Court Opinion

ID: 9797607
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:25:21.053625+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:54:24.273076
License: Public Domain

OPALA, J.,
dissenting in part.
¶ 1 I concur in the court’s opinion insofar as it holds that the district court had subject matter jurisdiction and that the State Election Board is not an essential party to the action. Its absence is not an impediment to granting relief. I dissent from today’s approval of the district court’s drawing of OHa-homa’s congressional districts. This case is about neither jurisdiction nor testing the constitutional orthodoxy of legislation. Here the parties camouflage legislative nonfeasance by manipulating the judiciary into filling a political vacuum with a judicially-created district-ing plan. The law does not allow the judiciary to be a roving commission, filling such political voids. Because no party in this lawsuit established that federal congressional districts must be drawn by anyone — much less by this court — and the judiciary should not intrude upon areas where there are no cognizable injuries to be redressed, I recoil from any holding which dignifies this dispute by raising it to a redressible claim.
I
THE ANATOMY OF LITIGATION
¶2 The difficulty of determining “plaintiffs” and “defendants” in this “lawsuit” should give the court pause in assuming that a cognizable claim exists. In the original petition, dated January 29, 2002, plaintiffs Alexander and Snipes sued Governor Frank Keating, members of the OHahoma State Election Board, Stratton Taylor (the President Pro Tempore of the OHahoma State Senate) and Larry E. Adair (Speaker of the OHahoma House of Representatives), all in their respective official capacities. Plaintiffs, as registered voters with an interest in participating in the 2002 elections for members of Congress from the State of OHahoma, sought “injunctive relief to ensure that the State of OHahoma has a constitutional redistricting plan in place in time to comply with the filing deadline for congressional elections in OHahoma.” They based their claim on Article 1, § 2 of the U.S. Constitution, as amended by § 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons I will discuss in Part II, the petition should have been dismissed for failure to state a claim for which relief may be granted.
¶ 3 Among other various interventions and realignments of the parties in this case, the Election Board officials were dismissed as *1215defendants, and Governor Keating, a Republican, switched from a defendant to a plaintiff, separating himself from defendants Taylor and Adair, both Democrats. These shifts took place presumably to align more clearly the dominant political interests against one another, lest any court manage to mistake this case for anything more than partisan bickering.
II
FAILURE TO STATE A COGNIZABLE INJURY AND REDRESSIBLE CLAIM
¶ 4 Plaintiffs argue that Art. I, § 2 of the U.S. Constitution, as amended by § 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, necessitates court action in this case. In my roughly fifty years in the law, I have become fairly familiar with the United States Constitution and the jurisprudence interpreting it. I am unable to make the jump from Art. I, § 2⅛ command that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state ...” and the Fourteenth Amendment to the claim that this (or any other) court must draw such districts when they do not exist. And they clearly do not exist.
¶ 5 Once the results of 2000 decennial census — particularly, that the number of representatives to which Oklahomans are entitled to elect decreased from six to five — were made known, the Oklahoma Congressional Redistricting Act of 1991, 14 O.S.2000 §§ 5.1 et seq., became functus officio1 — necessarily obsolete and immediately invalid. This leaves Oklahoma capable of electing five representatives, but with no congressional districts. The judiciary’s function is to subject districting plans that are in effect to constitutional testing under the Marshall Doctrine of judicial review. Here, there is nothing to test but legislative vacuum! I remain unconvinced that without congressional districts, the resulting situation — election at-large for each congressional seat — while likely unpalatable to all here involved, is unconstitutional on any grounds. Neither plaintiffs-appel-lees nor defendants-appellants bothered to mention why an at-large election for all five congressional seats would be illegal.
¶ 6 It is no more my job to attempt to craft a cognizable claim than it is to remedy a nonexistent injury. But for the sake of argument and legal education I will attempt to imagine what possible injury this case was meant to redress. First, I recognize that 2 USCS § 2a(c)(5) states that “Until a State is redistricted in the manner provided by the law thereof after any apportionment, ... if there is a decrease in the number of Representatives and the number of districts in such State, exceeds such decreased number of Representatives, they shall be elected from the State at large.” Perhaps if the parties gave this statute any thought (and no evidence of any such thought exists) they felt that 2 USCS § 2c repealed this statute by implication.2
¶ 7 Perhaps the parties were encouraged in this reading by a three-judge federal panel which read these possibly overlapping stat*1216utes this way in Shayer v. Kirkpatrick,3 Shayer was summarily affirmed by the Supreme Court,4 and this vague swipe is the nearest the Court has come to interpreting the two statutes. Its inconclusive approval is insufficient evidence that federal law mandates a division into districts rather than an at-large election.
¶8 Several reasons bolster such a belief. First, repeals by implication are not favored.5 Second, Shayer was not a petition for certio-rari, but an appeal from a Federal District Court panel, which obligated the Court to decide the matter in some way. Third, summary affirmations of cases with multiple issues may hold little and frequently hold nothing of precedential value.6 In Mandel v. Bradley7 the Court held that, “because a summary affirmance is an affirmance of the judgment only, the rationale of the affir-mance may not be gleaned solely from the opinion below.”8
¶ 9 Mandel created a two-step test for courts to apply in determining the quantum of precedential weight, if any, of the Court’s summary dispositions. First, the lower court must establish exactly what issues were presented in light of all the facts in the prior case-. Second, the court must determine if the Supreme Court necessarily decided those issues when it summarily disposed of the case.9 In an enlightening concurring opinion, Justice Brennan wrote that state and federal judges hoping to glean information from a summary affirmation must determine that the affirmation ... “not even arguably [rests] upon some alternative ... ground. The judgment should not be interpreted as deciding the constitutional questions unless no other construction of the disposition is plausible.”10 It is eminently plausible that the Court’s affirmance of Shayer could have rested on any number of other grounds. I therefore decline to follow the Shayer v. Kirkpatrick opinion’s construction of the federal statutes at issue.
