Court Opinion

ID: 9664166
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 00:05:17.313537+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:02.742862
License: Public Domain

BLACK, J.
dissenting:
For a court with a mighty poor track record of timely decision, made from and after submission of calendar causes and original actions, I must say that the foregoing order exhibits the dazzling speed of a regularly slow hut lately dexedrine-doped racehorse. Too, the order reminds poignantly of our corresponding experience in 1964, referring to majority suspension for stated good reason of proceedings under paragraph 7 of section 6 of the legislative article; all highlighted by Justice Adams’ now immortalized observation* that he did not “conceive it to he the proper duty or function of this Court to attempt to outrun the Supreme Court of the United States.” I rejoin in paraphrase that it is not in this year 1972 the proper duty or function of this Court to attempt to outrun, and thereby evade, any of the provisions of mentioned section 6, partisan pressures to the contrary notwithstanding.
In the light of the Court’s headlong haste to set up a timetable for wholly premature political-judicial action it does not seem to matter that few of us as yet have been given opportunity to even read — -much less contemplate — the para.graph 7 materials that were tossed into the clerk’s office last week and distributed to all here by February 4, or *491that there simply isn’t time left for nonpartisan as well as intellectually honest full compliance (with section 6) in time for any legislative election this year, or that the constitutional commission hasn’t bothered thus far to meet as in 1964 for formal report to the Court that “a majority of the commission cannot agree on a plan,” or that the action of the Court scheduled and forecast by the foregoing order is bound to accomplish the patently unconstitutional fait of a legislature half of which has been redistricted, reapportioned and elected with the other half left politically intact.
This time there is no constitutional emergency and no need or excuse for galvanic arousal of the Court, as there was between May 26 and June 17 of 1964, when the Court waited week by week for decision by the United States Supreme Court of the Reynolds line of cases. Nor is this Court now, as it was in 1964 and 1966, possessed of the employable benefit of section 5 of the constitutional schedule. At that time the Court was permitted to approve a “plan”, under paragraph 7, for application to simultaneous 1964 and 1966 elections of members of both houses. That cannot be done now. Did not said section 5, employing “notwithstanding” language, mandate election of the senate in 1964 for a 2-year term, thus requiring that the 1964 and 1966 senate and house elections take place concurrently but not thereafter?
Of course the real objection to the Court’s hot-spurred drive to “determine which plan complies most accurately,” in time for the House election this year, is that such action with its politically sly forethought will cut oh all opportunity of exercise of this Court’s original jurisdiction under paragraph 8 of said section 6; also that it is bound to result in the 1972 election of a newly apportioned and districted House with an already four-year elected *492Senate left untouched. Now who wants to say, right out in our reports, that anyone ever contemplated any such schemed antics of partisan politics when the Constitution of 1963 was submitted to and approved by the People?
I would enter an order advising the constitutional commissioners that they should receive and consider all plans they wish the Court to examine according to the paragraph 7 test; further, if unable to agree then, that they should meet for the making of a due and final record of constitutional disagreement. That record with all plans the commission has considered and failed to adopt should then be submitted to this Court as the constitutionally directed basis for paragraph 7 proceedings.

 In re Apportionment of Legislature, 372 Mich 473; echoed unanimously in People v Woods, 382 Mich 129 (1960).