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Page Number: 45.0

6 

ARIZONA STATE LEGISLATURE v. ARIZONA 

INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING COMM’N
 
ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting
 

B 
The  unambiguous  meaning  of  “the  Legislature”  in  the
Elections Clause as a representative body is confirmed by 
other  provisions  of  the  Constitution  that  use  the  same 
term in the same way.  When seeking to discern the mean-
ing  of  a  word  in  the  Constitution,  there  is  no  better  dic-
tionary than the rest of the Constitution itself.  Our prece-
dents  new  and  old  have  employed  this  structural  method
of interpretation to read the Constitution in the manner it
was  drafted  and  ratified—as  a  unified,  coherent  whole. 
See,  e.g.,  NLRB  v.  Noel  Canning,  573  U. S.  ___,  ___–___ 
(2014)  (slip  op.,  at  19–20);  id.,  at  ___  (SCALIA,  J.,  concur-
ring in judgment) (slip op., at 32); McCulloch v. Maryland, 
4 Wheat. 316, 414–415 (1819); Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 1 
Wheat.  304,  328–330  (1816);  Amar,  Intratextualism,  112
Harv. L. Rev. 747 (1999). 

The  Constitution  includes  seventeen  provisions  refer-
ring  to  a  State’s  “Legislature.”    See  Appendix,  infra. 
Every one of those references is consistent with the under-
standing  of  a  legislature  as  a  representative  body.    More 
importantly,  many  of  them  are  only  consistent  with  an
institutional legislature—and flatly incompatible with the 
majority’s  reading  of  “the  Legislature”  to  refer  to  the
people as a whole. 

Start with the Constitution’s first use of the term: “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 Qual-
ifications  requisite  for  Electors  of  the  most  numerous
Branch  of  the  State  Legislature.”  Art. I,  §2,  cl. 1.    This 
reference  to  a  “Branch  of  the  State  Legislature”  can  only 
be  referring  to  an  institutional  body,  and  the  explicit 
juxtaposition of “the State Legislature” with “the People of
the  several  States”  forecloses  the  majority’s  proposed 
reading.

The next Section of Article I describes how to fill vacan-