‘Federal plan’ were designed to obscure the real motivation, just as today most of the elaborate arguments against representation on the basis of people are simply covers for a naked struggle to retain political power.
“The justification for bicameralism remains the provision of checks and balances. Bicameralism may also serve to further the very objective of representing the people equitably in a legislature. In any districting geographic features are bound to cause some inequalities of population among districts. When there are two houses, an area that is somewhat underrepresented in one may be given a compensating advantage in the other and minor inequities in apportionment thus be balanced off.
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“There is no justification for making one house of a state legislature reflect the will of all the voters and the other the will of particular regions or classes.”
In addition, the Federal Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, a federal commission created by Congress for the purpose of conducting a continual study of federal, state and local governmental problems, recently completed an exhaustive study of the apportionment of state legislatures. This commission, composed of congressmen, governors, state .legislators, county officials, city officials and public members, came to the following conclusion as to the proper basis for state legislative apportionment [Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Apportionment of State Legislatures, pp. 67-73 (U. S. Govt. Printing Office, December 1962)]:
“ ‘Equal protection of the laws’ would seem to presume, and considerations of political equity demand, that the apportionment of both houses in the State legislature, be based strictly on population.
“The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is an amendment designed for the protection of the people. It is not intended to protect political subdivisions, minority views, or any particular form of governmental structure. The Fourteenth Amendment is concerned with one thing, and one thing only— that each person be treated equally in the eyes of the law of each and every State.
“In applying the requirement that each person be treated equally in the *243eyes of State law to the question of apportionment of seats in the State legislature, only one interpretation is possible. That interpretation requires that each man’s vote must count the same as every other man’s vote. The State has no authority to classify people according to where they live — urban or rural areas — the type of work they do — ■ laborer or banker — the type of education they have had — high school or college graduate — and authorize such classes to elect representatives to the State legislature in such a manner as to permit the vote of the members of any such class to have more weight in the election of State legislators than the members of any other class. Therefore, the Commission believes that population is the only fair and acceptable method of apportioning seats in the State legislature.
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“Except to the extent that they are represented according .to their numbers and that they have an opportunity to present their views to that body, minorities are not entitled to protection in the State legislature. Protection of minority interests or views does not mean the minority should be in a position to veto the desires of the majority. The protection given minority views and interests should not be a veto power in the legislative process, since other adequate protections are offered by both Federal and State constitutions. * * *»
In the light of the foregoing, I would hold that Article IY, Section 6 of the Constitution of Illinois and the implementing statutes, Ill.Rev.Stat.1961, Ch. 46 §§ 158-3 and 158-5, are invalid and void because they deprive and continue to deprive the Plaintiffs of liberty and property without due process of law and of the equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.