¶ 10 Rather, I read the provisions of 2 USCS § 2c to hold that they prohibit a legislature from deliberately designing a redistricting plan which would elect at-large representatives, but find them silent about *1217forcing a court affirmatively to create districts when the legislative nonfeasance results in the plainly constitutional regime of at-large elections. Public policy and judicial independence counsel such a reading. Since the effect of the 2000 census was to immediately invalidate the 1991 congressional districts and precipitate at-large elections in accordance with the terms of 2 USCS 2a(c)(5), and there is no clear command for a sine qua non requirement to divide states with multiple congressional representatives into districts, I cannot accede to the court’s view that a legally redressible claim or counterclaim exists.
Ill
DE NOVO STANDARD OF REVIEW FOR CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES
¶ 11 The court is also in error by assigning excessive deference to the trial court’s order. It adopts the equity standard of review. This standard falls short of the federal minimum for constitutional issues. The latter require de novo review.11 Originating with the 1920 case of Ohio Valley Water Co. v. Ben Avon Borough,12 the so-called Ben Avon doctrine requires full judicial review when a constitutional issue is raised.13 Some commentators speculate that the Ben Avon doctrine has been extinguished gradually through numerous inconsistent Supreme Court decisions.14 Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has never expressly overruled the doctrine, and courts continue to and are bound to apply if.15 Despite the parties’ failure to prove a constitutional injury, constitutional issues are clearly alive and well in this case.
¶ 12 When a court reviews the rulings or reasoning of a trial court de novo, it gives little or no deference to the trial judge. The reviewing court’s objective is not limited to ascertaining whether the lower court erred. “As such, it is not only at liberty, but is required, to comb the record in search of the facts of the case, the reasonable inferences from those facts, the law applicable to those facts, and proper inferences to be drawn from those facts.”16 In 1991, Justice Black-mun eloquently described the benefit of de novo review:
Independent appellate review of legal issues best serves the dual goals of doctrinal coherence and economy of judicial administration. District judges preside alone over fast-paced trials: Of necessity they devote much of their energy and resources to hearing witnesses and reviewing evidence. Similarly, the logistical burdens of trial advocacy limit the extent to which trial counsel is able to supplement the district judge’s legal research with memoranda and briefs. Thus, trial judges often must resolve complicated legal questions without benefit of ‘extended reflection [or] extensive information.’- Courts of appeals, on the other hand, are structurally suited to *1218the collaborative juridical process that promotes decisional accuracy. With the record having been constructed below and settled for purposes of the appeal, appellate judges are able to devote their primary attention to legal issues. As questions of law become the focus of appellate review, it can be expected that the parties’ brief will be refined to bring to bear on the legal issues more information and more comprehensive analysis than was provided for the district judge. Perhaps most important, courts of appeals employ multi-judge panels that permit reflective dialogue and collective judgment.17
The record indicates that this was certainly a “fast-paced” trial, and the Ben Avon doctrine commands us to exercise de novo review of the exigent constitutional issues.
IV
THE CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE OF JUDICIAL NEUTRALITY IN DEALING WITH POLITICAL ISSUES
¶ 13 Judges act without authority and erode whatever faith the public still carries in the insulation of the judiciary from the political process when they limit themselves to choose between two proposals for redistricting congressional seats both obviously laden with partisan advantage. The reapportionment process has been recognized by many observers as politics at its most heated.18 Indeed, since judicial redistricting'“is inevitably an exposed and sensitive” task, it “must be accomplished circumspectly, and in a manner ‘free from any taint of arbitrariness or discrimination.’ ”19
¶ 14 Even if I were convinced that the Shayer v. Kirkpatrick interpretation of 2 U.S.C.S. §§ 2a(c)(5) and 2(c) was indeed appropriate (or that the Supreme Court’s nebulous affirmation of that case could be accepted as precedential authority for the view that districts must indeed be drawn), I would nonetheless disagree with the court’s approval of the trial court’s approach and reverse the trial court’s adoption of a party-sponsored plan as a judicial abnegation of political neutrality.
¶ 15 The costs of potentially compromising the political neutrality of the court system far outweigh any benefits gained by simply choosing from ready-made and obviously partisan plans. Put simply, even if a federal mandate compelling courts to apportion districts did exist, the court must do so in a scrupulously neutral manner, free of any appearance of political influence. This would likely mean drawing districts neither party has suggested based on clearly definable, neutral criteria.20 I am most certainly aware of Justice Ginsburg’s teaching that “[T]he slim judicial competence to draw district lines weigh heavily against judicial intervention in apportionment decisions....”21 But when courts claim this reluctance to intrude on a legislative process in order to shift the burden of drawing districts to the political parties who bring suits before them, the reputation costs incurred by punting to a political party are simply intolerable.
*1219V
MY PROPOSED DISPOSITION OF THIS CONTROVERSY
¶ 16 In sum, if I were deciding this case, I would declare the claims and counterclaims in this controversy to be irredressible for want of any law to which judicial testing of constitutional orthodoxy may be appropriate, and I would invite the federal three-judge panel (or any other court drawing districts) to revisit this important issue. Even if I were convinced that this court is under a constitutional mandate to draw districts for Oklahoma, in an attempt to keep the judiciary above reproach, I would most certainly avoid deferring to either of two party-sponsored plans. I am not unduly critical of the court’s approval of the Governor’s plan, nor do I counsel the court to adopt the Senate plan; rather, I rise today to condemn the decisional process by which these irredressi-ble claims came to be decided. I do not invite this or any court ever to be bound by any tendered party-sponsored plan laden with excisable partisan bias, however slight.22
¶ 17 It is only when courts discipline the parties involved by refusing to function as a safety valve for political actors (who increasingly favor using the judiciary as a forum for resolving their disputes) that they will truly feel compelled to negotiate a solution on their own. The court has no business cleaning up this political mess, and I retreat from any such enterprise.

