hey there and welcome back to heimlich's history in this video we're looking at another one of your required supreme court cases in the ap government curriculum and that means it's time to look at baker v cars so if you're ready to get them brain cows milked well then let's get to it okay first as always let's get the facts of the case so this case was decided in 1962 and by that point the state of tennessee hadn't redrawn its legislative districts in over 60 years in that time tennessee's urban populations had grown much faster than its rural populations and therefore since the districts had not been redrawn to reflect those changes rural voters had much more voting power than did urban voters let me show you how that works using some basic numbers if 100 people live in this urban district over here and then five people live in this rural district over here and both of them get one representative with one vote then you can see that this group's vote counts for way more than this group's vote so why had tennessee been so negligent in their redistricting well the reasons are complicated but one of the major reasons is that the supreme court had already decided that questions of redistricting were not justiciable which means that the court had no business ruling on such things they argued that it was a political question not a justice question snip snap that's that as nobody says but in baker v carr that conclusion is going to change so what was the constitutional principle at stake here well it was the 14th amendment and especially the equal protection clause remember that the 14th amendment says that no state shall make or enforce any law which shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws this amendment deals with state infringements upon liberty and the argument was that by refusing to redraw the districts and reapportion representatives all citizens in tennessee were patently not equally protected under the law and therefore you bet your sweet bippy that this question is justiciable okay so what was the decision well first of all i should probably tell you that this was an agonizing decision for the court to make in fact biographers and historians argue that the stress of this case very much contributed to the poor health and ultimate demise of one of the justices but regardless the court decided that issues of reapportionment were in fact justiciable and therefore the supreme court did have authority to rule on questions of legislative reapportionment now you're probably asking yourself why in the world this is such a big decision and why did it kill a guy who was wrestling with it well in order to answer that let's talk about why this case matters first of all the case established the foundation of the one-person one-vote doctrine in which states were required to apportion the representatives in a way that equally represented all the people so that no votes counted any more than any other vote second combined with several subsequent decisions baker v carr fundamentally altered the nature of political representation across the united states following this decision many states had to redraw their districts and some of them more than once in order to make sure that the rural votes were not more powerful than the urban votes and third this decision got the supreme court involved in an area where it had only been minimally involved in the past namely political questions like redistricting that meant that there was a whole new set of questions that could potentially be raised before the supreme court however i should mention that as a result of this decision the court wasn't going to get involved in every political question they established a six-part test in this decision that would help future justices decide when an issue before the court was only political in nature and thus should be avoided and when an issue was justiciable and should thus be considered okay that's what you need to know about baker versus carr if you want more videos covering the required cases then click right over here and all your dreams will come true if you want to help getting an a in your class and five on your exam then click right here and grab review packet and finally if this video helped you and you want me to keep making them then subscribe and i shall oblige heimler out