Jonathan D. Shapiro (Columbia Law School; University of Oxford – University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, Students) has posted How Exclusive: An Originalist Account of the House's Exclusion Power (26 pages) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The power of the House of Representatives to exclude individuals claiming membership from sitting as genuine representatives—the House's Exclusion Power—is dangerously understudied. On the one hand, a rogue House can use the Exclusion Power to reject the legitimate results of an election; on the other, a House with an insufficient Exclusion Power will be helpless to prevent either the states or powerful individuals from subverting elections through bribery, fraud, coercion, favoritism, suppression, the like. The former problem of exclusivity is caused by an overly strong Exclusion Power, while the latter stems from an overly weak one. The question of just how exclusive the House is—that is, how powerful its Exclusion Power is—is thus highly significant, but, despite this importance, it remains essentially unaddressed. This Paper fills this gap, developing an originalist account of the House's Exclusion Power that shows the Power to be both sufficiently robust and sufficiently limited to avoid the twin problems of exclusivity.
Posted at 6:21 AM