For over two years the new U.S. Senate nominee from California has lived in the state of Maryland.
In establishing the qualification rules for the U.S. Senate, the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 3 says the following: "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." Those who like to play games with language, parsing words and such - along the lines of the famous Clinton line, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" - can easily imagine a loophole here.
The state can choose anybody in the state who's been a U.S. citizen at least nine years and lives there at the time of the appointment.
Our original plan - which lasted 120 years - was for the Governors and Legislatures of the states to name their two champions - the wise, experienced statesmen who would recognize when Washington DC was overstretching past its bonds, so they could cut it back at the start.
The Framers intended for the Senate to be the state governments' eyes and ears, watchtowers and guard dogs, supervising the city of Washington DC. The Framers knew that our nascent nation was already too big in the 18th century for one executive to know enough politicians across the country to fill all the posts in this executive branch with confidence.
The United States Senate could, in a rare moment of lucidity, refuse to seat her.
Any politician should be able to tell that if you don't have to live in the state you profess to represent, it's only a matter of time before both houses of Congress are populated entirely by the bureaucrat class of Washington DC. Will a majority of the current Senate be sharp enough to understand this threat to their very existence? Probably not.
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