510
Scalia, J., dissenting
stitutionally permissible, the Court has opened the door, and we will be continually called to judge whether one form of estimation is more acceptable than another.13
* * *
After much debate and faced with a long history of political manipulation, the Framers decided to make the taking of an "actual Enumeration" a constitutional requirement. While other nations had attempted population counts, none had made the count itself an important method of maintaining democracy by mandating it through a founding document. As a leading French statistician noted: "The United States presents in its history a phenomenon that has no parallel—that of a people who initiated the statistics of their country on the very day that they formed their government, and who regulated, in the same instrument, the census of their citizens, their civil and political rights, and the destiny of their people." Alterman 164. Well familiar with methods of estimation, the Framers chose to make an "actual Enumeration" part of our constitutional structure. Today, the Court undermines their decision, leaving the basis of our representative government vulnerable to political manipulation.
For the reasons stated above, I respectfully dissent from Part IV of the Court's opinion and would reverse the judgment of the District Court.
Justice Scalia, dissenting.
For the reasons I set forth in my opinion in Franklin v. Massachusetts, 505 U. S. 788, 823-829 (1992) (concurring in part and concurring in judgment)—and for an additional one brought forth in the briefing and argument of the present
13 See House of Representatives, 525 U. S., at 349 (Scalia, J., concurring in part) ("The prospect of this Court's reviewing estimation techniques in the future, to determine which of them so obviously creates a distortion that it cannot be allowed, is not a happy one").
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