Barbara Franklin, Secretary of Commerce, et al. v. Massachusetts et al. (505 U.S. 788)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 26, 1992 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 505 U.S. 788 · 112 S. Ct. 2767
- Decided
- June 26, 1992
- Term
- October Term 1991
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice O'Connor
- Issue area
- Judicial Power
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice O’Connor delivered the opinion of the Court, except as to Part III. As one season follows another, the decennial census has again generated a number of reapportionment controversies. This decade, as a result of the 1990 census and reapportionment, Massachusetts lost a seat in the House of Representatives. Appellees Massachusetts and two of its registered voters brought this action against the President, the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary), Census Bureau officials, and the Clerk of the House of Representatives, challenging, among other things, the method used for counting federal employees serving overseas. In particular, the appellants’ allocation of 922,819 overseas military personnel to the State designated in their personnel files as their “home of record” altered the relative state populations enough to shift a Representative from Massachusetts to Washington. A three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts held that the decision to allocate military personnel serving overseas to their “homes of record” was arbitrary and capricious under the standards of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. § 701 et seq. As a remedy, the District Court directed the Secretary to eliminate the overseas federal employees from the apportionment counts, directed the President to recalculate the number of Representatives per State…
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