886
Thomas, J., dissenting
thing, the solidity of the evidence supporting Powell's view that Congress lacks the power to supplement the constitutional disqualifications merely highlights the weakness of the majority's evidence that the States and the people of the States also lack this power.
1
To the extent that the records from the Philadelphia Convention itself shed light on this case, they tend to hurt the majority's case. The only evidence that directly bears on the question now before the Court comes from the Committee of Detail, a five-member body that the Convention charged with the crucial task of drafting a Constitution to reflect the decisions that the Convention had reached during its first two months of work. A document that Max Farrand described as "[a]n early, perhaps the first, draft of the committee's work" survived among the papers of George Mason. 1 Farrand xxiii, n. 36. The draft is in the handwriting of
the qualifications of members to serve in parliament' and those qualifications were 'not occasional but fixed.' " 395 U. S., at 528 (quoting 16 Parliamentary History of England 589, 590 (1769)); see ante, at 790. The English rule seems of only marginal relevance: The pre-existing rule in America—that States could add qualifications for their representatives in Congress, see n. 3, supra, while Congress itself could not—is surely more important. But in any event, Powell did not claim that the English rule deemed parliamentary qualifications to be fixed in the country's (unwritten) constitution, beyond the reach of a properly enacted law. Instead, qualifications were "fixed" rather than "occasional" only in the sense that neither House of Parliament could "exclude members-elect for general misconduct not within standing qualifications." Powell, 395 U. S., at 528. The English rule, in other words, was simply that when sitting as the judge of its members' qualifications, each House of Parliament could do no more than administer the pre-existing laws that defined those qualifications, see id., at 529, for "one House of Parliament cannot create a disability unknown to the law." T. Plucknett, Taswell-Langmead's English Constitutional History 585 (11th ed. 1960); cf. INS v. Chadha, 462 U. S. 919 (1983). This history was relevant to Powell (which dealt with the grounds on which one House of Congress could exclude a Member-elect), but it is not relevant to this case.
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