Court Opinion

ID: 9447009
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:23:16.594375+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:25:17.849141
License: Public Domain

WISDOM, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I concur fully in the majority opinion. However, the gravity of the issue, the gulf between the majority and dissenting *612opinions, and a few sharp quillets in the dissent impel me to make some observations on the application to the instant case of the doctrine of judicial abstention in political cases.
I.
The plaintiffs propose a cure worse than the disease. The Court therefore should withhold the exercise of its equity powers. That was Mr. Justice Rutledge’s view in an analogous situation. Colegrove v. Green, 1946, 328 U.S. 549, 566, 66 S.Ct. 1198, 90 L.Ed. 1432. That is my view in this case.
An attempt by the federal judiciary to control a state legislature’s right to fix the boundaries of a political subdivision is an intrusion of national courts in the polity of a state that in a federal system carries consequences even more serious and far-reaching than the partial disfranchisement of plaintiffs unable to vote in municipal elections because by legislative definition their voting district is not in a municipality. There are other considerations. The plaintiffs ask for something courts cannot give. Courts, any courts, are incompetent to remap city limits. And any decree in this ease purporting to give relief would be a sham: the relief sought will give no relief.
There is an obvious reply: in a democratic country nothing is worse than disfranchisement. And there is no such thing as being just a little bit disfranchised. A free man’s right to vote is a full right to vote or it is no right to vote. Perhaps so, but in similar situations — to me they are similar — the United States Supreme Court has made no such reply. Instead, in at least two decisions the Supreme Court declined jurisdiction when the relief from partial disfranchisement would require federal courts to intrude in the internal structure and organization of the government of a state. Colegrove v. Green, 1946, 328 U. S. 549, 66 S.Ct. 1198, 90 L.Ed. 1432; South v. Peters, 1950, 339 U.S. 276, 70 S.Ct. 641, 94 L.Ed. 834.
When Illinois partially disfranchised the citizens in its seventh congressional district by gerrymandering1 away ninety per cent of their effective vote as against the vote of Illinois citizens in the fifth congressional district, the Court declined to interfere. Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 66 S.Ct. 1198, 90 L.Ed. 1432. In congressional elections, therefore, 100,000 votes may equal 900,000 votes, and a thirty-five per cent minority may outvote a sixty-five per cent majority (over the state as a whole). Georgia, by the county-unit device, disfranchises citizens of Fulton County (Atlanta) by ninety-nine per cent as against citizens in certain rural counties.2 When the constitutionality of the system was attacked in the Supreme Court, again the Court held that federal courts should not interfere. South v. Peters, 339 U.S. 276, 70 S.Ct. 641, 94 L. Ed. 834.
I can see no difference between partially disfranchising negroes and partially disfranchising Republicans, Democrats, Italians, Poles, Mexican-Americans, Catholics, blue-stocking voters, industrial workers, urban citizens, or other groups who are euchered out of their full suffrage because their bloc voting is predictable and their propensity for propinquity or their residence in certain areas, as a result of social and economic pressures, suggests the technique of partial disfranchisement by gerrymander or malapportionment. I can see no difference between depriving negroes of the right to vote in municipal elections in Tuskegee and not counting at their full value votes cast in certain districts in Illinois in a congressional election or *613votes cast in certain counties in Georgia in a state election. The dissenting justices in Colegrove v. Green and in South v. Peters found no sound distinction between those cases and the negro-voting cases.
Colegrove v. Green and South v. Peters may be distinguishable at the periphery. At the center these cases and the instant case are the same. In the respect that Colegrove v. Green involved congressional districts, there was more reason for federal courts to intervene in Illinois’ gerrymandering affecting federal elections than there would be to intervene in Alabama’s gerrymandering that affects only municipal elections.
No one thinks that in Colegrove v. Green and South v. Peters the Supreme Court gave its constitutional blessing to partial disfranchisement. The Court did not reach the constitutional question. The Supreme Court was willing to assume that malapportionment was unconstitutional. “The Constitution”, said Mr. Justice Frankfurter for the majority in Colegrove v. Green, “has many commands that are not enforceable by the courts because they clearly fall outside the conditions and purposes that circumscribe judicial action.”3 In effect, the suit was “an appeal to the federal courts to reconstruct the electoral process of Illinois”. Mr. Justice Frankfurter stated: “[T]he petitioners ask of this Court what is beyond its competence to grant. * * * [T]his Court, from time to time, has refused to intervene in controversies * * * because due regard for the effective working of our Government revealed the issue to be of a peculiarly political nature and therefore not meet for judicial determination.” Mr. Justice Rutledge, concurring, stated:
“[The Court has] power to afford relief in a case of this type. * * * But the relief it seeks pitches this Court into delicate relation to the functions of state officials and Congress, compelling them to take action which heretofore they have declined to take voluntarily or to accept the alternative of electing representatives from Illinois at large in the forthcoming elections. * * * If the constitutional provisions on which appellants rely give them the substantive rights they urge, other provisions qualify those rights in important ways by vesting large measures of control in the political subdivisions of the government and the state. * * * I think, therefore, the case is one in which the Court may properly, and should decline to exercise its jurisdiction.”
In South v. Peters, 1950, 339 U.S. 276, 70 S.Ct. 641, 642, 94 L.Ed. 834, a majority of the Supreme Court considered that the holding warranted only a short per curiam opinion: “Federal courts consistently refuse to exercise their equity powers in cases posing political issues arising from a state’s geographical distribution of electoral strength among its political subdivisions.”
Long before these cases the Cherokee Nation asked for an injunction to restrain the State of Georgia and its officials from asserting certain rights and powers over the people of the Cherokee *614Nation. In defiance of a treaty between the United States and the Cherokee Nation, Georgia had passed laws dividing the Indian territory into districts and subjecting the Cherokees to the jurisdiction of the state. The Cherokees had the sympathy of almost all Americans. They had no possible haven but the United States Supreme Court. The Court refused to take jurisdiction. Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia, 1831, 5 Pet. 1, 30 U.S. 1, 8 L.Ed. 25. In the opinion for the Court, Chief Justice John Marshall went out of his way to write, by way of dictum:
