INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING COMM’N
Opinion of the Court
gress Profiles: 39th Congress (1865–1867), http://history.house.gov/Congressional-Overview/Profiles/39th/; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress: Trowbridge, Rowland Ebenezer (1821–1881). Cf. Cain, 121 Yale L. J., at 1817 (identifying legislative conflict of interest as the problem independent redistricting commissions aimed to check). In short, Baldwin is not a disposition that should attract this Court’s reliance.
We add, furthermore, that the Arizona Legislature does not question, nor could it, employment of the initiative to control state and local elections. In considering whether Article I, §4, really says “No” to similar control of federal elections, we have looked to, and borrow from, Alexander Hamilton’s counsel: “[I]t would have been hardly advisable … to establish, as a fundamental point, what would deprive several States of the convenience of having the elections for their own governments and for the national government” held at the same times and places, and in the same manner. The Federalist No. 61, at 374. The Elections Clause is not sensibly read to subject States to that deprivation.[1]
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The Framers may not have imagined the modern initiative process in which the people of a State exercise legislative power coextensive with the authority of an institutional legislature. But the invention of the initiative was in full harmony with the Constitution’s conception of the people as the font of governmental power. As Madison put it: “The genius of republican liberty seems to demand … not only that all power should be derived from the people,
- ↑ A State may choose to regulate state and national elections differently, which is its prerogative under the Clause. E.g., Ind. Code §3–3–2–2 (creating backup commission for congressional but not state legislative districts).
