Petitioner
U.S. Term Limits, Inc.
Respondents
Ray Thornton, Winston Bryant, Bobbie Hill
Petitioner's Claim
That Amendment 73 to the Arkansas Constitution, which limited the terms of officials elected to office in the legislative branch of the federal government, does not violate the Qualifications Clause or any other part of the U.S. Constitution.
Chief Lawyers for Petitioner
George O. Jernigan, Jr., Richard F. Hatfield, Winston Bryant
Chief Lawyers for Respondents
Doyle L. Webb, Stephen Engstrom, Elizabeth J. Robben, Sherry P. Bartley
Justices for the Court
Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
Sandra Day O'Connor, William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
22 May 1995
Decision
That the "Term Limits Amendment" would erode the structure designed by the framers to form a `more perfect Union"; accordingly, the amendment was judged unconstitutional.
Significance
During the 1980s and 1990s, sentiment in favor of term limitations grew throughout the nation. Career politicians, according to the grass-roots organizerswho were attempting to sway public opinion, had a way of becoming complacentand unresponsive to their constituents; yet with the advantages given by theelectoral system to incumbents, they were more likely to be reelected than their challengers. The solution, it seemed, was to put a limit on the number of terms a senator or representative could serve. Short of a nationwide movement for a constitutional amendment, this aim could be achieved through state action.
Arkansas Rejects Career Politicians
The 1980s and 1990s saw a surge of enthusiasm for term limits. Around the country, citizens became aware of the fact that certain senators and representatives seemed to have become permanent fixtures Washington, D.C. With each yearof "serving" their states or districts, these politicians gained more powerand more influence, enjoyed greater advantages, and drifted further from theneeds of their constituents. The nature of the American political process wassuch that incumbents tended to win elections; therefore, the answer was to "throw the bums out"--the "bums" being the incumbents. This, at least, was theview of term-limits advocates, who urged that a cap be placed on the numberof terms an official elected to fill a position in the federal government could serve. According to the New Republic, U.S. Term Limits, a citizen'sgroup, sent out a "huge red, white and blue envelope" containing a letter that began,
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, some 23 states had term-limitation statutes in place. Most of these, like the Arkansas provision challenged in Thornton, addressed that sector of public life in which term-limits advocates held that the most change was needed: Congress. In the general elections of 3 November 1992--when,incidentally, the nation voted in Arkansas's Governor Bill Clinton as its president by a 43 percent plurality--Arkansas voters had an opportunity to decide on a proposed amendment to limit terms of senators and representatives. Thepreamble of Amendment 73 said in part, "The people of Arkansas find and declare that elected officials who remain in office too long became preoccupied with reelection and ignore their duties as representatives of the people." Amendment 73 had term-limit provisions for the state's executive and legislativebranches. Section 3, the portion challenged in Thornton was the provision for Congress. Specifically, section 3(a) limited representatives to no more than three terms, or six years; and 3(b) established the maximum length for senatorial service as two terms, or 12 years. The "self-executing" amendment would apply to all persons seeking election after 1 January, 1993.
Ten days after Arkansas voters approved Amendment 73, Bobbie Hill filed a complaint in the Circuit Court for Pulaski County, Arkansas. The suit named herself, the League of Women Voters, and other Arkansas "citizens, residents, taxpayers and registered voters" as plaintiffs. The suit named the governor (which was still Bill Clinton, now on his way to the White House), other state officials, and the Republican and Democratic parties of Arkansas as defendants.State Attorney General Winston Bryant intervened as a defendant in support of the amendment, along with U.S. Term Limits, Inc.
The circuit court ruled that Amendment 73 violated Article I of the U.S. Constitution. Contained in Article I is the Qualifications Clause, which the court held should constitute the entirety of the qualifications imposed on candidates for the Senate or the House. Article I, section 2, clause 2 states that"No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty-five years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, andwho shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen." In other words, as long as one was 25 years old or older, had been a citizen for seven years or more, and was a legal resident in the statewhere one chose to run for the House, one was eligible. The qualifications for the Senate in section 3, clause 3, imposed the same set of criteria--age, term of citizenship, and residence--though in different amounts. Section 3 states that "No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Ageof thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and whoshall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen." Beyond those three criteria, there were no constitutional restrictions on who could be a member of Congress.
