Political potshots are not permitted in GQ. 
Hey, calling that a political potshot is itself a political potshot.
IIRC this actually became an issue back in the '90s when the government appoint a Roman Catholic nun to the Senate; her order had to transfer a small amount of property to her name so she could take her seat.
Yes, that was Peggy Butts. From Wikipedia:
Ancient Rome had age requirements for many government positions, including consul (generally regarded as the highest rank). Patricians could reach these ranks two years earlier than other nobles (the equites). Caesar was a patrician. One of his main rivals, the equites Bibulus, was exactly two years older. As a result, they kept finding themselves sharing ranks.
(There were always two consuls at a time. It never occurred to Bibulus to just wait a year.)
Age requirements, sure. Property requirements, well why not. But how about religious requirements like Lebanon IIRC? (I doubt a Hindu will ever lead the independent nation of Vatican City.) Sure, those have something to do with demographics. But how many nations require literacy, let alone passable IQ or sanity?
Or even hominid DNA. The US Constitution doesn’t require legislators or judges/justices to be human. I recall an old SciFi story about a robotic pope. Which nations specifically demand their leaders to be born of women?
In the Czech Republic, of which I am a naturalized citizen, the minimum age to run for for President, or for the Senate, is 40. For a deputy (member of parliament), it is 21. However, both the age of majority and the voting age are 18.
I assume the US provision was, besides the assumption someone over 35 would act mature and rational, that there were too many instances of alleged appointed/elected positions in Europe that despite the intent they be for qualified individuals, effectively became the political property of the occupant and passed down to sons or other relatives. It was one more provision to ensure true democracy not a sham one hiding a hereditary ruler - keeping in mind they did not write term limits into the original constitution.
(so what happens when the speaker is under 35 and a president and VP are no longer in position?)
The succession passes to the next qualified person in line, as it would if the person didn’t qualify on some other constitutional restriction. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright were not in the line of succession because they were foreign born.
That was Good News from the Vatican by Robert Silverberg.
It was an accomplishment in republican Rome to take office in suo anno, the first year you were eligible for it.
Queen Adelaide was not known to be pregnant and she was already in her mid-40s. This was more a “cover our bases just in case” clause rather than any serious expectation that a regency would be needed.
It’s true that the UK constitution is to a large extent unwritten, but this aspect is indeed one of those explicitly governed by statute. Under the Regency Act 1937 (adopted on the occasion of the accession of George VI; this made his daughter Elizabeth heir presumptive, who was a minor at the time), there is a regency if the monarch is below the age of eighteen. The regent is the person who is next in line to the throne (and not himself or herself disqualified, e.g. for not being of full age). The regent carries out the functions of the monarch in the name and on behalf of that monarch. So, in essence, there is no age requirement for being head of state in the UK (and the other Commonwealth realms, for that matter), but there is an age requirement of eighteen for carrying out the functions of the monarch.
But that doesn’t seem to address the situation we were talking about, which is where a king’s first child has been conceived but not yet born. If the king dies (but the mother and foetus survive), does someone else become monarch (temporarily or otherwise) or is there a gap in the line of monarchs until the baby is born?
It occurs to me that in the British monarchies this would be slightly less of an issue, but in countries where women could not become sole monarch it would have been important since they didn’t know what sex the baby would be.
Would also be an issue under the traditional British system if the deceased king had left behind a first-born daughter, and the queen was pregnant. If the child was another girl, the first-born daughter would have been queen regnant from the moment the king died. But if the second child is a male, she never would have been queen.
During the reign of George VI, the question came up again as it was theoretically possible that Queen Elizabeth would be pregnant with a male heir at the end of her husband’s reign. The government sought legal advice (toward the bottom), and the opinion they got was that the 1830 legislation simply codified a general rule that there’s always a monarch, but that a posthumous child with a superior claim automatically snatched the crown off of the new monarch’s head upon birth:
The opinion also details how some other countries did go with a temporary regency instead of a back-and-forth, but says that “no such halt in the succession could arise in this country unless Parliament expressly so provided.”
nm