Page:Recall of Legislators and the Removal of Members of Congress from Office.pdf/12

 "The federal offices at stake “aris[e] from the Constitution itself.” … Because any state authority to regulate election to those offices could not precede their very creation by the Constitution, such power “had to be delegated to, rather than reserved by, the States.”"

Members of Congress are clearly federal officials, not state officers, and owe their existence and authority solely to the federal Constitution. As explained by the Supreme Court: "In that National Government, representatives owe primary allegiance not to the people of a State, but to the people of the Nation. As Justice Story observed, each Member of Congress is ‘an officer of the union, deriving his powers and qualifications from the constitution, and neither created by, dependent upon, not controllable by, the states ….’ 1 Story §627. Representatives and Senators are as much officers of the entire union as is the President."

As noted in the previous section, even the dissenting Justices in the U.S. Term Limits case, who would have found under the Tenth Amendment a “reserved” authority in the states with respect to the “qualifications” of Members of Congress, explicitly conceded that no such authority exists in the states to “recall, which the Framers denied to the States when they specified the terms of Members of Congress.”

The United States Constitution establishes the exclusive qualifications for congressional office, sets the specific length of terms for Members of the House and for Senators, and expressly delegates to each house of Congress the authority to judge the elections and qualifications of, and to discipline and to remove its own Members. These provisions of the United States Constitution, with respect to federal officials, have supremacy over state laws and provisions, and state laws in conflict with such constitutional provisions have been found by the courts in the past to be invalid. Although the language of some state recall laws might be broad enough to include Members of Congress, or might even explicitly include federal officers, it does not appear under existing precedents and standards expressed by the Supreme Court that such statutes could be effective in altering the constitutionally established term of office of a Member of the United States Congress by allowing a Member to be removed from office through a state “recall” procedure. Rh