Page 2
University Daily Kansan Tuesday, April 10. 1962
The Kansas Situation
Reapportionment
The March 26 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on the reapportionment of state legislatures will unquestionably bring reapportionment of the Kansas legislature. There may be attempts to evade equitable reapportionment, but if the Kansas legislature wants to avoid court action it must apportion its members more equitably.
This does not mean that the urban areas in Kansas will gain control of the legislature. The rural-small town element will definitely continue to control at least one house of the legislature, but the urban areas will gain increased representation.
A suit is presently before the Shawnee County District Court designed to force more equitable apportionment of the Kansas legislature. The suit was brought by four newspapermen. One of them, John McCormally, executive editor of the Hutchinson News, made the following comment in a letter to this editor about what action the Kansas legislature will take in view of the Supreme Court decision:
"MY GUESS is that an effort will be made to squeeze under the wire stretched by the court by reapportioning the Kansas senate on a population basis, while letting the house represent area by reducing its membership to one from each county. Initial efforts will be made to frustrate this by placing a limit on the number of senators from any county rather than letting them truly represent people. But if this change is made (the opposite of the federal system) it will signal some progress, for, while the house will be even more rural dominated, the senate will be urban dominated and in the mechanics of legislation, compromises will be necessary between the two houses which will give urban areas more consideration than they now receive."
The method of using one house to represent counties that Mr. McCormally mentions is used by several states already, including Kansas. It is one method by which a rural-controlled legislature can insure continued domination of at least one house of the legislature. This is true even in states that are predominantly urban; New Jersey is a good example. This system follows the pattern of the U.S. Senate, which provides for two senators from each state.
THUS THE Kansas legislature can easily insure continued domination of at least one house by the rural population. It will have great difficulty in continuing rural domination of the senate, however.
Naturally the fears the rural population has of urban domination in the legislature will be an obstacle to fair and just reapportionment. But these fears and prejudices have served the rural conservatives badly in the past and they will continue to do so in the future. It is the failure of the rural-controlled legislatures throughout the nation to recognize and understand urban problems that has caused the cities to turn to the Federal government for aid. The Tennessee case is itself an example of this. The citizens who brought the reapportionment suit against the Tennessee legislature were forced to take their case to the federal courts because the rural-controlled legislature in Tennessee had refused them justice.
The Kansas legislature still has time to act on its own, but its time for voluntary action is limited. The suit presently under consideration in the Shawnee County District Court can undoubtedly be considered as only the opening skirmish. Unless the legislature acts, other suits will obviously be brought against it to force equitable reapportionment.
THE ONLY thing really in question is what form the Kansas legislature's action will take, for it is obvious that it must act. Its response to the Supreme Court ruling may be a series of delaying actions, designed to avoid an equitable reapportionment as long as possible. But it is both logical and inevitable that some form of more equitable reapportionment will have to be made.
The Supreme Court's decision makes token reapportionment impossible.
A series of delaying actions would be an unfortunate development. They would lead to bitterness and they would only delay the inevitable. What is needed is a program that would meet the requirement for equitable reapportionment calmly and with careful regard for the Supreme Court's ruling. This is the only responsible and in reality the only possible solution.
—William H. Mullins
Focus on Reapportionment
The Tennessee Case
The Tennessee case which the U.S. Supreme Court used as the basis for its March 26 decision on the apportionment of state legislatures is a good example of the charges brought against rural legislatures across the nation, including Kansas.
The Tennessee state legislature was last reapportioned in 1901. Yet Tennessee's constitution requires that the state legislature reapportion every 10 years. This reapportionment is supposed to be done on the basis of the number of qualified voters in each county or district. The legislature has refused to consider any bill brought before it for reapportionment.
THE RESULT of this refusal to reapportion was a state legislature that was heavily and unconstitutionally (according to Tennessee's constitution) weighed in favor of the rural population. In actual figures, it meant that 37 per cent of the voters elected 20 to 33 members of the state senate and that 40 per cent of the population elected 63 of 99 members of the state senate.
The reapportionment problem has been taken to both state and federal courts in many states. But prior to last month's decision of the Supreme Court, both state and federal courts had refused to act on it. The arguments by the courts were that the problem of reapportionment was a political issue and therefore did not fall within the
sphere of judicial action, that a ruling by a court would violate the separation of powers doctrine and, in the case of the federal courts, that a ruling by federal courts would violate the sovereignty of the state.