“If courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined. * * * A serious additional objection exists to the jurisdiction of the court. Is the matter of the bill the proper subject for judicial inquiry and decision? * * * The bill requires us to control the Legislature of Georgia, and to restrain the exertion of its physical force. The propriety of such an interposition by the court may be well questioned. It savors too much of the exercise of political power to be within the proper province of the judicial department.”
II.
With due deference to my able associate, it seems to me that the rhetorical questions in the opening paragraphs of the dissent assume a process of reaching a decision that is inapplicable to political cases. In political cases there are few absolutes and few either-or questions. There may be some matters that clearly fall within the exclusive control of the executive or the legislative branches of government or controversies that these political departments manifestly may settle more appropriately than the judicial department. Courts then apply the doctrine of abstention almost automatically. But since every official act is political in a sense, in most cases courts are driven to inquire. How political? And what are the consequences of granting or denying the relief requested? Because of this and because discretionary equitable powers usually are invoked, courts have considered it proper to take a pragmatic approach and to weigh a variety of considerations in reaching a decision, not stopping, for example, with the flat statement that the issue is political and non-justiciable.4 A weighing of practical considerations along with broad principles may blur the line between no-jurisdiction and jurisdiction-but-abstention, yet it has characterized political cases since Luther v. Borden, 1849, 7 How. 1, 48 U.S. 1, 12 L.Ed. 581.
To abstain or not to abstain in a hard case that seriously affects the balance between the federal government and the states puts a court to the task of assaying values and assessing effects. Here we must weigh the value, in a federal system, of preserving the integrity of a state as a polity, including a state’s control over its political subdivisions and the state administrative process — against the value of an individual’s right to vote in city elections when as a consequence of a state law gerrymandering municipal *615limits he does not live in a municipality. We must weigh the effects of federal action against inaction, of judicial intervention against self-limitation. This weighing of values and effects is in no sense a play on the word “political”. It is a reasonable basis for a decision that may appear indefensible only when the case is sought to be reduced to the single question: did the plaintiff have a constitutional right of which he was deprived or did he not ?
III.
In my judgment, Colegrove v. Green and South v. Peters control this case. Even if they were not controlling, I would favor withholding the exercise of our equity powers for the reasons given and for the following reasons.
(1) Grant of relief would put federal courts in the position of interfering with the internal governmental structure of a state, putting a new kind of strain on federal-state relations already severely strained. Control over the political subdivisions of a state including the incorporation of cities and towns and the determination of their boundaries, is a political function of the state legislature and an attribute of state sovereignty in a federal union. So it has always been held. Let the chips fall where they may, the courts have decided. This is the substance of the holdings in Commissioners of Laramie County v. Com’rs of Albany County, 1876, 92 U.S. 307, 23 L. Ed. 552; Town of Mount Pleasant v. Beckwith, 1879, 100 U.S. 514, 25 L.Ed. 699; and Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, 1907, 207 U.S. 161, 28 S.Ct. 40, 52 L.Ed. 151. In these and similar cases the citizens who suffered from changes in city limits, by loss of property values or by increased taxation (if the boundaries are extended) or from lack of fire and police protection (if the boundaries are contracted) and from loss of voting privileges (in the case of a gerrymander), were in the same situation as the plaintiffs are in this case.
(2) The plaintiffs ask the Court to hold unconstitutional a law that is clearly constitutional on its face. The statutory approach necessary to reach that somewhat unusual result would compel the Court to go beneath the surface of the law and impute to the legislature an un-professed subjective intention. This ulterior motive, when coupled with inferences from the effect of the law, would then be fatal to the constitutionality of the statute. As Mr. Justice Cardozo put it, this process spreads psychoanalysis to unaccustomed fields. United States v. Constantine, 296 U.S. 287, 299, 56 S.Ct. 223, 80 L.Ed. 233. I recognize that occasionally there may be statutes which are unconstitutional in the light of their effect and the legislature’s intentions. Over the long pull, however, I believe that the interests of justice lie in the direction of testing a law in the light of what the law says, not in the light of what the legislature intends. Rather than deviate from that principle in a case involving the exercise of a political function historically lodged with the state and free from federal supervision, I would heed the frequent admonition to avoid a decision upon the constitutional question when there is a tenable alternative ground for disposing of the controversy.
(3) This case differs from all cases involving successful complaints of discrimination under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in that there is no effective remedy. An injunction will enable a citizen to vote — if he lives in a voting district where an election is held. It is an empty right when he does not live in a voting district. The best that this Court could do for the plaintiffs would be to declare Act 140 of 1957 invalid. There is nothing to prevent the legislature of Alabama from adopting a new law redefining Tuskegee town limits, perhaps with small changes, or perhaps a series of laws, each of which might also be held unconstitutional, each decision of the court and each act of the legislature progressively increasing the strain on federal-state relations. As stated in Colegrove: “No court can affirmatively remap the Illinois districts. * * * At best we could only declare the existing electoral system invalid.” *616Nor can this Court remap Tuskegee. If we had the competency to determine the proper geographical limits for towns in Alabama, still there would be no way of our giving effect to the talents of our judges: the plaintiffs’ only real remedy is one we have no right to give — a mandamus against the legislature of Alabama.
In short, the situation is unmanageable. If we intervene we shall only intensify the very dispute we are asked to settle. And federal courts have no mission — from the constitution or from that brooding omnipresence of higher law so often an influence on constitutional decisions — to find a judicial solution for every political problem presented in a complaint that makes a strong appeal to the sympathies of the court. To repeat the words of Chief Justice John Marshall: “If courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined. * * * [But] such an interposition by the court * * * savors too much of the exercise of political power to be within the proper province of the judicial department.”