The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the ruling of the lower court by a 5-2 vote. Writing for a plurality of three justices, Justice Robert L. Brown held that the amendment was unconstitutional because the states had no power to "change, add to, or diminish" the requirements in the Qualifications Clause. "The uniformity in qualifications mandated in Article I," he wrote, "provides the tenor and the fabric for representation in the Congress. Piecemeal restrictions by State would fly in the face of that order." Amendment 73 was not, asthe respondents claimed, "merely a ballot access amendment." This was a claimthey had tried to make based on its language, which stated than anyone who had served more than the maximum number of terms "shall not be eligible to have his/her name placed on the ballot . . . " "Its intent and effect," the state's high court held, was "to disqualify congressional incumbents from furtherservice." Two other justices on the Arkansas Supreme Court, however, questioned this ruling, with one of them pointing out that the Constitution nowhereprevents states from imposing additional qualifications for congressional service.
The Qualifications Clause and Other Prohibitions
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consolidate several related cases. Upon review it voted 5-4 to affirm the ruling of the lower court. Justice Stevens, forthe majority, wrote that section 3 of Amendment 73, the part pertaining to senators and representatives, did indeed violate the Constitution. Though Article I, section 5, clause 1 gave each House of Congress power to judge the "Qualifications of its own Members," it did not grant them authority to alter oradd to the qualifications already established in the Constitution. The Courthad established this in Powell v. McCormack (1969), which had sprungfrom attempts by the House to bar Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., from his seat following allegations of wrongdoing on his part in 1966. A reviewof its Powell decision convinced the Court in the present case that the constitutional qualifications for elective service could not be supplemented by Congress.
The Constitution similarly prohibits states from adding congressional qualifications, the Court ruled. The petitioners had argued that states had this authority under the Tenth Amendment, which reserves for them all powers not granted to the federal government, but the Court rejected this for two reasons. First, since the power to add qualifications did not exist in the Constitutionprior to the writing of the Tenth Amendment, it could not be considered a power "reserved" for the states. Second, it seemed fairly clear that the framers of the Constitution intended for that document, and not the states, to be the exclusive source of qualifications for prospective members of Congress. Other parts of the Constitution demonstrate this, as does the historical recordand commentary by various judges and justices. Further, to quote the Powell decision, the "fundamental principle of our representative democracy .. . [is] that the people should choose whom they please to govern them." Ifthe states were given free reign to add restrictions, this would result in a"patchwork . . . inconsistent with the framers' vision of a uniform NationalLegislature representing the people of the United States."
Thus, Justice Stevens wrote, a state term-limits measure was unconstitutional"when it has the likely effect of handicapping a class of candidates and hasthe sole purpose of creating additional qualifications indirectly." With regard to the petitioners' claim that it was a mere "ballot access amendment," the Court indicated that it hardly mattered what they called it: the amendmentwas "an indirect attempt to evade . . . the Qualifications Clauses' requirements and trivialize[d] the basic democratic principles underlying those Clauses." Nor did the Court go along with the claim that Amendment 73 was a measure granted to the state by the Elections Clause in Article I, section 4, clause 1, which gives states the power to regulate "Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections." This Clause, the Court held, was put in place "to protect the integrity and regularity of the election process . . . not to provide [states] with license to impose substantive qualifications that would exclude classes of candidates from federal office."
The Court addressed the question of how citizens could hope to impose term limits if Amendment 73 was unconstitutional in the conclusion of its ruling, when it held that "State imposition of term limits for congressional service would effect such a fundamental change in the constitutional framework that itmust come through a constitutional amendment properly passed under the procedures set forth in Article V [of the Constitution]." Without such an amendment, which would apply to the nation as a whole, the use of term limits by one state on its own "would erode the structure designed by the framers to form a`more perfect Union'."
Justice Kennedy issued a concurring opinion, in which he addressed objectionsraised by the dissent and "explain[ed] why [their] course of argumentation runs counter to fundamental principles of federalism." The importance of the federalist system had been presented in several parts of the The Federalist, he wrote, and the necessity of protecting that system's power from encroachment by the states had been recognized even before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Then, following the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and its subsequent challenge in the Slaughternouse Cases (1873), the Court had reinforced the holding that "rights stem from sources other than the States."
