Alito and "one person, one vote" reapportionment.

The NYT reports on Samuel Alito and the strong influence his father had on him. Telling the nominee's life story has become a crucial part of the confirmation process, and Alito has a special need to explain the opposition to the "one person, one vote" principle of legislative apportionment, which he stated in a 1985 job application. Here, the life story component is surprisingly rich:

When ... Democrats pressed Judge Alito about why he had once disagreed with the Warren Court decision that established the "one person, one vote" standard for state districts, he again recalled the legacy of his father, Samuel A. Alito, who worked for three decades as the director of research for the New Jersey Legislature.

In his bedroom at night as a boy, Judge Alito told senators, he could hear his father clicking away at a manual calculator as he struggled to redraw the state's legislative districts with equal populations, people present for the conversations said....

As director of research for the New Jersey Legislature, the elder Mr. Alito became known as a human encyclopedia of state demographics and legislative history....

Although he was a registered Republican, Mr. Alito was obsessive about avoiding any perception of partisanship in his office. Many of his colleagues said he never revealed any hint of his own inclinations on political issues, aside from the Legislature's importance to the state....

The elder Mr. Alito's highest-profile role came when the Supreme Court's "reapportionment" cases in the 1960's established the principle that state legislative voting districts must be of equal population: one person, one vote. The redrawing of New Jersey's districts started 20 years of legal and legislative battles full of risks for incumbent lawmakers. The issue was also rife with racial tensions between urban minorities and the mostly white suburbs, and as director of research, Mr. Alito was in charge of drafting the maps.

"He was walking a fine line," said Jack Lacy, a former Town Council member in Hamilton Township, N.J., who was a friend of the Alitos. "And he not only survived it, he enhanced his reputation."

We're so accustomed to the plain, abstract fairness of the "one person, one vote" standard that we may assume only a bigot would oppose it. But the story of the elder Alito struggling to fit the abstraction to the real world ought to make us want to moderate that assumption.

It's worth going back and reading or rereading the reasons Justice Frankfurter gave for opposing judicial reapportionment, back in 1962:

Apportionment, by its character, is a subject of extraordinary complexity, involving -- even after the fundamental theoretical issues concerning what is to be represented in a representative legislature have been fought out or compromised -- considerations of geography, demography, electoral convenience, economic and social cohesions or divergencies among particular local groups, communications, the practical effects of political institutions like the lobby and the city machine, ancient traditions and ties of settled usage, respect for proven incumbents of long experience and senior status, mathematical mechanics, censuses compiling relevant data, and a host of others. Legislative responses throughout the country to the reapportionment demands of the 1960 Census have glaringly confirmed that these are not factors that lend themselves to evaluations of a nature that are the staple of judicial determinations or for which judges are equipped to adjudicate by legal training or experience or native wit. And this is the more so true because, in every strand of this complicated, intricate web of values meet the contending forces of partisan politics. The practical significance of apportionment is that the next election results may differ because of it. Apportionment battles are overwhelmingly party or intra-party contests. It will add a virulent source of friction and tension in federal-state relations to embroil the federal judiciary in them.