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Opinion of the Court
Today we renew our adherence to the principles expressed in Germano, which derive from the recognition that the Constitution leaves with the States primary responsibility for apportionment of their federal congressional and state legislative districts. See U. S. Const., Art. I, § 2. "We say once again what has been said on many occasions: reapportionment is primarily the duty and responsibility of the State through its legislature or other body, rather than of a federal court." Chapman v. Meier, 420 U. S. 1, 27 (1975). Absent evidence that these state branches will fail timely to perform that duty, a federal court must neither affirmatively obstruct state reapportionment nor permit federal litigation to be used to impede it.
Judged by these principles, the District Court's December injunction of state-court proceedings, vacated by this Court in January, was clear error. It seems to have been based upon the mistaken view that federal judges need defer only to the Minnesota Legislature and not at all to the State's courts. Thus, the January 20 deadline the District Court established was described as a deadline for the legislature, ignoring the possibility and legitimacy of state judicial redistricting. And the injunction itself treated the state court's provisional legislative redistricting plan as "interfering" in the reapportionment process. But the doctrine of Germano prefers both state branches to federal courts as agents of apportionment. The Minnesota Special Redistricting Panel's issuance of its plan (conditioned on the legislature's failure to enact a constitutionally acceptable plan in January), far from being a federally enjoinable "interference," was precisely the sort of state judicial supervision of redistricting we have encouraged. See Germano, 381 U. S., at 409 (citing cases).
Nor do the reasons offered by the District Court for its actions in December and February support departure from the Germano principles. It is true that the Emison plaintiffs alleged that the 1983 legislative districting scheme vio-
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