. Functus officio literally means "a task performed." It is applied to things which have "fulfilled the function, discharged the office, or accomplished the purpose, and [are] therefore of no further force or authority.” Black’s Law Dictionary, Special Deluxe Fifth Edition, (1979), p. 606. See Macy v. Board of County Com'rs, 1999 OK 53 at n. 21, 986 P.2d 1130.

. As Justice Lavender notes in a concurrence, 2 USCS § 2c states that,
In each State entitled in the Ninety-first Congress or in any subsequent Congress thereafter to more than one Representative under an apportionment made pursuant to the provisions of subsection (a) of section 22 of the Act of June 18, 1929, entitled "An Act to provide for apportionment of Representatives” (46 Stat. 26), as amended [2 USCS 2a(a)], there shall be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of Representatives to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives shall be elected only from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative (except that a State which is entitled to more than one Representative and which has in all previous elections elected its Representatives at Large may elect its Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress).
§ 2a(c)(5) was passed in 1929, while § 2c was passed in 1967. Both are still in force.

. 541 F.Supp. 922 (W.D.Mo.1982).

. Schatzle v. Kirkpatrick, 456 U.S. 966, 102 S.Ct. 2228, 72 L.Ed.2d 841 (1982). Summary affir-mances such as this are simply dispositions sans an explicitly-reasoned decision-making process; they merely affirm the judgment of a lower court without explanation. ’

. See, e.g., Universal Interpretive Shuttle Corp. v. Washington Metropolitan Area Tratisit Comm., 393 U.S. 186, 193, 89 S.Ct. 354, 358, 21 L.Ed.2d 334 (1968) (citing Wood v. United States, 16 Pet. 342, 363, 10 L.Ed. 987 (1842); FTC v. A.P.W. Paper Co., 328 U.S. 193, 202, 66 S.Ct. 932, 936, 90 L.Ed. 1165 (1946)).

