In the run-up to the midterms, President Trump continues to call for nationalizing congressional elections. He has sought to initiate the process through executive orders, such as one proposing to set “a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day for all methods of voting.” The words and spirit of the United States Constitution—the bedrock textualism and originalism of conservative constitutional interpretation—say he can’t nationalize elections.
Unlike some consequential constitutional questions, it’s not a close call.
The Constitution’s framers and ratifiers weighed the idea and firmly rejected it. For example, Pennsylvania arch-nationalist Gouverneur Morris was appalled that his state did not impose minimum property-ownership qualifications for voting. As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he pressed for their imposition nationwide for congressional elections. Morris drew James Madison into his camp but failed to persuade many others, leaving a notable paper trail of his failure.
The Virginia Plan, which served as a starting point for the convention’s deliberations, did not include qualifications for suffrage. But, as the delegates worked through its various provisions, one of them suggested adding property-ownership requirements for members of Congress. Morris proposed instead imposing them on voters. “If qualifications are proper,” Madison reports Morris saying, “he would prefer them in the electors rather than the elected.” Although several delegates objected, Morris managed to have the issue of nationalizing congressional elections referred to a committee charged with drafting a constitution from the various resolutions passed by delegates for their final consideration.
Reflecting Morris’s concerns, the drafting committee’s records include debate over a proposal that the qualifications of voters would be the same nationally with regard to citizenship, manhood, sanity of mind, and possession of real property. At the time, ten of the thirteen states imposed property-ownership qualifications for voting in their legislatures. Most of these states imposed lower qualifications for elections to their assemblies or larger branches and higher qualifications for elections to their senates or upper chambers. No state allowed enslaved people to vote, and three southern states barred free Blacks from voting. Only New Jersey then allowed women to vote, but only single women could satisfy the state’s property-ownership requirement.
Rather than accept Morris’s proposal to impose uniform national qualifications for voting in congressional elections, the committee took the opposite approach. In all states, the first article of the committee’s draft states, the qualification of the electors for congressional elections “shall be the same … as those of the electors [for] the most numerous branch of their own legislatures.” In other words, in any state, those eligible to vote in elections for the state’s assembly could also vote in federal elections. This provision clearly and expressly left the matter to the states.
When this provision reached the full convention for consideration, Morris moved to strike it in favor of empowering Congress to set uniform national voting standards for federal elections. Madison and Delaware’s John Dickinson backed Morris’s motion, but a rising chorus of delegates from right, left, and center spoke against it.
Pennsylvania’s representative on the committee, the scholarly conservative James Wilson, reportedly declared, “This part of the Report was well considered by the Committee, and he did not think it could be changed for the better.” Virginia libertarian George Mason warned, “A power to alter the qualifications would be a dangerous power in the hands of [Congress].” Benjamin Franklin added that he did not think “the elected had any right in any case to narrow the privileges of the electors.”
Ultimately, only one state, Dickinson’s Delaware, supported Morris’s motion, and the final Constitution retained language virtually identical to the committee’s draft. Delegates then added a further clause to the Constitution expressly entrusting the time, place, and manner of holding congressional elections to the states, subject only to subsequent regulation by Congress. There is thus no express role for the president in congressional elections, let alone a grant of power for the president to act unilaterally.
The issue of national authority over congressional elections resurfaced during the ratification debates. Federalists assured supporters of states’ rights that the Constitution reserved such matters to the states. Even Madison followed the party line. In the Federalist Papers, he writes that nationalizing voting rights, “to have reduced the different qualifications in the different states to one uniform rule, would probably have been as dissatisfactory to some of the states, as it would have been difficult to the convention.” Responding to states-rights advocates at the Virginia Ratifying Conventions regarding the authority of Congress to regulate the time, place, and manner of voting, he added that such control “will very probably never be exercised.”
Following these clear constitutional strictures, subsequent nationalizing mandates on voting in federal elections have required either constitutional amendments or valid legislation. One bar states from restricting suffrage on account of race. Another does so on account of sex. A separate constitutional amendment prohibits states from imposing poll taxes in federal elections. Another provides that states may not bar persons age 18 or older from voting on the basis of age. Congress, meanwhile, has passed legislation governing the timing and manner of voting, such as setting a uniform date for congressional elections.
All of this makes one thing abundantly clear: under any mode of constitutional interpretation, presidents may not unilaterally impose their will on congressional elections. Absent express constitutional amendments or legislation on specific issues, the states run the show. Should the states or courts allow President Trump to usurp this central pillar of American federalism, elections will become yet another example of how the Constitution isn’t working.
Edward J. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning legal historian.
William Cooper is the author of How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.