I’m pretty sure that if you’re a US citizen by descent, you are a US citizen at the moment of birth. Choosing not to possess paperwork proving you’re a citizen doesn’t make you a non-citizen.
Yes but try turning up to enter the US and saying “I’m a citizen from birth so you have to let me into the country” with no paperwork. Avoiding issues like this is why the “natural born citizen” wording should be dropped completely. Defining the requirement as being a US citizen with no other citizenships for XX number of years prior to election is clear and does away with having to spell out all kinds of exceptions and special cases.
This is true for everybody, though. If my parents refuse to register my birth because birth certificates are the mark of the beast, that’s going to be pretty inconvenient for me at some point too.
I agree.
Most other countries get by with a lot less, actually. For example, to be elected President of Ireland you have to be a citizen, and have attained the age of 35. That’s it. There is no requirement that you should have been a citizen for any particular length of time, or that you should not hold any other citizenship, or should have renounced any that you may have had in the past. If your links with Ireland are not sufficiently strong, or your links with other countries are too strong, that’s a political matter which may influence people’s willingness to vote for you, but it doesn’t stop you offering yourself for election.
In France, you have to be a citizen of the Republic and have attained the age of 18. The voters may care if you are only recently a citizen, or if you also have citizenship of another country, but the law doesn’t.
In Germany, you don’t even have to be a citizen. Certain non-citizens residents are also eligible for election. (You do have to be an ethnic German, though, or married to one.) It doesn’t matter whether you hold citizenship of any other country.
In the UK, you can’t be elected head of state, obviously, but you can be elected to Parliament and any member of Parliament can become Prime Minister. To be elected to Parliament, you have to be a UK citizen, or an Irish citizen, or a citizen of any Commonwealth country. If you also have citizenship of some other country, that’s irrelevant.
The problem with a “no other citizenship” rule is that people don’t always control what citizenship they have. I’m an Irish citizen from birth. There are limited circumstances under which Irish law allows renunciation of citizenship and I don’t happen to come within them, so there is nothing that I can do which will make me not an Irish citizen. I doubt that this is an unusual state of affairs.
Bottom line: I really see no need to exclude dual nationals from offering themselves for election in the US. It’s not the practice in other developed democracies, and it could operate unfairly on people who hold a non-renunciable citizenship in another country.
Sure but if they want to keep the “no dual citizen” rule it could be sufficient to just have a US official procedure where you renounce your other citizenship whether or not the other country recognises it.
Try turning up to enter the U.S. and saying, “I’m a citizen from birth and I have a U.S. passport and a consular report of birth abroad; I don’t happen to have any paperwork on me at the moment, but you have to let me into the country.” Same difference.
Well, I don’t think you could accurately call that a “no dual citizenship” rule; if the other country didn’t recognize the procedure as effective - and they mostly wouldn’t because those that allow renunciation of citizenship have their own procedures for doing that - then someone who had been through the procedure would still be a dual citizen, wouldn’t he?
You could have a rule which says (a) you have to be a US citizen, and (b) you have to formally repudiate any allegiance to any foreign state (and you could apply that to all candidates, without inquiring into whether do, in fact, hold citizenship under any foreign law. (Come to think of it, you could include a repudiation of foreign allegiance in the presidential oath of office. That might make more sense.)
None of this follows from what you quoted.
There is no “no dual citizenship” rule for eligibility to run for president.
Coremelt never claimed that we currently have a “no dual citizenship” rule.
Coremelt suggested “Avoiding issues like this is why the “natural born citizen” wording should be dropped completely. Defining the requirement as being a US citizen with no other citizenships for XX number of years prior to election is clear and does away with having to spell out all kinds of exceptions and special cases.” This is an opinion about what could be done in the future, not a statement about the present.
Then DSL replied that a problem with such a rule is that you can’t always get rid of your dual ciitizenship status, to which coremelt replied that it would probably be enough to simply renounce any other citizenships, not actually get the other countries to acknowledge the renouncement.
I agree that it looks like a very simple and workable rule. We could pass an amendment which says that to be eligible to be president, you must be a US Citizen, formally renounce any other citizenships (if any), and and then afterwards be a resident of the US for at least 14 years. This would get rid of the fuzzily-defined “natural born” requirement, but still preserve the idea that we don’t want the King of France becoming president of the US.
FWIW, If we adopted this new rule, the Ted Cruz would be eligible to run for president in 2028. And if Arnold Schwarzenegger renounces his Austrian citizenship in 2016, he’d be eligible to run for president in 2032.
But would requiring a lengthy period after renunciation be fair? In Cruz’s case, he didn’t even know he was Canadian until 2014, when the media raised the possibility. He promptly renounced it, pretty much as soon as he learnt he was Canadian.
If someone has had US citizenship since birth, lived in the US since age 4, and never even knew he had a foreign citizenship, what risk is there that he would be a [del]Canadian[/del] Manchurian candidate?
He SAYS he didn’t even know he was Canadian until 2014. That’s an utterly unprovable statement, and one that quite frankly I have a hard time believing (even I know that Canada had birthright citizenship, same as the U.S., and I’ve never been to the Great White North, or Harvard Law).
There is a common belief out there that if you have two potential citizenships, you have to claim one of them by the time you’re 18 or 21. That’s not correct, for either Canada or the US, but I’ve seen it advanced on these very boards. It doesn’t strike me as unbelievable.
I thought that legal theory was dealt with with the Insular cases.
If we’re going to change the constitution, then the correct wording change is just to say “a citizen”. Who cares when or how the candidate for president became a citizen? If they’re a citizen, they can run for president, and the voters can decide if the fact that they’re also Queen of Canada means they shouldn’t become president. If the voters don’t want the Queen of Canada to be president, then they shouldn’t vote for her. If they vote for her, then she should be president.
I had a similar thought on my way to work this morning. What if I ran for president and then found out that Elbonia* automatically grants citizenship to anyone with a great grandparent that lived in the Volga Valley** after 1901? My GGF and GGM both immigrated from the Volga Valley to the US in 1907. I could be have dual citizenship with Elbonia and not even know it. So that would really suck if I had to renounce said citizenship and then wait at least 14 years before I could run again. I’m changing my mind. Making a no-dual-citizenship rule just trades one set of problems for another set of problems.
Maybe just being a US Citizen is enough. If the voters really wanted to elect someone who has dual citizenship, never lived in the US, and doesn’t even speak English, maybe we should let them.
- fictional country
** actual place, in Russia.
Here’s the problem with “Let the Voters decide” that means the whole section of Qualifications for President (a natural born citizen of the United States, a resident for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older.) is meaningless. A 18 yo who is not even a US Citizen can then still run and be elected.
I know the Courts dont want to be barraged with endless Birther lawsuits, but this is a cheap way out.
It’s only “let the voters decide” if it’s not clear cut.
Ted Cruz was born in Canada. Is he a natural born citizen? Let the voters decide if he’s a natural born citizen.
Is he 35? We don’t have to let the voters decide, since his age is unambiguous. Has he resided in the United States for 14 years? We don’t have to let the voters decide, since his residency is unambiguous.
The only reason you have so many Republicans saying they have no opinion on Ted Cruz’s status is because they can’t stand him, and they think it’s funny.
So, let us say he was only 25. How would you sue? Based upon the Courts, no one can sue. Perhaps his opponent?