Inhabitants--Justiciability?

[Scarberry, Mark]

The language Sandy quotes from my post has nothing to do with the legal
question whether Cheney is an inhabitant of Wyoming. My point is that most
people won't worry about Bush and Cheney being inhabitants of the same
state, that Cheney has strong ties to Wyoming which make it plausible that
he could quickly change from being an inhabitant of Texas to an inhabitant
of Wyoming, and that people would think a rejection of his Wyoming
inhabitant status was an instance of cynical political maneuvering in
defiance of the result of a democratic election. That would, as a practical
matter, be dangerous to the political future of the legislator who would be
viewed as having defied the will of the people.

I think if I were a Congressman or Senator--or a member of the electoral
college--charged with deciding whether, as of December 2000, Cheney was an
inhabitant of Texas, I would look for serious indications that he had broken
some of his major connections with Texas (e.g., resigning the Dallas job
rather than taking a leave of absence from it, and selling the home in
Dallas) and strengthened some of his connections with Wyoming (e.g.,
spending more time at his house in Wyoming than at his house in Texas during
the Fall of 2000 and stating that he planned to retire in Wyoming after
serving 8 years as vice president).

Absent those kinds of changes, his mere changing of voter registration would
not, in my view, eliminate the 12th amendment problem.

But justiciability is the more interesting question. More opinions on that?

Mark S. Scarberry
Pepperdine University School of Law
mark.scarberry at pepperdine.edu


 -----Original Message-----
From: Sanford Levinson [mailto:SLevinson at MAIL.LAW.UTEXAS.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2000 3:29 PM
To: CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: Inhabitants--Justiciability?



Mark Scarberry writes:


<<<<

...woe betide the legislator who thwarts the will of the people by refusing
to consider a long time Wyoming congressman to be an inhabitant of Wyoming.
(That is, such a legislator is likely to be voted out of office come the
next election.)


Under Mark's theory, was the "long time Wyoming congressman" any less of an
"inhabitant" of Wyoming last week, before the opportunistic change of voting
registration, than today? Surely there's nothing in the formality of voting
registration per se that makes him an "inhabitant" of Wyoming. (Did he even
have to fly to Wyoming to change his registration, or was an email or a fax
good enough?) When was Cheney last in his new "home state"? Does anybody
know or care?

<<<<


Sandy

>>>>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/private/conlawprof/attachments/20000725/dcd35f15/attachment.htm