Dissent: An Ironic Ruling
Justice Thomas, in an opinion joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, and Justice Scalia, dissented. "It is ironic," he began, "that the Court bases today's decision on the right of the people `to choose whom they please to govern them'" when its ruling indicated that neither the people of Arkansas nor their legislature had a right to make such a choice. "Nothing in theConstitution," Justice Thomas wrote,
Beginning an opinion which stretched to more than 87 pages without footnotes--slightly longer than that of the majority opinion and Kennedy's concurrence--Justice Thomas addressed "first principles" since "the majority fundamentally misunderstands the notion of `reserved' powers." Because the Constitution is based on the principle that all powers stem from the people, Justice Thomasheld, it was incumbent on the Court to point to a place in that document which would have expressly forbidden the people of Arkansas from voting to enactAmendment 73. Justice Thomas then took apart the majority's Tenth Amendmentargument, which it had made by reference to cases as widely separated in timeas McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985). "Despite the majority's citation of Garcia and McCulloch," Justice Thomas wrote, "the only true support for its view of the Tenth Amendment comes from Joseph Story's 1833 treatise onconstitutional law." As valuable as Story's insights were in Commentarieson the Constitution of the United States, Justice Thomas wrote, Story had not been one of the framers.
Having addressed the Tenth Amendment argument from a number of perspectives,Justice Thomas wrote of Amendment 73, "Whatever one might think of the wisdomof this arrangement, we may not override the decision of the people of Arkansas unless something in the Federal Constitution deprives them of the power to enact such measures." The Qualifications Clause, he held, was not that "something," and he addressed this topic in a lengthy argument. He then turned tothe historical record, finding that "[t]o the extent that the records from the Philadelphia [constitutional] Convention itself shed light on this case, they tend to hurt the majority's position." As for the majority's claim that the absence of discussion of term limits during the ratification period provesthe framers' intention, Thomas wrote that this argument " . . . cuts both ways. The recorded ratification debates also contain no affirmative statement that the states cannot supplement the constitutional qualifications." JusticeThomas then addressed various other historical items and assessed the logicalimplications of the Court's ruling. Drawing to a conclusion, he returned tohis starting-point: the absurdity of a law that prevented the people from having electoral choice on the basis that they must have electoral choice. "Either the majority's holding is wrong," Justice Thomas wrote, "and Amendment 73does not violate the Qualifications Clauses, or . . . the electoral system that exists without Amendment 73 is no less unconstitutional than the electoralsystem that exists with Amendment 73."
Impact
Just as the Court's decision in Thornton was split more or less between the liberals who opposed term limits and the conservatives who supported them, the reaction in political journals was on similar lines. Jeffrey Rosen inthe liberal New Republic, writing before the Court reviewed the case,suggested that "The justices will be on solid ground if they strike down term limits on the theory that no temporary majority--in a federal or state legislature or state plebiscite--should be able to add qualifications for officethat thwart the will of the voters in each district." As it turned out, thiswas close to what the majority decided. The conservative National Review, in a review of the case after the decision, praised Justice Thomas's "long, dispassionate, lucid, and thoroughly persuasive" dissenting opinion. Thomas' dissent, wrote Lino A. Graglia was "a call to revolution: for the Court not to invalidate policy choices on which the Constitution is silent would be for the Court hardly to invalidate any policy choices at all and to permit policy-making on basic social issues to revert to the control of the people." Even the radical Lenora Fulani, perennial candidate for the presidency, decriedthe Thornton ruling, calling it an "indicat[ion] to many Americans that the time has come to impose term limits on the Supreme Court, too." Yet the Republican Revolution of the 1994 elections, which brought about Republicanmajorities in both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, provedthat sweeping change was possible without term limits. On 29 March 1995, thenew House of Representatives voted on a term limits amendment. The initiativelost by a vote of 227 to 204.
Related Cases
U.S. Term Limits, Inc.
Respondents
Ray Thornton, Winston Bryant, Bobbie Hill
Petitioner's Claim
That Amendment 73 to the Arkansas Constitution, which limited the terms of officials elected to office in the legislative branch of the federal government, does not violate the Qualifications Clause or any other part of the U.S. Constitution.
