Last night I got a phone call. On the other end of the line was a recorded message saying that one of the people running for the seat in the US House doesn’t live in this district. It also said that it wasn’t paid for by the opposing candidate, but rather by that candidate’s party’s national congressional campaign committee. It seemed to be some kind of recorded message auto-dialer (which I’ve learned from the Simpsons is illegal).
My questions are:
Is it illegal to call up voters using some kind of device like this?
If so, to whom do I report it?
Is it a requirement for a person to live in a congressional district in order to run for that seat?
I cannot answer questions 1 or 2; they depend on your state’s laws plus whatever safeguards are in place federally. But the answer to 3 is no, there’s no requirement. It’s customary and virtually universal for a member of Congress to live within the district he represents, but the Constitutional requirements, which are binding, are that he must be 25 years of age, seven years a U.S. citizen, and at the time of election an inhabitant of the state from which he is elected.
Political messages are offered an extreme amount of respect and leeway by virtue of the First Amendment. The Do-Not-Call laws specifically exclude political messages from prosecution.
Just wondering, but what’s the theory behind this? It seems counter-intuitive that you could have all of your state’s Congressmen living in one city. It seems like a person representing a certain congressional district should live or work in that district.
That’s what the Constitution reads – if the Federalist Papers addressed the reason, beyond the idea that a representative from a state should live in that state, I’m not aware of it.
But the law makes sense in one way – while it’s possible to effectively gerrymander a politican out of office by shifting the district he represents so it’s topheavy with members of the opposite party, you can’t simply force him out of office by redistricting so that his legal residence is 0.25 miles outside the district he represents, and then requiring him to resign for not living in his district.
Further, it makes sense from another standpoint: say you’ve lived in South Bend, IN for years and been represented by a congressman from the neighboring city of Elkhart (example picked purely at random; I know nothing of NE Indiana politics) – and suddenly the last census makes it necessary to split the district between the two cities – with the majority of his old constituents in the South Bend district. There’s nothing stopping him from running for re-election in the district with most of his constituents (and support), and presumably moving into his (new) district during the campaign.
If residence in the congressional district is not required it certainly is traditional. A fair number of voters might be inclined not to vote for a candidate who did not live in the district.
Sometimes, just maybe, that little fact might be of political use. In my state one out of five Congressmen is a Democrat and one is a liberal/moderate Republican – the other three are take-no-prisoners, case hardened and hide bound followers of the RNC. One of them even thinks that the RNC is run by a bunch of pantywaist quasi-liberals. Just by chance the GOP dominated legislature enacted a reapportionment plan that took both the Democrat’s home county and the moderate/liberal Republican’s home county and put them in one of the hard case’s districts. Both chose to move and both have been accused of being carpetbaggers.
I don’t believe the Constitution makes any mention of districts. Each state has always allocated its congressional seats by assigning each seat to the electors in a particular region, but there’s no requirement that this system be used. The Constitution only requires elections be democratic.
For instance, a state with five congressional seats could just have one statewide election in which the top five candidates won terms in Congress. Or an intermediate system might be used where several districts each elected several congressmen at large. Since the rise of political parties was not foreseen, other ideas might have seemed more reasonable.