Article One of the Constitution of the United States establishes the legislative branch of the federal government, the United States Congress. Under Article One, Congress is a bicameral legislature consisting of the House of Representatives and the Senate.[1]: 73 Article One grants Congress various enumerated powers and the ability to pass laws "necessary and proper" to carry out those powers. Article One also establishes the procedures for passing a bill and places various limits on the powers of Congress and the states from abusing their powers.
Article One's Vesting Clause grants all federal legislative power to Congress and establishes that Congress consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In combination with the vesting clauses of Article Two and Article Three, the Vesting Clause of Article One establishes the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government. Section 2 of Article One addresses the House of Representatives, establishing that members of the House are elected every two years, with congressional seats apportioned to the states on the basis of population. Section 2 includes various rules for the House of Representatives, including a provision stating that individuals qualified to vote in elections for the largest chamber of their state's legislature have the right to vote in elections for the House of Representatives. Section 3 addresses the Senate, establishing that the Senate consists of two senators from each state, with each senator serving a six-year term. Section 3 originally required that the state legislatures elect the members of the Senate, but the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, provides for the direct election of senators. Section 3 lays out various other rules for the Senate, including a provision that establishes the vice president of the United States as the president of the Senate.
Section 4 of Article One grants the states the power to regulate the congressional election process but establishes that Congress can alter those regulations or make its own regulations. Section 4 also requires Congress to assemble at least once per year. Section 5 lays out various rules for both houses of Congress and grants the House of Representatives and the Senate the power to judge their own elections, determine the qualifications of their own members, and punish or expel their own members. Section 6 establishes the compensation, privileges, and restrictions of those holding congressional office. Section 7 lays out the procedures for passing a bill, requiring both houses of Congress to pass a bill for it to become law, subject to the veto power of the president of the United States. Under Section 7, the president can veto a bill, but Congress can override the president's veto with a two-thirds vote of both chambers.
Section 8 lays out the powers of Congress. It includes several enumerated powers, including the power to lay and collect "taxes, duties, imposts, and excises" (provided duties, imposts, and excises are uniform throughout the United States), "to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States", the power to regulate interstate and international commerce, the power to set naturalization laws, the power to coin and regulate money, the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States, the power to establish post offices and post roads, the power to establish federal courts inferior to the Supreme Court, the power to raise and support an army and a navy, the power to call forth the militia "to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions" and to provide for the militia's "organizing, arming, disciplining...and governing" and granting Congress the power to declare war.[1]: 373 Section 8 also provides Congress the power to establish a federal district to serve as the national capital and gives Congress the exclusive power to administer that district. In addition to various enumerated powers, Section 8 grants Congress the power to make laws necessary and proper to carry out its enumerated powers and other powers vested in it. Section 9 places various limits on the power of Congress, banning bills of attainder and other practices. Section 10 places limits on the states, prohibiting them from entering into alliances with foreign powers, impairing contracts, taxing imports or exports above the minimum level necessary for inspection, keeping armies, or engaging in war without the consent of Congress.
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Section 1 is a vesting clause that bestows federal legislative power exclusively to Congress. Similar clauses are found in Article II, which confers executive power upon the president alone, and Article III, which grants judicial power solely to the federal judiciary. These three articles create a separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government. This separation of powers, by which each branch may exercise only its own constitutional powers and no others,[2][3] is fundamental to the idea of a limited government accountable to the people.
The separation of powers principle is particularly significant for Congress. The Constitution declares that the Congress may exercise only those legislative powers "herein granted" within Article I (as later limited by the Tenth Amendment).[4] It also, by implied extension, prohibits Congress from delegating its legislative authority to either of the other branches of government, a rule known as the nondelegation doctrine.[5] However, the Supreme Court has ruled that Congress does have the latitude to delegate regulatory powers to executive agencies as long as it provides an "intelligible principle" which governs the agency's exercise of the delegated regulatory authority.[6] That the power assigned to each branch must remain with that branch, and may be expressed only by that branch, is central to the theory.[7] The nondelegation doctrine is primarily used as a way of interpreting a congressional delegation of authority narrowly,[8] in that the courts presume Congress intended only to delegate that which it certainly could have, unless it clearly demonstrates it intended to "test the waters" of what the courts would allow it to do.[9]
Although not mentioned in the Constitution, Congress has also long asserted the power to investigate and the power to compel cooperation with an investigation.[10] The Supreme Court has affirmed these powers as an implication of Congress's power to legislate.[11] Since the power to investigate is an aspect of Congress's power to legislate, it is as broad as Congress's powers to legislate.[12] However, it is also limited to inquiries that are "in aid of the legislative function";[13] Congress may not "expose for the sake of exposure".[14] It is uncontroversial that a proper subject of Congress's investigation power is the operations of the federal government, but Congress's ability to compel the submission of documents or testimony from the president or his subordinates is often-discussed and sometimes controversial (see executive privilege), although not often litigated. As a practical matter, the limitation of Congress's ability to investigate only for a proper purpose ("in aid of" its legislative powers) functions as a limit on Congress's ability to investigate the private affairs of individual citizens; matters that simply demand action by another branch of government, without implicating an issue of public policy necessitating legislation by Congress, must be left to those branches due to the doctrine of separation of powers.[15] The courts are highly deferential to Congress's exercise of its investigation powers, however. Congress has the power to investigate that which it could regulate,[12] and the courts have interpreted Congress's regulatory powers broadly since the Great Depression.
