Page:Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n.pdf/33

Rh Shiel, H. R. Misc. Doc. No. 57, at 349–352 (concluding that Oregon’s Constitution prevailed over any conflicting legislative measure setting the date for a congressional election).

, in dissent, maintains that, under the Elections Clause, the state legislature can trump any initiative-introduced constitutional provision regulating federal elections. He extracts support for this position from Baldwin v. Trowbridge, 2 Bartlett Contested Election Cases, H. R. Misc. Doc. No. 152, 41st Cong., 2d Sess., 46–47 (1866). See post, at 15–16. There, Michigan voters had amended the State Constitution to require votes to be cast within a resident’s township or ward. The Michigan Leg­islature, however, passed a law permitting soldiers to vote in other locations. One candidate would win if the State Constitution’s requirement controlled; his opponent would prevail under the Michigan Legislature’s prescription. The House Elections Committee, in a divided vote, ruled that, under the Elections Clause, the Michigan Legisla­ture had the paramount power.

As the minority report in Baldwin pointed out, however, the Supreme Court of Michigan had reached the opposite conclusion, holding, as courts generally do, that state legislation in direct conflict with the State’s constitution is void. Baldwin, H. R. Misc. Doc. No. 152, at 50. The Baldwin majority’s ruling, furthermore, appears in ten­sion with the Election Committee’s unanimous decision in Shiel just five years earlier. (The Committee, we repeat, “ha[d] no doubt that the constitution of the State ha[d] fixed, beyond the control of the legislature, the time for holding [a congressional] election.” Shiel, H. R. Misc. Doc. No. 57, at 351.) Finally, it was perhaps not entirely accidental that the candidate the Committee declared winner in Baldwin belonged to the same political party as all but one member of the House Committee majority responsible for the decision. See U. S. House of Representatives