Equal Protection and Voting, Reynolds v. Sims

[Emsworth]

The Supreme Court's decision in Reynolds v. Sims was utterly atrocious. The Constitution does not merely fail to support the court's interpretation; in fact, it directly refutes it.

The argument made by the majority was that the equal protection clause requires states to equally "protect" every citizen's right to vote. If the equal protection clause stood alone, then this argument might have some semblance of merit. But as it so happens, the equal protection clause does not stand alone: it is but one part of a more extensive constitutional amendment.

But in Reynolds, the Court utterly ignored Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides:

[W]hen the right to vote at any election for the choice of ... the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

When one part of the Fourteenth Amendment expressly allows states to deny the right to vote, how can another part prevent states from doing exactly the same thing? The various provisions are not disjoint and unrelated clauses, but rather constitute a single and unified text, and should be construed in pari materia. Whatever the equal protection clause might have meant if it stood alone, it is obvious that, in context, it cannot extend to the right to vote.

I could proceed to discuss the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and how the Supreme Court ignored it in Reynolds, but I think that the textual argument is so strong that any investigation into original meaning is unnecessary.