1577. CONGRESS, Qualifications of Members.—
You ask my opinion on the question,
whether the States can add any qualifications
to those which the Constitution has
prescribed for their members of Congress? It
is a question I had never before reflected on;
yet had taken up an off-hand opinion, agreeing
with your first, that they could not; that
to add new qualifications to those of the Constitution,
would be as much an alteration as
to detract from them. And so I think the
House of Representatives decided in some
case; I believe that of a member from Baltimore.
But your letter having induced me
to look into the Constitution, and to consider
the question a little, I am again in your predicament,
of doubting the correctness of my
first opinion. Had the Constitution been silent,
nobody can doubt but that the right to
prescribe all the qualifications and disqualifications
of those they would send to represent
them, would have belonged to the State.
So also the Constitution might have prescribed
the whole, and excluded all others.
It seems to have preferred the middle way.
It has exercised the power in part, by declaring
some disqualifications, to wit, those of
not being twenty-five years of age, of not having
been a citizen seven years, and of not being
an inhabitant of the State at the time of
election. But it does not declare, itself, that
the member shall not be a lunatic, a paupen
a convict of treason, of murder, of felony, or
other infamous crime, or a non-resident of
his district; nor does it prohibit to the State
the power of declaring these, or any other
disqualifications which its particular circumstances
may call for; and these may be
different in different States. Of course,
then, by the tenth amendment, the power is
reserved to the State. If, wherever the Constitution
assumes a single power out of many
which belong to the same subject, we should
consider it as assuming the whole, it would
vest the General Government with a mass of
power never contemplated. On the contrary,
the assumption of particular powers seems an
exclusion of all not assumed. This reasoning
appears to me to be sound; but, on so recent a
change of view, caution requires us not to be
too confident, and that we admit this to be one
of the doubtful questions on which honest men
may differ with the purest motives; and the
more readily, as we find we have differed from
ourselves on it.—
To Joseph C. Cabell. Washington ed. vi, 309.
Ford ed., ix, 451.
(M.
1814)
