Page:Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Comm’n.pdf/53

14 the majority acknowledges, the distinction between “the Legislature” and the people “occasioned no debate.” Ante, at 27. That is because everybody understood what “the Legislature” meant.

The majority contends that its counterintuitive reading of “the Legislature” is necessary to advance the “animating principle” of popular sovereignty. Ante, at 24. But the ratification of the Constitution was the ultimate act of popular sovereignty, and the people who ratified the Elections Clause did so knowing that it assigned authority to “the Legislature” as a representative body. The Elections Clause was not, as the majority suggests, an all-purpose “safeguard against manipulation of electoral rules by politicians.” Ante, at 26. Like most provisions of the Constitution, the Elections Clause reflected a compromise—a pragmatic recognition that the grand project of forging a Union required everyone to accept some things they did not like. See The Federalist No. 59, at 364 (describing the power allocated to state legislatures as “an evil which could not have been avoided”). This Court has no power to upset such a compromise simply because we now think that it should have been struck differently. As we explained almost a century ago, “[t]he framers of the Constitution might have adopted a different method,” but it “is not the function of courts … to alter the method which the Constitution has fixed.” Hawke, 253 U. S., at 227.

In addition to text, structure, and history, several precedents interpreting the Elections Clause further reinforce that “the Legislature” refers to a representative body.

The first precedent comes not from this Court, but from Congress. Acting under its authority to serve as “the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members,” Art. I, §5, cl. 1, the House of