874
Thomas, J., dissenting
"Had the Constitution been silent, nobody can doubt but that the right to prescribe all the qualifications and disqualifications of those they would send to represent them, would have belonged to the State. So also the Constitution might have prescribed the whole, and excluded all others. It seems to have preferred the middle way. It has exercised the power in part, by declaring some disqualifications . . . . But it does not declare, itself, that the member shall not be a lunatic, a pauper, a convict of treason, of murder, of felony, or other infamous crime, or a non-resident of his district; nor does it prohibit to the State the power of declaring these, or any other disqualifications which its particular circumstances may call for; and these may be different in different States. Of course, then, by the tenth amendment, the power is reserved to the State." Letter to Joseph C. Cabell (Jan. 31, 1814), in 14 Writings of Thomas Jefferson 82-83 (A. Lipscomb ed. 1904).14
B
Although the Qualifications Clauses neither state nor imply the prohibition that it finds in them, the majority infers from the Framers' "democratic principles" that the Clauses must have been generally understood to preclude the people of the States and their state legislatures from prescribing any additional qualifications for their representatives in Congress. But the majority's evidence on this point establishes only two more modest propositions: (1) the Framers did not want the Federal Constitution itself to impose a
14 The majority notes Jefferson's concession that state power to supplement the Qualifications Clauses was "one of the doubtful questions on which honest men may differ with the purest of motives." See ante, at 813, n. 24; 14 Writings of Thomas Jefferson 83 (A. Lipscomb ed. 1904). But while Jefferson cautioned against impugning the motives of people who might disagree with his position, his use of the phrase "[o]f course" suggests that he himself did not entertain serious doubts of its correctness.
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