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The size of the Commons varies according to population growth modified by the aim of equalizing the size of constituencies. Adjustments are proposed by the impartial Boundaries Commissions. Even after the departure of most hereditaries, the Lords remains a large House. Parliaments last roughly four years. The Electoral Commission registers and monitors donations to political parties and election expenses. Members' salaries are no longer under Commons control but allowances remain a difficulty. Decennial and a recent mid‐decade reapportionment of a fixed number of House seats based on State laws drawing partisan boundaries, coupled with non‐inclusive primary voter participation and the increased costs of election and constant fund‐raising by incumbents impacts on the quality of Members, their willingness to work collegially, and on their legislative productivity.

This chapter explains how the Court derives constitutional principle using examples from the areas of freedom of speech, racial discrimination, reapportionment, and abortion. It then uses two examples from the area of the Establishment Clause: the concept of the wall of separation between church and state and the Lemon test to illustrate how the Court transforms broad principle into specific constitutional doctrine. Next, it considers how the Court derives constitutional doctrine using four specific areas for purpose of illustration: seditious speech, strict scrutiny, libel, and school desegregation. Finally, the chapter discusses various sources of constitutional doctrine including precedent, purpose, structure, theory, necessity, and whole cloth.

This chapter discusses the use of ethical argument by the Court. It examines the arguable employment of such methodology under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment focusing on the death penalty and length of sentence cases. It then considers the use of this type of argument through substantive due process by examining punitive damage and the right to privacy cases. Finally, it discusses the concept of ethical argument in the reapportionment decisions.

This section introduces the seeming oddities of the Florida Constitution and suggests that the book will explain how they came to be part of the constitution. It briefly explains how Florida’s growth created a need for its antiquated, post-Reconstruction constitution to be overhauled, why that goal appeared to be impossible, and how it finally was achieved. It introduces the Pork Chop Gang of rural legislators and the reformers who led the state after reapportionment caused the Gang’s demise.

This chapter discusses the fourteen-year legal battle to create single-member districts in the state legislature and aid black candidates. When the MFDP began its lawsuit in 1965, Mississippi used multimember districts to dilute the voting strength of black-majority counties. The state defended the use of the districts to minimize black political power, and until the resolution of the cases in 1979, only one black legislator, Robert Clark, won a seat from a multimember district. Through lawsuits in the federal courts and Supreme Court intervention, the MFDP plaintiffs prevailed and created a plan that led to the election of numerous black legislators in 1979.

Other issues before the convention revealed profound splits between the white counties and black counties of the state. Reapportionment provoked bitter debate; the two sides did not trust each other and feared that tipping the balance of power in the state would mean passage of extra taxes on their respective regions. Mississippi was similar to the rising populist movement in other states as poor farmers feared new technology and entrenched institutions and so opposed an appointed judiciary, favors to railroads and other corporations, support of taxes that would help only certain regions (such as levees in the Delta), and hard money. Rising opposition led the elites of the black counties to push for promulgation of the constitution rather than ratification.

Why did it take four legislative sessions spanning two years to pass the new Constitution and put it on the ballot? First, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the 1967 legislature unconstitutional and Florida existed for three months without a valid legislature while hurry-up elections were again held statewide. Then the Walt Disney World project‘s proposed legislation singlehandedly preempted consideration during the second legislative session. Then, once the legislators started actually paying attention to the proposed Constitution, they found much to disagree with. Finally, in the heat of the summer of 1968, the legislators passed a document most of them could live with. Public relations battles for and against ratification were waged; although the public ratified the Constitution, the geographic areas voting for and against it were telling.

The final chapter argues that the adoption of the new Constitution depended on reapportionment and that the reorganization of government, home rule, and other features of the new Constitution allowed the state to manage growth and operate efficiently. The only part of the Constitution that was not written anew in 1968 was the judicial article. It was another four years before that constitutional knot was untied and smoothed out. It took the joint efforts of cultural opposites to pull off the last element of Florida’s modern Constitution.

The chapter analyses the impact of the black struggle for the right to vote and participation in the electoral process in the state of Mississippi. It also discusses the political impact of legislative reapportionment litigation, which replaced multimember Congressional districts with single-member districts statewide which ultimately empowered blacks to participate fully in the electoral process. The reapportionment litigation influenced the politics and policy of the state and guided the state in a progressive direction. The consistent struggle against racial segregation over voting rights and electoral participation witnessed a dramatic upsurge in black political participation, and ultimately increased the number of black elected officials at county and local levels.

This chapter describes the reasons for Florida's historic commitment to the Democratic Party and how that loyalty lasted up to World War II. The Civil War and the events of Reconstruction positioned Florida, like the South, solidly in the Democratic-fold. That relationship was strengthened further under the leadership of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the programs of the New Deal. It was the New Deal that provided Floridians with their only relief from a crippling Depression that devastated the state for 14 long years. After World War II, Florida's leaders pursued tourism, population growth, and modernization in an effort to avoid a return to the crippling effects of the Great Depression. The postwar population and economic expansion brought prosperity to the state, but it also triggered a confrontation between natives and newcomers over whose political and cultural values would direct the state's modernization. That confrontation defined the 1950s and led to a political free-for-all in which natives blocked school desegregation, refused to reapportion the state, and blocked redistricting of the legislature. The outcome of this clash remained unresolved at the end of the decade of the 1950s and so did Florida's future.

