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Supreme Court Jurisprudence
Although the Supreme Court has not needed to directly address the subject of recall of Members of Congress, other judicial decisions indicate that the right to remove a Member of Congress before the expiration of his or her constitutionally established term of office is one which resides within each house of Congress as expressly delegated in the expulsion clause of the United States Constitution, and not in the entire Congress as a whole (through the adoption of legislation), nor in the state legislatures through the enactment of recall provisions. In Burton v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of federal law which on its face purported to make one convicted of bribery “ineligible” to be a United States Senator, could not act as a forfeiture of a Senator’s office, since the only way to remove a Member under the Constitution was by the Senate exercising its authority over its own Members: "The seat into which he was originally inducted as a Senator from Kansas could only become vacant by his death, or by expiration of his term of office, or by some direct action on the part of the Senate in the exercise of its constitutional powers."

The concept that the states do not, individually, possess the authority to change the terms or qualifications for federal officers agreed upon by the states in the United States Constitution, has been confirmed by the Supreme Court in modern case law. The Supreme Court found in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, that the authority of the individual states over the elections of federal officials under Article I, Section 4, clause 1, is not a broad authority for an individual state to substantively change the qualifications, length, or number of terms of federal officials established within the United States Constitution. The Court in U.S. Terms Limits, Inc. noted that the states do retain significant sovereign authority in many areas, but that the states transferred and delegated certain powers and authority to the national government within the instrument creating that entity, the Constitution. With respect to powers in relation to the federal, national government, and any powers deriving exclusively from and because of the existence of that national government, the states must look to the United States Constitution for grants or delegation of authority to them.

Even the dissenting opinion in the U.S. Term Limits case, which would have found a “reserved” power of the individual states with respect to term limits and additional “qualifications” of Members of Congress, distinguished such arguable authority regarding the “selection of Members” from any authority of a state to affect the term of a Member of Congress once a Member is sworn and seated in the United States Congress. As explained in Justice Thomas’ dissent, an individual state does not possess the authority to effectuate a recall to cut short the Rh