[6][7] No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.The Framers of the Constitution understood this clause primarily as an anti-corruption device.
Painfully familiar with the system of "royal influence", whereby the English kings had "purchased" the loyalty of Members of Parliament with appointment to lucrative offices, particularly as members of Parliament were not paid until 1911, the framers sought to limit the corrupting effect of patronage and plural office holding in the new republic.
"[7] Robert Yates proposed to the 1787 Constitutional Convention a ban on Members of Congress from "any office established by a particular State, or under the authority of the U.
[10] In 1945, Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson was appointed to serve as U.S. Chief of Counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the 1945–46 Nuremberg trials.
[12] The Ineligibility Clause has resulted in some conflicts over potential appointments of Representatives and Senators to various Cabinet posts and other federal government offices.
Nonetheless, examples of joint service in the executive and the judiciary have been a rarity in American history, and a strong tradition has developed disfavoring the practice.
This is in line with the view expressed about the clause by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States.
[16] It is not clear if a member of Congress could hold a reserve commission in the armed forces (which fall under the Executive Branch), as the only case, Schlesinger v. Reservists Committee to Stop the War, was never ruled on its merits due to lack of legal standing.
[13] The clause was at issue in 1937, when sitting Alabama Senator Hugo Black was appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Furthermore, Time magazine pointed out that the Retirement Act for which Black had voted merely guaranteed justices' pensions against reduction.
[18] Perhaps the most widely known conflict involving this clause concerned the appointment of Senator William B. Saxbe of Ohio to the post of United States Attorney General by then-President Richard Nixon, in the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre.