268
Opinion of the Court
sentative to elect their Representatives from single-member districts, rather than from multimember districts or the State at large. Section 2a(c), however, requires multimember districts or at-large elections in certain situations; and with particular relevance to the present cases, in which Mississippi, by reason of the 2000 census, lost a congressional seat, § 2a(c)(5) requires at-large elections. Cross-appellants would reconcile the two provisions by interpreting the introductory phrase of § 2a(c) ("Until a State is redistricted in the manner provided by the law thereof after any apportionment") and the phrase "established by law" in § 2c to refer exclusively to legislative redistricting—so that § 2c tells the legislatures what to do (single-member districting) and § 2a(c) provides what will happen absent legislative action— in the present cases, the mandating of at-large elections.
The problem with this reconciliation of the provisions is that the limited role it assigns to § 2c (governing legislative apportionment but not judicial apportionment) is contradicted both by the historical context of § 2c's enactment and by the consistent understanding of all courts in the almost 40 years since that enactment. When Congress adopted § 2c in 1967, the immediate issue was precisely the involvement of the courts in fashioning electoral plans. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had recently been enacted, assigning to the federal courts jurisdiction to involve themselves in elections. See 79 Stat. 439 (as amended and codified at 42 U. S. C. § 1973 et seq.). Even more significant, our decisions in Baker v. Carr, 369 U. S. 186 (1962), Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U. S. 1 (1964), and Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U. S. 533 (1964), had ushered in a new era in which federal courts were overseeing efforts by badly malapportioned States to conform their congressional electoral districts to the constitutionally required one-person, one-vote standards. In a world in which the role of federal courts in redistricting disputes had been transformed from spectating, see Colegrove v. Green, 328 U. S. 549 (1946) (opinion of Frankfurter, J.), to directing,
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