Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
principle of “one person, one vote”—in other words, that any chamber of a state legislature must be based on equal population districts.
In response to these decisions, the House of Representatives passed a bill stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction over cases involving legislative apportionment. Members of Congress, led by Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, spearheaded a movement for a constitutional amendment overriding the Court’s decisions. The effort ultimately fell short of the two-thirds of the states required under Article V of the Constitution to compel Congress to call a convention to propose amendments. “The newly reapportioned legislatures, after all, had no desire to return to the status quo ante the Reapportionment Cases.”[178]
Debates about the role of, and potential reforms to, the Court continued through the decades following the retirement of Chief Justice Warren in 1969. Many of these controversies are, of course, pertinent to the Commission’s mission. They are discussed in the following Chapters in the context of the specific structural issues they presented.
IX. Conclusion
As this historical overview demonstrates, debates about the proper role of the Supreme Court are as old as the Constitution. Though the focus of today’s discussions is, appropriately, on current events and the immediate recent past, taking a longer view across 234 years of the Republic’s existence allows for a deeper and more contextualized analysis of complex imperatives of text, structure, politics, and reform. The combination of these factors was present when the Constitution was drafted in 1787; when it was fundamentally reshaped through the Reconstruction Amendments of 1865, 1868, and 1870; in the controversy between the President, Congress, and the judiciary over Court-packing in 1937; and in the civil rights struggles and victories of the 1950s and 1960s. The current debates require us to draw on the strengths and insights of these previous conflicts while also recognizing the distinctiveness of each moment across the history of the courts, the country, and the Constitution.
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