Cite as: 514 U. S. 779 (1995)
Thomas, J., dissenting
Edmund Randolph, the chairman of the Committee, with emendations in the hand of John Rutledge, another member of the Committee. As Professor Farrand noted, "[e]ach item in this document . . . is either checked off or crossed out, showing that it was used in the preparation of subsequent drafts." 2 id., at 137, n. 6; see also W. Meigs, The Growth of the Constitution in the Federal Convention of 1787, pp. I-IX (1900) (providing a facsimile of the document).
The document is an extensive outline of the Constitution. Its treatment of the National Legislature is divided into two parts, one for the "House of Delegates" and one for the Senate. The Qualifications Clause for the House of Delegates originally read as follows: "The qualifications of a delegate shall be the age of twenty five years at least. and citizenship: and any person possessing these qualifications may be elected except [blank space]." Id., at II (emphasis added). The drafter(s) of this language apparently contemplated that the Committee might want to insert some exceptions to the exclusivity provision. But rather than simply deleting the word "except"—as it might have done if it had decided to have no exceptions at all to the exclusivity provision—the Committee deleted the exclusivity provision itself. In the document that has come down to us, all the words after the colon are crossed out. Ibid.
The majority speculates that the exclusivity provision may have been deleted as superfluous. See ante, at 815-816, n. 27.19 But the same draft that contained the exclusivity language in the House Qualifications Clause contained no
19 The majority also argues that in any event, the views of the members of the Committee "tel[l] us little about the views of the Convention as a whole." Ante, at 815, n. 27. But our task is simply to determine whether at the time of the framing, the language of the Qualifications Clauses would have been commonly understood to contain an exclusivity provision. The surviving records suggest that the members of the Committee of Detail did not understand the final Qualifications Clauses to be exclusive, and the majority offers no reason to think that their understanding of the language was unusual for their time.
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