I was reading an article about Bob Barr and saw this:
But this triggered something from the dark recesses of my memory - Representatives do not need to live in the district they represent.
I know from my own state’s effort to term limit Congresscritters that SCOTUS has ruled that states cannot change the requirements for Federal offices. So how can placing two Reps in the same district (I assume residence-wise) force them to run against each other?
Would you vote for a representative who didn’t live in your district?
It doesn’t force them to run against each other as a legal matter, but my guess is that the practical implication is that it did, since they were both sitting Congressmen and had developed their political networks in what was now the same district, including the incumbency advantage of the party nomination. If one of them decided not to run against the other, he would have had to get the nomination in another district and build up a new political network in the new district.
Plus, if one left, that one might have looked like he was afraid of the other, was carpetbagging to a district that he didn’t have much of a connection to, and so on.
I’d vote for a competent person who didn’t live in my district over an incompetent rival that did.
A side story:
Some people here remember Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s VP running mate in 1968 and 1972. He was, before that, Governor of Maryland and before that mayor of Baltimore, if memory serves me.
He rose to fame for calling newscasters the “nattering nabobs of negativism”, but that was all ghost-writers. He was, in fact, a bland, uncontroversial bozo that had gone beyond his level of incompetence long before.
He was only elected governor because the Democrats put up against him a Southern-style segregationist who had all of George Wallace’s vitriol and none of his political savvy. Democrats deserted in droves to vote for Agnew. I’m sure my parents did.
Thus the dangers of a two-party system and the requirement that people “represent their constituency”.
This isn’t unusual after a redistricting, where the party in power in the state legislature will attempt to redraw Congressional districts to maximize their party’s chances. If you have two incumbent Republicans, you can take some of the Republican bits of District A and swap them for more Democratic bits of District B. So District B becomes a much safer Republican seat, while the Democrats get a much better shot at District A. As Northern Piper says, the two incumbent Republicans aren’t forced to run against each other, but they know that by far their best chance to hang onto their seat is to run in the more Republican district.
The legal (Constitutional) requirement is to live in the state you represent, Living in the district is a political necessity, for reasons explained above, not a legal rfequirement.
Only slightly off topic, since it reference residences and redistricting, is an anecdote of interest in New York. Assemblyman H. Robert Nortz, a Republican, represented a district composed of most of Jefferson and Lewis Counties in the State Assembly (lower house). He lived and practiced law in Lowville, county set of Lewis County, the smaller of the two counties. After the 1990 census, with substantial growth in Jefferson County’s population, the Democrat-controlled Assembly redistricted and constructed a district that included Jefferson and western Lewis Counties, surrounding Lowville on three sides but excluding it; it was put into a different district.
Whereupon Mr. Nortz, who had for decades had a summer cottage at Cape Vincent in Jeffeeron County, declared that his primary legal residence, and his Lowville home his winter secondary residence. Since even the local Democrats felt that bit of redistricting was dirty pool, he won reelection handily, served a couple more terms, and retired.