Court Opinion

ID: 9446695
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:16:26.494935+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:44.928492
License: Public Domain

CAMERON, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I agree with the opinion of the majority that the appellant failed to make out a case on the merits. But I disagree with the conclusion it announces that the District Court of the United States had jurisdiction to try the case. Since my difference with the majority relates to a vital question touching the relationship of the states with the federal government in an important field, I am impelled to state briefly the reasons for my dissent.
I.
The majority opinion pays lip service to the principle that “Under our federal system the qualification of voters is left to the several states subject to some limitations imposed by the United States Constitution.” But it intimates that the jui’isdiction of the states over the elective franchise does not amount to much because of amendments to the Constitution since the War Between the States.
I think the correct rule on the subject is stated in Darby v. Daniel, D.C.S.D. Miss.1958, 168 F.Supp. 170, 176:
“Any consideration of the constitutionality of the challenged portions of this amendment begins with the fundamental fact that, under our constitutional system, the qualification of voters is a matter committed exclusively to the States. The Supreme Court has spoken on the subject in language as clear as it is decisive. Witness, for example, what it said in Pope v. Williams, 1904, 193 U.S. 621, 24 S.Ct. 573, 48 L.Ed. 817:
“ ‘The privilege to vote in any state is not given by the Federal *5Constitution, or by any of its amendments. It is not a privilege springing from citizenship of the United States. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, 22 L.Ed. 627. It may not be refused on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, but it does not follow from mere citizenship of the United States. In other words, the privilege to vote in a state is within the jurisdiction of the state itself, to be exercised as the state may direct, and upon such terms as to it may seem proper * * »
Following this quotation (168 F.Supp. 177-181) is a full discussion of the rights of the states to control election machinery, together with citation of supporting Supreme Court cases.
II.
The ease of Snowden v. Hughes, 1944, 321 U.S. 1, 64 S.Ct. 397, 88 L.Ed. 497, is in my opinion, direct support for the position that the court below had no jurisdiction to try this case. The brief quotation in the majority opinion from that case is not sufficient to bring the holding of the Supreme Court into proper focus. The Snowden case was discussed by us at some length in the case of Simmons v. Whitaker, 1958, 252 F.2d 224; and the more extended quotation from it at pages 229-231, as well as in the dissenting opinion in Reddix v. Lucky, 5 Cir., 1958, 252 F.2d 930, 939-940, demonstrate, in my opinion, that the holding of the Supreme Court in Snowden is directly opposite to that attributed to it by the majority opinion.
III.
The Act under which appellant invoked federal jurisdiction was one of a series concerning which the Supreme Court said in Collins v. Hardyman, 1950, 341 U.S. 651, 856, 71 S.Ct. 937, 939, 95 L.Ed. 1253:
“The Act was among the last of the reconstruction legislation to be based on the ‘conquered province’ theory which prevailed in Congress for a period following the Civil War.”
The Supreme Court has held uniformly that this series of statutes, to be constitutional, must be given a narrow and limited application. The reason for this was thus set forth in the concurring opinion of Mr. Justice Stone in Hague v. C. I. O., 1939, 307 U.S. 496, 521 et seq., 59 S.Ct. 954, 966, 83 L.Ed. 1423, where he discussed the Fourteenth Amendment which they were designed to implement:
“The reason for this narrow construction of the clause and the consistently exhibited reluctance of this Court to enlarge its scope has been well understood since the decision of the Slaughter-House Cases [16 Wall. 36, 21 L.Ed. 394]. If its restraint upon state action were to be extended more than is needful to protect relationships between the citizen and the national government, and if it were to be deemed to extend to those fundamental rights of person and property attached to citizenship by the common law and enactments of the states when the Amendment was adopted, * * * it would enlarge Congressional and judicial control of state action and multiply restrictions upon it whose nature, though difficult to anticipate with precision would be of sufficient gravity to cause serious apprehension for the rightful independence of local government.”
The whole thesis of narrow construction of the so-called Civil Rights Statutes — to which this Court is so definitely committed — was further developed in the dissenting opinion in Sharp v. Lucky, 5 Cir., 1958, 252 F.2d 910, 915 et seq.
IV.
The case before use involves nothing but a local political brawl. To extend federal jurisdiction to such would spread so thin the energies of the handful of men constituting the Federal Judiciary that there would be no time left for the performance of their legitimate duties. *6It would, moreover, lend substance to the widespread feeling that “The Cult of the Cloth” is engaged, by some sort of bootstrap-lifting technique, in an effort to turn over to federal functionaries the most intimate prerogatives of local self-government in derogation of universally accepted tenets of State-Federal relationships. Such a concept, wherever it is given effect, cannot, in my opinion, fail to bring the whole federal judicial process into disrepute. So feeling, I cannot but record my unequivocal rejection of it.