RPT’s Grounds For Appeal Of DeLay Case

Paul Burka at Burka Blog is reporting that James Bobb, Jr., attorney for the Republican Party of Texas in the DeLay case, has informed him of the Party’s two grounds for appeal to the Fifth Circuit.

According to Burka, the first ground for appeal is that the Democratic Party had no standing to challenge GOP Chairwoman Benkiser’s determination that DeLay was ineligible to run. Bobb claims Nick Lampson should have brought the suit.
The second point Burka cites is Bopp’s claim that the U.S. Constitution allows that “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives” shall be “prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

In this regard, Burka notes:

The RPT is arguing that the state laws Benkiser acted under to declare DeLay ineligible are part of the “manner” of holding elections.

What Bopp and Burka both miss, though, is that cases like Schaeffer v. Townsend, as I noted before, have held that qualifications clause set forth in the Constitution is all-encompassing, and that no state law may superceed that.

As for the “manner” argument, I think that’s purely legal semantics.  Interpreting the phrase, “the manner of holding elections,” does not, in my view, encompass ineligibility. Only the qualifications clause covers that.

In Schaeffer, the Ninth Circuit addressed that directly:

California argues that the residency requirement is sus-
tained by its power to regulate the procedural aspects of fed-
eral elections granted by U.S. CONST. art. I, S 4, cl. 1: “The
Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators
and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the
Legislature thereof.” California contends that under the Elec-
tions Clause it is not limited squarely to regulating times,
places and manner; rather, it has the power to adopt
“generally-applicable and evenhanded restrictions that protect
the integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself.”
Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U.S. 780, 788 n.9 (1983).

[...]

The Term Limits Court rejected such a broad reading of the Elections Clause and held the balancing test inapplicable where the challenged provision supplemented the Qualifications Clause and did not regulate a procedural aspect of an election or require a candidate to show a minimum level of support before running. The Court noted that: “The provisions at issue in . . . our . . . Elections Clause cases were thus constitutional because they regulated election procedures and did not even arguably impose any substantive qualification rendering a class of potential candidates ineligible for [a] ballot position.” 514 U.S. at 835. The Court distinguished other Elections Clause cases on the ground that “they did not involve measures that exclude candidates from the ballot without reference to the candidates’ support in the electoral process.” Id.

Going back again to the Term Limits case of the 1990s, the Ninth noted that the Court distinguishes election clause cases on whether or not they involve measures that exclude candidates from the ballot.

The RPT has no legs to stand on.