But if both Dems have been elected, why do party members get to choose who stays quiet? My home state (IA) is facing this very issue.
This whole thing is surprising coming from Kucinich, what with Congress supposedly being elected representatives of their home districts and all. You’d think he’d take the position of, “This is not what the Constitution had in mind and it infringes on democratic principles!”
Maybe he would say that if it wasn’t his ass on the line.
I don’t understand the question. The public generally doesn’t get to force any particular individual to compete for any particular office.
Members of Congress are supposed to be “residents” of the jurisdictions from which they are elected. If he’s not a resident, then he won’t be eligible to run.
It would be strange for him to take such a position, since it would be wrong on both counts.
The Constitution didn’t “have in mind” that elected officials once elected would be required to stay put for the rest of their lives if they wanted to keep competing for office. The United States at its inception was a highly mobile society with many, many people on the move. It was not unheard of for political figures to be elected from more than one jurisdiction.
Second, it doesn’t “infringe on democratic principles.” Candidates choose to run and elections are decided by voters. Those are democratic principles. Forcing a candidate to run in any particular race is not a commonly accepted democratic principle.
The purpose of Congress is to represent the state while enacting federal legislation. It is only natural to think the person representing said state would have a link to it.
Re: Democratic principles, it narrows the race down in a primary to pretty much one guy. Party politics can hurt democracy, if you consider someone’s ability to run part of democracy. This is significantly bigger than someone just ‘being a poor Joe Plumber who has no shot at the Presidency’.
I’m not a fan of the party machine. Maybe you are.
edit: I also see a big difference between moving 10 or 30 miles and moving across the country just to stay in office.
Being elected by the people of that state would be a pretty strong link in my opinion.
If they choose to elect someone new to their area what’s wrong with that? They believe he can best represent them.
How could he be deemed ineligible to run based on something that isn’t determined until election day?
Because it isn’t determined on election day. You can’t just show up on election day and say you’re a resident of your district. You usually have to establish that you have lived in your district or state for a certain period of time to be eligible, and that has to be done before the election. In this case it sounds like Kucinich would just have to be a resident of Washington state by May 2012, which is the deadline for filing his paperwork to become a candidate. As long as he’s a resident by then, he would be OK. And maybe that’s another reason he likes Washington state: he has almost a year to decide if he wants to go ahead with this plan.
In other places, you might have to be a resident for six months or a year at the time you file. That nearly bit Rahm Emanuel in the ass when he was running for mayor of Chicago. To be eligible there, you have to be a resident for a full year, and Emanuel’s opponents said he didn’t qualify eligible because he’d been living in Washington. He was briefly taken off the ballot but convinced the courts that he was a resident, kept a home in Chicago, and had always intended to return after he left DC.
This isn’t relevant. Congressional Districts are set by the Legislature of the state.
Right, the state legislature is what’s relevant here. The GOP also made big gains in state legislatures last year and that may have been what threw me off. It’s still bad for Kucinich since Republicans have big majorities in both houses of the Ohio legislature.
The only residency requirement in the Constitution is that a member of the House “shall…when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.” Since U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton in 1995, states can’t impose their own stricter requirements.
I don’t think he’d piss anyone off by staying where he is and running in whatever district his becomes. After all, the “other” Dem in that situation has no particular reason to be favored over Kucinich.