JUSTICE WILLIAM J. Brennan delivered the majority opinion in the Supreme Court's decision on the Tennessee case, which said that "We hold today only (A) that the court possessed jurisdiction of the subject matter; (B) that a justifiable cause of action is stated upon which appellants would be entitled to appropriate relief; and (C) . . . that the appellants have standing to challenge the Tennessee apportionment statutes."
The majority opinion also said that "Beyond noting that we have no cause at this stage to doubt the district court will be able to fashion relief if violations of constitutionality are found, it is improper now to consider what remedy would be most appropriate if appellants prevail at the trial."
The majority opinion noted also that some apportionments could be so unfair as to violate the clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution providing that no state shall "deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws."
Daily Hansan
Extension 11, news 100m Extension 376, business office
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
Telephone Viking 3-2700
University of Kansas student newspaper
Telephone VIKING 3-2100 Extension 711 news room
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press.
Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22,
N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates:
$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon
during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University
holidays and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence,
Kansas.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ron Gallagher ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEBARREMENTS
Iron Camghee Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT Editorial Editor
Bill Mullins BUSINESS DEPARTMENT Business Manager
Charles Martinache
"You folks have enough room back there?"
Power Shift Seen
... Until yesterday's decision by the Supreme Court, however, imbalance in the state legislatures had been primarily a local, and state issue, with regional politicians and political scientists arguing it out without producing any major change.
"In this situation," he wrote, "as in others of like nature, appeal for relief does not belong here. In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives..."
This points up one of the odd paradoxes in the majority and dissenting opinions. Justice Frank-furter, dissenting, argued that the court's intervention was wrong and would be ineffective.
YET, WHEN some experienced politicians looked over the court's decision, their opinion seemed to be that the court's decision might very well produce that "informed, civically militant electorate" that local political and pedagogical analysis had failed to arouse in the past.
Justice Frankfurter was particularly critical of injecting the court into what he called the clash of political forces in political settle-ments.
"The court's authority—possessed neither of the purse nor the sword—ultimately rests," he argued, "on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction. Such feeling must be nourished by the court's complete detachment, in fact and appearance, from political entanglements..."
THERE WAS little support here (Washington) for the view that the courts, "possessed neither of the purse nor the sword," would decide these cases themselves. Many observers made the point that it would be much more difficult for the courts to come up with a formula for just representation in a state legislature than to produce a formula for public school integration.
The political consensus seemed to be about as follows:
- The rise in the nation's population—up by 3,000,000 every year—and the movement of the people off the land into the cities and suburbs, have created urgent problems of city renewal, education, and transportation.
- The court has dramatized a critical situation.
- THE STATE legislatures, increasingly weighted to the farm areas, are not dealing with these problems effectively. Therefore, once the court has brought the issue to the center of national attention, public opinion will produce the pressure for greater representation from the urban and suburban areas.
That this will be a slow process nobody doubts—probably as slow as the school desegregation process—but the feeling is that the process has now started, that it will proceed mainly in the headlines for a time, but that in due course it will move—probably leftward from where it is now.
(Excerpted from a column in the March 27 New York Times by James Reston)
The Kansas legislature is presently much like the Tennessee legislature that the Supreme Court used as the basis for its March 26 decision. Its members, if the Kansas constitution is accepted as the authority, include many who are unconstitutionally seated.
The Kansas Legislature
There is an arrangement for both geographic and population representation in the Kansas legislature. The 40 member senate is supposed to represent population, yet it does not. Sedgwick, Wandyote, Johnson and Shawnee Counties had a 1980 population of 813,804. This is 57 per cent of the total Kansas population. According to the Kansas constitution, these four counties are entitled to a total of 15 senators. They have a total of four.
IT MIGHT be further noted about the senate that 584,840 out of a 1960
population of 2,178,611 control 21 of the 40 senate seats. These 21 seats constitute a quorum and are the majority necessary for passing any bill or joint resolution. Thus the majority of the senate is elected by and is responsible to 26.84 per cent of the people of Kansas.
The Kansas House of Representatives is based on area. Each of the 105 counties is entitled to one representative. There also are 20 floating seats that are assigned to the larger counties.
THE KANSAS constitution requires both the house of representatives and the senate to be re- apportioned every five years. They have been reapportioned only twice each since 1930. The last reapportionment in both houses was in the 1950s.
---