. The Supreme Court of Illinois invalidated a 1931 reapportionment and ordered a return to the statute of 1901. Moran v. Bowley, 1932, 347 Ill. 148, 179 N.E. 526. Legislative' inaction resulted in a gerrymander as ^effective as any gerrymander created by legislative action reshuffling district lines.

. For a defense of the system see Henson, The County Unit System is Constitution, 14 Ga.Bar J. 22, (1951).

. Mr. Justice Frankfurter continued: “Thus, ‘on Demand of the executive Authority,’ Art. IV, § 2, of a State it is the duty of a sister State to deliver up a fugitive from justice. But the fulfillment of this duty cannot be judicially enforced. Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Dennison, 24 How. 66, 16 L.Ed. 717. The duty to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed cannot be brought under legal compulsion. State of Mississippi v. Johnson, 4 Wall. 475, 18 L.Ed. 437. Violation of the great guaranty of a republican form of government in States cannot be challenged in the courts. Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. State of Oregon, 223 U.S. 118, 32 S.Ct. 224, 56 L.Ed. 377. The Constitution has loft the performance of many duties in our governmental scheme to depend on the fidelity of the executive and legislative action and, ultimately, on the vigilance of the people in exercising their political rights.” Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 556, 66 S.Ct. 1198, 1201, 90 L.Ed. 1432.

. In Colegrove v. Green, for example, the Court attached importance to these considerations : the court lacked satisfactory-criteria for a judicial determination; the basis for the suit was not a private wrong, but a wrong suffered by Illinois as polity; no court can affirmatively remap the Illinois districts; it is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the polities of the people; regard for the Constitution as a viable system precludes judicial correction, since authority for dealing with the problem resides first with Congress and ultimately with the people (to secure a state legislature that will apportion propei-ly); malapportionment is chronic and embroiled in politics, and courts should avoid this political thicket; the Constitution has many commands that are not enforceable but left to legislative or executive action, and ultimately to the people; the possible consequences of decision were of great magnitude and the judicial processes inadequate for dealing with them; in our system of government it is appropriate that Congress have the final determination whether to seat Congressmen.