Obama Citizenship

Candidate Qualification: SCOTUS Ruled No to Additional State Qualifications

By Phil

I happened to find the following comment from “Sola Veritas” (do a search on the page to find it; #32) at FreeRepublic.com:

Also, a state cannot impose additional requirements on elections to federal offices–which is why Congressional term limits can only come from Congress (fat chance). In U.S. TERM LIMITS, INC. v. THORNTON(1995) the Supreme Court ruled (in the usual 5-4 split, with Kennedy in the majority) that

“. . . the Constitution prohibits States from imposing congressional qualifications additional to those specifically enumerated in its text. Petitioners’ argument that States possess control over qualifications as part of the original powers reserved to them by the Tenth Amendment is rejected for two reasons. First, the power to add qualifications is not within the States’ pre-Tenth-Amendment “original powers,” but is a new right arising from the Constitution itself, and thus is not reserved. Second, even if the States possessed some original power in this area, it must be concluded that the Framers intended the Constitution to be the exclusive source of qualifications for Members of Congress, and that the Framers thereby “divested” States of any power to add qualifications.”Nor can the Court agree with petitioners’ related argument that (term limits are) a permissible exercise of state power under the Elections Clause, Art. I, 4, cl. 1, to regulate the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections.” A necessary consequence of that argument is that Congress itself would have the power under the Elections Clause to “make or alter” a measure such as (term limits), a result that is unfathomable under Powell v. McCormick. Moreover, petitioners’ broad construction is fundamentally inconsistent with the Framers’ view of the Elections Clause, which was intended to grant States authority to protect the integrity and regularity of the election process by regulating election procedures, see, e.g., Storer v. Brown, 415 U.S. 724, 730 , 733, not to provide them with license to impose substantive qualifications that would exclude classes of candidates from federal office.

While this case dealt with term limits, there really is no distinguishing facts that would allow a different decision regarding presidential primaries. The Constitution does not provide for state enforcement of the “natural-born citizen” clause, so any enforcement will have to come from Congress.

The law link is quite extensive, but doing a search on the page for the first few words of the first paragraph (as the quote quotes, above) will send you to the right area, including the SCOTUS’ opinion.

Per the commenter’s last paragraph, it would appear that if US Term Limits v. Thornton is any kind of precedent-setter for the eligibility issue, that would portend some very interesting consequences for Congress, per se, and could theoretically help to explain why SCOTUS has heretofore let all lower court rulings stand.

-Phil

Full post as published by The Right Side of Life on January 20, 2009 (boomark / email).