Chapter 3 describes how local African Americans, with the help of the U.S. Congress, federal courts, and the U.S. Department of Justice, instigated the reapportionment revolution after 1965. This revolution carried the spirit of civil rights reform, the Great Society, and President Lyndon Johnson’s equality-of-results standard well into the 1970s. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969) to expand the implications of the VRA’s preclearance clause in section 5, antidilution litigation began to flood America’s court system. African American public-housing resident Curtis Holt Sr. and white suburbanites eventually sued to deannex Chesterfield County, but for very different reasons. The white residents of the annexed area saw annexation as a way to continue passive resistance to school integration. Holt’s suit led the Supreme Court to place what became a seven-year moratorium on city council elections. This suit not only plugged Richmond into the Burger Court’s campaign against vote dilution but also eventually culminated in the implementation of Richmond’s majority–minority district system. Local politics in Richmond had national implications. Litigation (e.g., City of Richmond v. United States [1975]), the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice played a critical role in the monumental election of a black-majority council in Richmond in 1977.

This chapter describes the Supreme Court’s actions on reapportionment cases nationally in the early 1960s when all states were malapportioned, and the Court’s movement toward the one-man-one-vote requirement. It puts the Florida malapportionment problem in the national perspective. It also describes how the Florida legislators decried the intrusion of the U.S. Supreme Court into state affairs, and how the Florida Supreme Court’s defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on civil rights and social reform, prominently including Justice Harold “Tom” Sebring’s role in the Virgil Hawkins cases, actually invited the U.S. Supreme Court to intrude, bypass Florida government, and rule directly on Florida’s apportionment.

This chapter describes how the Florida Constitution Revision Commission was created and formed; argues that the 1966 CRC was originally created as another Pork Chop gambit to retain power; and continues the reapportionment saga as other states successfully reapportioned but Florida did not. The growth of the Kennedy Space Center moon race and the announcement that Walt Disney World was coming to Florida highlighted Florida’s changing composition. It introduces the Commission’s chair, Chesterfield Smith, and some leaders in legislative apportionment, such as Reubin Askew.

This chapter describes the organization and early tasks of the Constitution Revision Commission: what principles were emphasized, what rules governed, the principal constitutional issues to be addressed, and the internal politics of the CRC. It also introduces and discusses several key members of the CRC, including its chair, lawyer Chesterfield Smith; Judge Hugh Taylor; Senator Beth Johnson; Richard Pettigrew; and Robert Ervin. At the same time, reapportionment lawsuits continued, and Disney announced plans for a new theme park in Florida.

The certified-question debates engaged the whole Constitution Revision Commission. The committees then met again, and each drafted the parts of the constitution that its work governed. The draft was published, and the CRC held public hearings around the state to get input. They incorporated the suggested changes into another draft. During the same months, the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly invalidated the Florida legislature because of malapportionment, the Pork Chop Gang finally faced extinction, and the 1966 gubernatorial campaign resulted in the election of Florida’s first Republican governor in ninety years, Claude Kirk, who defeated Miami mayor Robert King High.

This chapter discusses the theoretical argument that congressional redistricting, whether by a single party or by other means, is a fundamentally constrained activity, along with the implications of these constraints for both partisan bias and electoral responsiveness. Four categories of constraints on the redistricting process are discussed: political constraints, legal constraints, structural constraints, and geographic constraints. The chapter considers a necessary condition for the implementation of partisan gerrymandering: one political party should control each of the political branches of state government (both legislative chambers and the governorship) at the time of reapportionment following the decennial census. It also examines the argument that the redrawing of electoral boundaries is also constrained by the fundamental tension between the competing interests of partisan advantage and incumbent protection; the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and population migration on the redistricting process; and how partisan bias arises under a limited set of circumstances.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Supreme Court of the United States in litigation relating to partisan gerrymandering, paying particular attention to a case that attempted to apply the previously established Davis v. Bandemer precedent to congressional elections: Vieth v. Jubelirer. It begins with an overview of Badham v. Eu, which arose from the redrawing of California's congressional districts in the aftermath of the 1980 census and its most significant holding: that the Bandemer precedent, which had initially been applied to the drawing of state legislative districts only, also extends to the drawing of congressional districts. The chapter then considers the circumstances surrounding the Vieth case, in which the alleged political gerrymander concerned the reapportionment plan for the congressional districts in the state of Pennsylvania rather than those for the state assembly. It also analyzes the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Vieth, focusing on Justice Antonin Scalia's plurality opinion and Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurring opinion.