Franklin v. Massachusetts

The APA permits review only of final agency action. The Secretary’s report to the President did not itself give any State an entitlement to a specified number of Representatives or directly alter the apportionment. That legal consequence followed only when the President transmitted the population figures and apportionment calculation to Congress under 2 U.S.C. § 2a.

The Court treated the Secretary’s report as nonfinal because the census figures could still be corrected and because nothing in the statutory scheme expressly barred the President from directing further work on the census before submitting the final apportionment statement. Until the President acted, the relevant census figures remained a moving target for purposes of reapportionment.

Although the APA does not expressly exclude the President from its definition of “agency,” the Court would not infer that Congress meant to subject the President’s official statutory duties to APA review merely from silence. Separation-of-powers concerns required a clear statement from Congress. The President’s actions may be challenged as unconstitutional, but they are not reviewable as an abuse of discretion under the APA.

The plaintiffs established causation as to the decision to allocate overseas employees at all: the record showed that Massachusetts would have retained an additional House seat if those employees had been excluded from State population totals. But they did not show that Massachusetts would have retained that seat if the Bureau had used a different, supposedly more accurate source of State-affiliation data. They therefore lacked standing to challenge the particular data source.

The plurality did not decide whether a federal court may directly enjoin the President in the performance of official duties. Instead, it held that a declaratory judgment against the Secretary could redress the injury. The Secretary had a concrete interest in defending census policy, and the Court assumed that the President and other government officials would likely follow an authoritative judicial interpretation of the relevant constitutional and statutory rules even if they were not directly bound by an injunction.

Justice Scalia disagreed with this redressability analysis. In his view, relief depended on discretionary action by the President—followed by action from the House Clerk—and a court cannot assume that a coordinate constitutional officer will act on a subordinate official’s revised recommendation or on the court’s legal reasoning.

The Court read the constitutional phrase “in each State” in light of the longstanding census concept of “usual residence.” That concept has never meant mere physical presence on census day. From the first census onward, persons temporarily absent from their usual homes were counted where they ordinarily resided.

History supported a flexible understanding of residence. The first census statute counted persons who were temporarily absent at their usual place of residence; President Washington was counted in Virginia despite extensive travel; and the constitutional term “inhabitant” had been understood to include persons absent for considerable periods on public or private business. The census has likewise counted certain students, institutionalized persons, and Members of Congress according to enduring connections rather than current physical location.

The Secretary reasonably concluded that many overseas federal employees, especially military personnel on temporary assignments, retained ties to States in the United States and could be included in those States’ population totals. This judgment was consonant with the Constitution, though not compelled by it. Excluding those persons altogether would not necessarily produce more equal representation; if they properly belonged to a State, exclusion would dilute the voting weight of that State’s residents.