The Political Thicket Reprise | More Perfect | WNYC Studios

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We revisit one of the most important Supreme Court cases you’ve probably never heard of: Baker v. Carr, a redistricting case from the 1960s, which challenged the justices to consider what might happen if they stepped into the world of electoral politics.

[Archive Reading, The New York Times]: A habitual womanizer, heavy drinker and uncaring parent. Douglas was married four times. Cheating on each of his first three wives with her eventual successor.[Archive Clip, Justice William O. Douglas]: Oh, sure.Suzie Lechtenberg: This is footage from his last marriage, to his wife Kathleen. He was 67. She was 23.Sam Issacharoff: So, yes, yes. That is William Douglas.Mike Seidman: And ...Mike Seidman: …they hated each other. They just despised each other.

Tara Grove: He believed that many matters should be left up to the political process. And that courts should stay out of those issues. Kate Whittaker: Can you imagine? Pushing the plow along in the fields. And then lecturing and arguing cases to the cows, or to the horses, or whatever.Alan Kohn: Oh, and on the side he would hunt. He would hunt squirrels.Alan Kohn: And he amassed, I think, $700.Kate Whittaker: My understanding is that he simultaneously went to law school and high school.Suzie Lechtenberg: Yeah.

[Archive Clip, Justice Charles Whittaker]: I hesitate. You had so many interruptions. But I have a question or two. I wonder if I might have the privilege of asking you?[Archive Clip, Justice Charles Whittaker]: I think it may last … [Archive Clip, Justice John Roberts]: It's my job to call balls and strikes. And not to pitch or bat.Suzie Lechtenberg: Frankly, that seems how a justice should be. That you are approaching it without a political agenda and that you're deciding it.

[Archive Clip, Justice Charles Whittaker]: She was found in her bedroom by a fireman and taken outside. And soon thereafter pronounced dead. Suzie Lechtenberg: He ends up being so undecided on this death penalty case that he forces the Court to delay the vote until the next term. And there were a series of cases like this.Suzie Lechtenberg: Where the law would be fuzzy, ideologies would harden. And Whittaker, he would be right in the middle.

Suzie Lechtenberg: Like Memphis. Because in those 60 years, people had moved to the cities in droves.Suzie Lechtenberg: But the Tennessee State legislature had refused to update its count. And it was still giving more representation to those rural areas.Suzie Lechtenberg: NYU law professor Sam Issacharoff. For people that don't understand it, how does it actually dilute your vote?

[Archive Clip, Justice William O. Douglas]: I say there's nothing in the Constitution of the United States of America that ordains, and nothing in the Constitution of Tennessee that ordains that state government is, and must remain, an agricultural commodity. And there's nothing in either one of those Constitutions that said, it takes 20 city residents to equal one farmer.

 

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