Chief Lawyers for Petitioner
George O. Jernigan, Jr., Richard F. Hatfield, Winston Bryant
Chief Lawyers for Respondents
Doyle L. Webb, Stephen Engstrom, Elizabeth J. Robben, Sherry P. Bartley
Justices for the Court
Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, John Paul Stevens (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
Sandra Day O'Connor, William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
22 May 1995
Decision
That the "Term Limits Amendment" would erode the structure designed by the framers to form a `more perfect Union"; accordingly, the amendment was judged unconstitutional.
Significance
During the 1980s and 1990s, sentiment in favor of term limitations grew throughout the nation. Career politicians, according to the grass-roots organizerswho were attempting to sway public opinion, had a way of becoming complacentand unresponsive to their constituents; yet with the advantages given by theelectoral system to incumbents, they were more likely to be reelected than their challengers. The solution, it seemed, was to put a limit on the number of terms a senator or representative could serve. Short of a nationwide movement for a constitutional amendment, this aim could be achieved through state action.
Arkansas Rejects Career Politicians
The 1980s and 1990s saw a surge of enthusiasm for term limits. Around the country, citizens became aware of the fact that certain senators and representatives seemed to have become permanent fixtures Washington, D.C. With each yearof "serving" their states or districts, these politicians gained more powerand more influence, enjoyed greater advantages, and drifted further from theneeds of their constituents. The nature of the American political process wassuch that incumbents tended to win elections; therefore, the answer was to "throw the bums out"--the "bums" being the incumbents. This, at least, was theview of term-limits advocates, who urged that a cap be placed on the numberof terms an official elected to fill a position in the federal government could serve. According to the New Republic, U.S. Term Limits, a citizen'sgroup, sent out a "huge red, white and blue envelope" containing a letter that began,
Fellow American, most members of Congress view their job as guaranteed for life. The average rate [of reelection] for incumbent congressmen over the last decade has been almost 98 percent. Why? Because it is almost impossible for a challenger to come anywhere near matching an incumbent's war chest! [i.e., their election budget] . . . term limits is the greatestmovement of the twentieth century!
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, some 23 states had term-limitation statutes in place. Most of these, like the Arkansas provision challenged in Thornton, addressed that sector of public life in which term-limits advocates held that the most change was needed: Congress. In the general elections of 3 November 1992--when,incidentally, the nation voted in Arkansas's Governor Bill Clinton as its president by a 43 percent plurality--Arkansas voters had an opportunity to decide on a proposed amendment to limit terms of senators and representatives. Thepreamble of Amendment 73 said in part, "The people of Arkansas find and declare that elected officials who remain in office too long became preoccupied with reelection and ignore their duties as representatives of the people." Amendment 73 had term-limit provisions for the state's executive and legislativebranches. Section 3, the portion challenged in Thornton was the provision for Congress. Specifically, section 3(a) limited representatives to no more than three terms, or six years; and 3(b) established the maximum length for senatorial service as two terms, or 12 years. The "self-executing" amendment would apply to all persons seeking election after 1 January, 1993.
Ten days after Arkansas voters approved Amendment 73, Bobbie Hill filed a complaint in the Circuit Court for Pulaski County, Arkansas. The suit named herself, the League of Women Voters, and other Arkansas "citizens, residents, taxpayers and registered voters" as plaintiffs. The suit named the governor (which was still Bill Clinton, now on his way to the White House), other state officials, and the Republican and Democratic parties of Arkansas as defendants.State Attorney General Winston Bryant intervened as a defendant in support of the amendment, along with U.S. Term Limits, Inc.
The circuit court ruled that Amendment 73 violated Article I of the U.S. Constitution. Contained in Article I is the Qualifications Clause, which the court held should constitute the entirety of the qualifications imposed on candidates for the Senate or the House. Article I, section 2, clause 2 states that"No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty-five years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, andwho shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen." In other words, as long as one was 25 years old or older, had been a citizen for seven years or more, and was a legal resident in the statewhere one chose to run for the House, one was eligible. The qualifications for the Senate in section 3, clause 3, imposed the same set of criteria--age, term of citizenship, and residence--though in different amounts. Section 3 states that "No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Ageof thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and whoshall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen." Beyond those three criteria, there were no constitutional restrictions on who could be a member of Congress.
