Martin DyckmanWinston Churchill never lived in any of the four constituencies that elected him to Parliament, or in the two others where he ran and lost during his 65 years in politics.
He didn’t need to.
“Apparently an MP can be elected to Parliament without even living in this country, provided he has citizenship,” writes my friend Bob Nicholls, a retired teacher who lives in Britain.
Even some citizens of other Commonwealth nations are eligible.
In the United States, on the other hand, residency is a fetish. The Constitution requires senators and representatives to be, when elected, inhabitants of their respective states.
State constitutions like Florida’s typically take that down to the individual district.
Although a U.S. House member can live anywhere in his or her state, voters can be picky about it.
A few Congress members chance it. When former Rep. Allen West viciously denounced Florida colleague Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it came out that he lived and voted in her district, not his. (He moved to another, which rejected him at the first opportunity.)
Some voters don’t care. New York sent Robert Kennedy and Hillary Clinton to the Senate right after they had moved there to campaign.
But the “carpetbagger” question is an issue–in my opinion, a red herring–in the special election campaign to replace the late District 13 Florida Rep. C.W. Bill Young.
Alex Sink, the Democrat, lived in neighboring Hillsborough County, where she was a banking executive, and carried District 13 in two statewide elections. Even though she has rented a residence in the district, the Republicans are trying to label her a carpetbagger.
Their own candidate, David Jolly, most recently made his living as a Washington lobbyist,far from District 13.
The British, I think, are more sensible about it. Their system allows party committees to match their strongest candidates to their likeliest constituencies, as Florida Democrats did with Sink.
But for that, Churchill’s career might have foundered long before his — and Britain’s — finest hour.
Florida ought to allow its state legislators to live, if not anywhere, at least anywhere in the state, and let the voters decide whether that matters.
That would make it harder to gerrymander targeted legislators out of their seats.
There was a pungent example in 1992, when Republicans conspired with Democratic State Rep. James T. Hargrett Jr., an African American, to give him a State Senate seat. It would dispose of two Democratic women senators, Helen Davis of Tampa and Jeanne Malchon of St. Petersburg.
The Hargrett district had tentacles reaching from Tampa to the Pinellas Point waterfront — just far enough to reach Malchon’s home. Her choice was to oppose Hargrett or move, and she did not want to do either.
The Davis seat had been reconfigured to have a majority of Pinellas County voters.
That was the first of Charlie Crist’s election victories.
One reason the British care little about residency in their national elections is that the party controlling the House of Commons runs the government as well. Divided rule is impossible there, and so the parliamentary elections are even more vital than U.S. congressional races.
“(M)any people here vote for the party and rely on elected local councillors to cover local issues,” says Nicholls. “On a personal level, whilst I would prefer my MP to live locally and have definite links to the area, my vote is usually on national party lines.”
MPs are expected to visit their constituents regularly and hear from them individually.
MPs have budgets to tend their roots, but in a major recent scandal many were caught using the money to house relatives or to line their own pockets. No system is perfect.
The same grass-roots expectation attaches to American senators and representatives. No matter that their day-to-day residences are in Washington, they had better be seen often “at home.” Failing at that cost Elizabeth Dole her North Carolina Senate seat in 2008, and the perception that Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar had “gone Washington” contributed to his defeat in a Tea Party primary.
How British MPs vote is so much more important than where they live that I couldn’t find an agency with ready knowledge of how many of the 650 MPS actually live in their constituencies.
In 1924, Churchill campaigned in a newly chosen constituency he called “amazing” because “at least a hundred” fellow MPs lived there.
He lost.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor at the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in Waynesville, North Carolina.
