Baker V. Carr - Background

Background

Plaintiff Charles Baker was a Republican who lived in Shelby County, Tennessee, the county in which Memphis is located. The Tennessee State Constitution required that legislative districts be redrawn every ten years according to the federal census to provide for districts of substantially equal population. Baker's complaint was that Tennessee had not in fact redistricted since 1901, in response to the 1900 census. By the time of Baker's lawsuit, the population had shifted such that his district in Shelby County had about ten times as many residents as some of the rural districts. Representationally, the votes of rural citizens were worth more than the votes of urban citizens. Baker's argument was that this discrepancy was causing him to fail to receive the "equal protection of the laws" required by the Fourteenth Amendment. Defendant Joe Carr was sued in his position as Secretary of State for Tennessee. Carr was not the person who set the district lines – the state legislature had done that – but was sued ex officio as the person who was ultimately responsible for the conduct of elections in the state and for the publication of district maps. The state of Tennessee argued that legislative districts were essentially political questions, not judicial ones, as had been held by a plurality opinion of the Court in which Justice Felix Frankfurter declared that, "Courts ought not to enter this political thicket." Frankfurter believed that relief for legislative malapportionment had to be won through the political process.