The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the ruling of the lower court by a 5-2 vote. Writing for a plurality of three justices, Justice Robert L. Brown held that the amendment was unconstitutional because the states had no power to "change, add to, or diminish" the requirements in the Qualifications Clause. "The uniformity in qualifications mandated in Article I," he wrote, "provides the tenor and the fabric for representation in the Congress. Piecemeal restrictions by State would fly in the face of that order." Amendment 73 was not, asthe respondents claimed, "merely a ballot access amendment." This was a claimthey had tried to make based on its language, which stated than anyone who had served more than the maximum number of terms "shall not be eligible to have his/her name placed on the ballot . . . " "Its intent and effect," the state's high court held, was "to disqualify congressional incumbents from furtherservice." Two other justices on the Arkansas Supreme Court, however, questioned this ruling, with one of them pointing out that the Constitution nowhereprevents states from imposing additional qualifications for congressional service.
The Qualifications Clause and Other Prohibitions
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consolidate several related cases. Upon review it voted 5-4 to affirm the ruling of the lower court. Justice Stevens, forthe majority, wrote that section 3 of Amendment 73, the part pertaining to senators and representatives, did indeed violate the Constitution. Though Article I, section 5, clause 1 gave each House of Congress power to judge the "Qualifications of its own Members," it did not grant them authority to alter oradd to the qualifications already established in the Constitution. The Courthad established this in Powell v. McCormack (1969), which had sprungfrom attempts by the House to bar Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., from his seat following allegations of wrongdoing on his part in 1966. A reviewof its Powell decision convinced the Court in the present case that the constitutional qualifications for elective service could not be supplemented by Congress.
The Constitution similarly prohibits states from adding congressional qualifications, the Court ruled. The petitioners had argued that states had this authority under the Tenth Amendment, which reserves for them all powers not granted to the federal government, but the Court rejected this for two reasons. First, since the power to add qualifications did not exist in the Constitutionprior to the writing of the Tenth Amendment, it could not be considered a power "reserved" for the states. Second, it seemed fairly clear that the framers of the Constitution intended for that document, and not the states, to be the exclusive source of qualifications for prospective members of Congress. Other parts of the Constitution demonstrate this, as does the historical recordand commentary by various judges and justices. Further, to quote the Powell decision, the "fundamental principle of our representative democracy .. . [is] that the people should choose whom they please to govern them." Ifthe states were given free reign to add restrictions, this would result in a"patchwork . . . inconsistent with the framers' vision of a uniform NationalLegislature representing the people of the United States."
Thus, Justice Stevens wrote, a state term-limits measure was unconstitutional"when it has the likely effect of handicapping a class of candidates and hasthe sole purpose of creating additional qualifications indirectly." With regard to the petitioners' claim that it was a mere "ballot access amendment," the Court indicated that it hardly mattered what they called it: the amendmentwas "an indirect attempt to evade . . . the Qualifications Clauses' requirements and trivialize[d] the basic democratic principles underlying those Clauses." Nor did the Court go along with the claim that Amendment 73 was a measure granted to the state by the Elections Clause in Article I, section 4, clause 1, which gives states the power to regulate "Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections." This Clause, the Court held, was put in place "to protect the integrity and regularity of the election process . . . not to provide [states] with license to impose substantive qualifications that would exclude classes of candidates from federal office."
The Court addressed the question of how citizens could hope to impose term limits if Amendment 73 was unconstitutional in the conclusion of its ruling, when it held that "State imposition of term limits for congressional service would effect such a fundamental change in the constitutional framework that itmust come through a constitutional amendment properly passed under the procedures set forth in Article V [of the Constitution]." Without such an amendment, which would apply to the nation as a whole, the use of term limits by one state on its own "would erode the structure designed by the framers to form a`more perfect Union'."
Justice Kennedy issued a concurring opinion, in which he addressed objectionsraised by the dissent and "explain[ed] why [their] course of argumentation runs counter to fundamental principles of federalism." The importance of the federalist system had been presented in several parts of the The Federalist, he wrote, and the necessity of protecting that system's power from encroachment by the states had been recognized even before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Then, following the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and its subsequent challenge in the Slaughternouse Cases (1873), the Court had reinforced the holding that "rights stem from sources other than the States."