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
Election districts in each state have recently been required to be structured so that each elected representative represents substantially equal populations, based on court interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, finding that, "construed in its historical context, the command of Art. I, § 2, that Representatives be chosen 'by the People of the several States' means that as nearly as is practicable one man's vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another's." Court involvement in this issue developed slowly from an initial practice of electing representatives at-large, until in the late 1940s and the early 1950s the Court used the "political question" doctrine in Baker v. Carr to decline to adjudicate districting and apportionment suits. The Supreme Court has held in Rucho v. Common Cause that there was no "constitutional directive" nor any "legal standards to guide" the Court in claims of unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering, and such claims today are considered nonjusticiable.[16]
At the time of its creation, the Constitution did not explicitly give citizens an inherent right to vote.[17] However, by stipulating that those qualified to vote in elections for the largest chamber of a state's legislature could vote in Congressional (House of Representatives) elections the Framers expressed a rather explicit intent that the House was to be directly elected. Since the Civil War, several constitutional amendments have been enacted that have curbed the states' broad powers to set voter qualification standards. Though never enforced, clause 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that "when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice president of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State." The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Nineteenth Amendment prohibits the denial of the right to vote based on sex. The Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibits the revocation of voting rights due to the non-payment of a poll tax. The Twenty-sixth Amendment prohibits the denial of the right of US citizens, eighteen years of age or older, to vote on account of age.
Moreover, since the Supreme Court has recognized voting as a fundamental right,[18] the Equal Protection Clause places very tight limitations (albeit with uncertain limits) on the states' ability to define voter qualifications; it is fair to say that qualifications beyond citizenship, residency, and age are usually questionable.[19]
In the 1960s, the Supreme Court started to view voting as a fundamental right covered by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[20] In a dissenting opinion of a 1964 Supreme Court case involving reapportionment in the Alabama state legislature, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II included Minor v. Happersett (an 1875 case which allowed states to deny women the right to vote) in a list of past decisions about voting and apportionment which were no longer being followed.[21]
In Oregon v. Mitchell (1970), the Supreme Court held that the Qualifications clause did not prevent Congress from overriding state-imposed minimum age restrictions for voters in Congressional elections.[22]
Since clause 3 provides that Members of the House of Representatives are apportioned state-by-state and that each state is guaranteed at least one Representative, exact population equality between all districts is not guaranteed and, in fact, is currently impossible, because while the size of the House of Representatives is fixed at 435, several states had less than 1/435 of the national population at the time of the last reapportionment in 2020. However, the Supreme Court has interpreted the provision of Clause One that Representatives shall be elected "by the People" to mean that, in those states with more than one member of the House of Representatives, each congressional election district within the state must have nearly identical populations.[23]
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
The Constitution provides three requirements for Representatives: A Representative must be at least 25 years old, must be an inhabitant of the state in which he or she is elected, and must have been a citizen of the United States for the previous seven years. There is no requirement that a Representative reside within the district in which he or she represents; although this is usually the case, there have been occasional exceptions.[24]
The Supreme Court has interpreted the Qualifications Clause as an exclusive list of qualifications that cannot be supplemented by a house of Congress exercising its Section 5 authority to "judge...the...qualifications of its own members"[25] or by a state in its exercise of its Section 4 authority to prescribe the "times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives." The Supreme Court, as well as other federal courts, have repeatedly barred states from additional restrictions, such as imposing term limits on members of Congress, allowing members of Congress to be subject to recall elections, or requiring that Representatives live in the congressional district in which they represent.[26][27] A 2002 Congressional Research Service report also found that no state could implement a qualification that a Representative not be