The Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico and the Philippines to Congress

• In Event: American Empire in the 20th Century: Transformations in Law and Representation

Abstract

Our paper studies the legislative politics of the position of Resident Commissioners, a nonvoting position created by Congress in the wake of the Spanish-American War. In 1900, the U.S. Congress created a position never before seen in Congressional history: that of the Resident Commissioner to Congress. This official was charged to represent the so-called ‘insular possession’ of Puerto Rico to the United States. Congress also created two Resident Commissioner positions from the Philippines, officials who took their seats in 1907.

In our paper, we trace the political debate and legislative history around these institutional developments—developments with profound implications for the democratic fate of the millions of people, overwhelmingly racial and ethnic minorities, who resided in these U.S. territories. We make a series of arguments. First, we offer evidence about the intellectual origins of the resident commissioner institution as related to, but distinct from, the territorial delegate, who would represent U.S. territories prior to statehood. Second, we show how notions of race and empire structured contemporaneous conflict over the Resident Commissioner role. Third, we place the Resident Commissioner position amid ambiguities in the Constitution’s Territorial Clause. Its language grants Congress plenary power over “Territory or other Property,” but left ambiguous is the status of peoples living in these territories—and the political and legal relationship between the territories and the federal government. In turn, we theorize the Resident Commissioner position as an institutional device by which policymakers tried to square U.S. democratic principles with a yearning for empire.

Authors

• Austin Bussing, Trinity University

• Elliot J, Mamet, Princeton University