U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton

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, for the 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 or add to the qualifications already established in the Constitution. The Court had established this in Powell v. McCormack (1969), which had sprung from attempts by the House to bar Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., from his seat following allegations of wrongdoing on his part in 1966. A review of 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 Constitution prior 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 record and 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." If the states were given free reign to add restrictions, this would result in a "patchwork . . . inconsistent with the framers' vision of a uniform National Legislature 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 has the 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 amendment was "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 it must 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 objections raised 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."