. The precedential value of summary dispositions is often difficult to determine. According to one scholar, as of 1995, with regard to federal appellate summary affirmations,
The Federal Circuit has stressed that a summary disposition should not be viewed as a blanket adoption of the district court’s reasoning because it may be based upon "any ground appropriate to tire case.” Quad Envtl. Tech. Corp. v. Union Sanitary Dist., 946 F.2d 870, 874 (Fed.Cir.1991). In the District of Columbia, Second, Third, Seventh, Eighth,- and Ninth Circuits, summary dispositions are not prece-dential. D.C. CIR. R. 11(c); 2D CIR. R. 0.23; 3D CIR. I.O.P. 5.6; 7TH CIR. R. 53(b)(2)(iii); 8TH CIR. R. 47B, APP. I; 9TH CIR. R. 36-3. Tenth Circuit Rule 36.3, denying precedential status to summary dispositions, has been suspended. [See In re Rules of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, 955 F.2d 36, 36 (10th Cir.1992) (giving historical background supporting court's decision to adopt rule that denies precedential weight to unpublished opinions except under doctrines of law of the case, collateral estoppel, and res judicata).] The Federal Circuit allows citation to every disposition of the court except those unanimously designated as nonprecedential. FED. CIR. R. 47.8. Rules permitting summary dis- . positions in the remaining circuits are silent about the precedential value (other than pre-clusive effect) of such dispositions. 1ST CIR. R. 27.1; 4TH CIR. R. 34(a); 5TH CIR. R. 47.6; 6TH CIR. R. 19.
Martha J. Dragich, Will the Federal Courts of Appeal Perish if they Publish? Or does the Declining use of Opinions to Explain and Justify Judicial Decisions Pose a Greater Threat?, 44 Am. U.L.Rev. 757, 763 at n.21.

. 432 U.S. 173, 97 S.Ct. 2238, 53 L.Ed.2d 199 (1977) (per curiam).

. Id. at 176, 97 S.Ct. 2238.

. See Id. at 175-80, 97 S.Ct. 2238.

. Id. at 180, 97 S.Ct. 2238 (Brennan, J., concurring) (emphasis added).

. See generally Rev. John. J. Coghlin, A Comparison of the Administrative Law of the Catholic Church and the United States, 34 Loy. L.A. L.Rev. 81, 183.

. 253 U.S. 287, 40 S.Ct. 527, 64 L.Ed. 908 (1920).

. See id. At 289.

. See, e.g., Leslie A. Glick, Independent Judicial Review of Administrative Rate-Making: The Rise and Demise of the Ben Avon Doctrine, 40 Ford-ham L.Rev. 305, 306-07, 314 (1971). For an inconsistent decision, see Railroad Commission v. Rowan & Nichols Oil Co., 310 U.S. 573, 60 S.Ct. 1021, 84 L.Ed. 1368 (1940).

. Coughlin, supra note 11 at FN 687 and accompanying text. See Glick, supra note 687, at 313 n. 32, 314. See generally California v. Southland Royalty Co., 436 U.S. 519, 525-26, 98 S.Ct. 1955, 1958, 56 L.Ed.2d 505 (1978) (upholding an administrative interpretation of the Natural Gas Act on the ground that the interpretation was reasonable); St. Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States, 298 U.S. 38, 52, 56 S.Ct. 720, 726, 80 L.Ed. 1033 (1936) (holding that courts must review constitutional issues independently from the findings of the Secretary of Agriculture); Pichotta v. City of Skagway, 78 F.Supp. 999, 1004 (D.Alaska 1948) (stating that when a case presents an issue of constitutional law, the reviewing court may determine the issue upon its own, rather than the administrative, record); Atl. Coast Line R.R. Co. v. Pub. Serv. Comm’n, 77 F.Supp. 675, 680 (D.S.C.1948) (stating that an independent action in equity brought pursuant to an act of Congress deserves de novo review).

.2 J.App. Prac. & Process 47-2-47, nn. 63-4 and accompanying text.

. See Salve Regina College v. Russell, 499 U.S. 225, 231-232, 111 S.Ct. 1217, 1221, 113 L.Ed.2d 190 (alteration in original) (citations omitted).

. See generally Robert Redwine, Comment: Constitutional Law: Racial and Political Gerrymandering — Different Problems Require Different Solutions 51 Okla. L.Rev. 373 (1998); Note: Federal Court Involvement in Redistricting Litigation, 114 Harv. L.Rev. 878 (2001). Pamela S. Karlan, The Fire Next Time: Reapportionment After the 2000 Census, 50 Stan. L.Rev. 731, 731-34 (1998).

. Connor v. Finch, 431 U.S. 407, 415, 97 S.Ct. 1828, 1834, 52 L.Ed.2d 465 (1977) (quoting Roman v. Sincock, 377 U.S. 695, 710, 84 S.Ct. 1449, 12 L.Ed.2d 620 (1964)).

. Some may argue that announcing in advance that a court will solely limit itself to choose the 'most reasonable proposal may encourage the interested parties to work towards the political middle on their own. Such an argument would go on to note that political actors are likely better suited to make such plans than are judges. I may well agree, but hold that such a scheme still intolerably sullies a court in politics by expressly placing itself at the mercy of political actors.

. Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 935, 115 S.Ct. 2475, 2500, 132 L.Ed.2d 762 (1995) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

. At oral argument, neither party denied that both party-sponsored plans were at least "slightly biased.”