Article 1, Section 3, Clause 3: Qualifications of Senators
No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.
This clause parallels Article 1, Section 2, Clause 2, establishing the qualifications for members of the House of Representatives. It has the same three elements: A minimum age, a minimum time as a citizen of the Unites States, and a requirement of residency in the state he represents. The differences are relatively minor: A Senator must be 30 years old, versus 25 years for a Representative; he must have been a citizen for nine years, versus seven for a Representative; and there is no difference in the requirement of residency. Again, the definition of “inhabitant” was left deliberately vague, and has largely been left to the individual states to judge. As with Representatives, the list is exhaustive; the states may not add any additional requirements. This was moot prior to passage of the 17th Amendment, since it was those very legislatures who elected Senators. It is now more meaningful, since it is now the people of the state who elect their Senators.
The slightly more stringent requirements of age and duration of citizenship reflect an institutional character that is more deliberative and less representative.
This seems an opportune time to comment on an aspect of the Founding that is more implicit than spelled out in the Constitution. The preceding Articles of Confederation, in Article IV, expressly articulated the freedom of movement:
The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different states in this union, the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from Justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states; and the people of each state shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other state, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any state, to any other State of which the Owner is an inhabitant…
Article 4, Section 2, repeats some of this, though in far pithier language. We do not believe it can be inferred that the Framers ever abandoned the concept of freedom of movement first articulated in the Articles of Confederation. The very loose requirement of residency to represent a district or state practically invites gifted men and women who are unable to find the opportunity for political service in one state to move to another state where their political opportunities may be greater. The pejorative, “carpetbagger”, is a product of the bitterness of the Civil War and Reconstruction and ought to be discarded from our thinking. In practice, in recent decades, it seems it has been.