Dissent: An Ironic Ruling
Justice Thomas, in an opinion joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O'Connor, and Justice Scalia, dissented. "It is ironic," he began, "that the Court bases today's decision on the right of the people `to choose whom they please to govern them'" when its ruling indicated that neither the people of Arkansas nor their legislature had a right to make such a choice. "Nothing in theConstitution," Justice Thomas wrote,
deprives the people of eachState of the power to prescribe eligibility requirements for candidates whoseek to represent them in Congress. The Constitution is simply silent on thisquestion. And where the Constitution is silent, it raises no bar to action by the States or the people.
Beginning an opinion which stretched to more than 87 pages without footnotes--slightly longer than that of the majority opinion and Kennedy's concurrence--Justice Thomas addressed "first principles" since "the majority fundamentally misunderstands the notion of `reserved' powers." Because the Constitution is based on the principle that all powers stem from the people, Justice Thomasheld, it was incumbent on the Court to point to a place in that document which would have expressly forbidden the people of Arkansas from voting to enactAmendment 73. Justice Thomas then took apart the majority's Tenth Amendmentargument, which it had made by reference to cases as widely separated in timeas McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985). "Despite the majority's citation of Garcia and McCulloch," Justice Thomas wrote, "the only true support for its view of the Tenth Amendment comes from Joseph Story's 1833 treatise onconstitutional law." As valuable as Story's insights were in Commentarieson the Constitution of the United States, Justice Thomas wrote, Story had not been one of the framers.
Having addressed the Tenth Amendment argument from a number of perspectives,Justice Thomas wrote of Amendment 73, "Whatever one might think of the wisdomof this arrangement, we may not override the decision of the people of Arkansas unless something in the Federal Constitution deprives them of the power to enact such measures." The Qualifications Clause, he held, was not that "something," and he addressed this topic in a lengthy argument. He then turned tothe historical record, finding that "[t]o the extent that the records from the Philadelphia [constitutional] Convention itself shed light on this case, they tend to hurt the majority's position." As for the majority's claim that the absence of discussion of term limits during the ratification period provesthe framers' intention, Thomas wrote that this argument " . . . cuts both ways. The recorded ratification debates also contain no affirmative statement that the states cannot supplement the constitutional qualifications." JusticeThomas then addressed various other historical items and assessed the logicalimplications of the Court's ruling. Drawing to a conclusion, he returned tohis starting-point: the absurdity of a law that prevented the people from having electoral choice on the basis that they must have electoral choice. "Either the majority's holding is wrong," Justice Thomas wrote, "and Amendment 73does not violate the Qualifications Clauses, or . . . the electoral system that exists without Amendment 73 is no less unconstitutional than the electoralsystem that exists with Amendment 73."
Impact
Just as the Court's decision in Thornton was split more or less between the liberals who opposed term limits and the conservatives who supported them, the reaction in political journals was on similar lines. Jeffrey Rosen inthe liberal New Republic, writing before the Court reviewed the case,suggested that "The justices will be on solid ground if they strike down term limits on the theory that no temporary majority--in a federal or state legislature or state plebiscite--should be able to add qualifications for officethat thwart the will of the voters in each district." As it turned out, thiswas close to what the majority decided. The conservative National Review, in a review of the case after the decision, praised Justice Thomas's "long, dispassionate, lucid, and thoroughly persuasive" dissenting opinion. Thomas' dissent, wrote Lino A. Graglia was "a call to revolution: for the Court not to invalidate policy choices on which the Constitution is silent would be for the Court hardly to invalidate any policy choices at all and to permit policy-making on basic social issues to revert to the control of the people." Even the radical Lenora Fulani, perennial candidate for the presidency, decriedthe Thornton ruling, calling it an "indicat[ion] to many Americans that the time has come to impose term limits on the Supreme Court, too." Yet the Republican Revolution of the 1994 elections, which brought about Republicanmajorities in both Houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, provedthat sweeping change was possible without term limits. On 29 March 1995, thenew House of Representatives voted on a term limits amendment. The initiativelost by a vote of 227 to 204.
Related Cases
- McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316 (1819).
- Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969).
- Bullock v. Carter, 405 U.S. 134 (1972).
- FERC v. Mississippi, 456 U.S. 742 (1982).
- Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528(1985).
- United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995).
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