The Reapportionment Thicket

In 1946, Justice Felix Frankfurter warned his Supreme Court colleagues against meddling with the apportion ment of political voting districts.

"Courts," he said, "ought not to enter this political thicket." Frankfurter's ad vice was heeded until last year, when the court set forth its historic one-man, one-vote rule for congressional and state legislative elections. Those decisions landed all courts in the thicket -- and so thick was the grove that it seemed to many that the Supreme Court was not even trying to pick its way out. Last week the court hardly clarified matters. In four terse de cisions, it:

>> Upheld a lower federal court order requiring New York to hold a special legislative election on Nov. 2. The elec tion will be held under "Plan A," the first of four reapportionment plans passed last December by a lame-duck Republican legislature. The State Su preme court voided all four, noting specifically that Plan A violated a state constitutional provision against a lower house of more than 150 members. A three-judge federal court overturned that ruling on the grounds that some reapportionment action must be taken.

It ordered the special election under Plan A, with the provision that the new legislature draft another apportion ment plan acceptable under the state constitution. Plan A has been violently denounced by Democrats as favorable to Republicans, who lost control of the legislature last year for the first time in 30 years.

>> Required California to reapportion its state senate along population lines by July 1. Otherwise, the job will be done by a three-judge federal panel.

The Supreme Court ruling, which re jected an appeal by Democratic Gov ernor Pat Brown, had the effect of reversing five statewide referendums since 1926.

>> Decided, at least for the time being, a dispute between a federal court and the Illinois Supreme Court. Last Jan uary, the federal court reapportioned state senate districts; if its orders were not followed, it said, all state senators would have to run at large in 1966 (as did all representatives in 1964). Two weeks later, the State Supreme Court, while agreeing that the present appor tionment was unconstitutional, asserted its own jurisdiction, gave the senate until this July 1 to realign itself. The federal court refused to yield jurisdiction. But the Supreme Court ordered the federal court to step aside and give the Illinois bench "a reasonable time" to achieve reapportionment. -- Declined to rule on the constitutionality of an Idaho reapportionment plan, adopted by the legislature last March, and passed the question back to a three-judge federal court.

In no case did the Supreme Court issue any further guidelines about what it considers to be constitutional reapportionment. This fact was caustically noted by Justice John Marshall Harlan in a dissent to the New York decision. Wrote Harlan, who had also dissented to the original one-man, one-vote ruling: "I am wholly at a loss to understand the Court's casual way of disposing of this matter. The Court should be willing to face up articulately to these difficult problems which have followed as a not unnatural aftermath of its reapportionment decisions of last term. These matters bristle with difficult and important questions that touch the nerve centers of the sound operation of our federal and state judicial and political systems."

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