890
Thomas, J., dissenting
delegates presumably did not want state legislatures to be able to tell the Members of Congress from their State, "Vote against Bill A or we will slash your salary"; such a power would approximate a power of recall, which the Framers denied to the States when they specified the terms of Members of Congress. The Framers may well have thought that state power over salary, like state power to recall, would be inconsistent with the notion that Congress was a national legislature once it assembled. But state power over initial eligibility requirements does not raise the same concerns: It was perfectly coherent for the Framers to leave selection matters to the state level while providing for Members of Congress to draw a federal salary once they took office. Thus, the Compensation Clause seems wholly irrelevant; contrary to the majority's suggestion, see ante, at 811, n. 21, it does not address elections at all.
Second, the majority gives passing mention to the Elector-Qualifications Clause of Article I, § 2, which specifies that in each State, the voters in House elections "shall have the qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature." But the records of the Philadelphia Convention provide no evidence for the majority's assertion that the purpose of this Clause was "to prevent discrimination against federal electors." See ante, at 808.20
20 The majority inaccurately reports James Madison's explanation of the Elector-Qualifications Clause in The Federalist No. 52. Madison neither mentioned nor addressed the consequences of "allowing States to differentiate between the qualifications for state and federal electors." See ante, at 808. Instead, he addressed the problems that would have arisen if the Constitution had assigned control over the qualifications of voters in House elections to the state legislatures rather than to the people of each State. It was such an arrangement that, in Madison's view, "would have rendered too dependent on the State governments that branch of the federal government which ought to be dependent on the people alone." The Federalist No. 52, at 326; cf. ante, at 808. The Elector-Qualifications Clause avoided this problem because the various state constitutions con-
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