Since losing his Massachusetts senatorship to Elizabeth Warren in 2012, former Cosmopolitan Sexiest Man of the Year (1982) Scott Brown has set his sights northward, to the quadrennially relevant state of New Hampshire.

Brown is almost certainly planning to challenge Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen in the 2014 New Hampshire Senate race; as such, he has spent the better part of 2013 traveling the Granite State and interacting with potential constituents. In August, he played guitar with the band Cheap Trick at New Hampshire’s Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom, a venue that apparently also functions as a portal to the year 1985. In two days, Brown will host the New Hampshire G.O.P. holiday party in Nashua.

The most unambiguous indication that Brown is plotting a run—the most unambiguous indication that any out-of-state politician is launching a candidacy on new turf—is his recent purchase of a New Hampshire home. Brown already had a vacation home in the state, but Bloomberg News reports that Brown “has found a buyer for his Wrentham, [Massachusetts], home and is set to close on that deal this week.” He’ll keep his job as a lawyer in Boston, though, because “he isn’t licensed to practice law in New Hampshire.”

It’s no secret why Brown is making these moves: he’s taking steps to fulfill New Hampshire’s residency requirement for prospective U.S. Senators. If you want to represent the Live Free or Die state on Capitol Hill, the reasoning goes, the least you can do is live there—or live there like half the time and maintain a pieds-à-terre in McLean or Bethesda. If only it were that simple.

The residency requirements for serving in the United States Senate are so vague as to be essentially meaningless. Per Article I, Section III of the Constitution: “No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.” An “inhabitant”: that term could, and has, meant anything from legitimately inhabiting within the state in question to being “registered to vote from the address of a home” sold 40 years prior, in the case of former Indiana senator Dick Lugar. Is a P.O. Box address an “inhabitancy”? It depends!

Moreover, the “inhabitancy” requirement doesn’t especially protect or benefit the residents of the district or state. Like most prohibitions (see: The War on Drugs), it has little to no established track record of preventing the practice it seeks to ban. All it really does is disqualify would-be carpetbaggers who cannot afford to buy mansion after mansion in their search for a friendly district.

Meanwhile, those with bottomless pockets continue to hop from district to district with impunity. Consider the saga of peripatetic Hudson Valley–area rich person Sean Eldridge, the husband of Facebook zillionaire and noted New Republic subscriber Chris Hughes. In 2011, Eldridge and Hughes bought a $5 million home in Garrison, New York, The New York Times reported. Tragic twist: the attendant congressional seat “appeared unattainable,” so the duo was forced (“forced”) to buy another multi-million-dollar mansion in a nearby district, one that Eldridge believes he has a better chance of winning in 2014.

Does Eldridge’s most recent mansion newly enable him to better understand the plight of the residents of New York’s 19th congressional district? Definitely not. Could Eldridge likely represent his constituents just as well (or just as poorly) if he were living slightly farther away from many of them? Sure! The additional Hudson Valley home will not make Hughes a better congressman than, say, a state senator who grew up in the 19th but happens to live in the 18th because his kids go to public school there and he cannot afford to move his family.


As for Brown, one could argue that he’s as representative of New Hampshire as anyone, despite his inconvenient Massachusetts zip code. As New Hampshire journalist James Pindell told The Washington Post:

[Y]ou’d be hard pressed to find a state where it matters less. Something like 60 percent (and growing) of the state’s residents are from somewhere else. The last four governors were from another state—the last two from Massachusetts . . . New England is not like the rest of the country. When it’s not rush-hour, a person can drive from downtown Boston to the New Hampshire border in 30 minutes. The state has the second-highest amount of commuters to another state per capita, and many of them to go work in Massachusetts.

People everywhere commute or tele-commute to distances near and far. A congressman Skypeing with a concerned citizen from across state lines might even prove better at serving his constituents than an “in-state” senator whose extreme wealth and connections enable him to buy advertisement after advertisement and win elections without having to interact with anyone besides major donors.

Abolishing the “inhabitancy” requirement would allow constituents to choose from a variety of presumptuous carpetbaggers—not just the very wealthy presumptuous carpetbaggers. Let’s make sure Americans can choose from the widest possible selection of overconfident and imperious egomaniacs—regardless of bank account balance or ability to get a second mortgage.