So you’d basically be raising the age requirement?
Fair enough. But don’t people who get elected President have to have some “experience” first? Where is that gonna come from? I can’t be mayor of a town in Poland, immigrate, become naturalized, and then run for President? How long do you want me to wait so you know I’m “loyal”? The President swears to uphold the Constitution. What more do you need?
When you are finished with public office, you are finished with public office.
No other elected official has been asked to do that.
All the theories and reasons may well be valid. But the Constitution isn’t just an exercise in theory. There is the law of unintended consequences. Every fix creates two new problems. There may be a name for it; somebody mentioned “Dialectic Theory” to me one time, that change is ever constant. The Supreme Law of the Land should remain static until changed for a compelling reason, not just to tinker daily with it.
The reasons for such an exclusion may have been entirely valid in the days of the Founding Fathers, and less so today. But to address it simply for the sake of tinkering yields no benefit. Is America somehow deprived by reducing the campaign pool? Not theoretically, but in reality? Where have we provably suffered by the exclusion of someone who wanted to lead but was denied?
I’ve seen an incredible plethora of worthless Presidents. There are only a few who are considered Great Statesmen, and even those are still subject to some controversy. If the worst Presidents in history were unable to destroy America, how can someone be the greatest President to save America, if only he were natural-born, not naturalized?
Possible? Sure. When it happens, deal with it. Not tinker with the Greatest Document of America just for the rhetoric of it. Personally, I don’t see what the necessity of the 22nd Amendment was. After all, in a democracy, it potentially blocks the will of the people, doesn’t it? And it has no effect on any other federal office for some very good reasons.
You say this as if it is some kind of inevitable natural law or something. The distinction is created by law and can just as easily be uncreated.
That’s not relevant to the discussion, because it is a requirement to become a citizen. It does not create different classes of citizens.
Any such distinction should be eliminated as well. The rights of citizenship should be absolutely uniform regardless of the manner it was acquired.
Arguably, but not really? That statement approaches nonsense. It’s a classification that is unjust.
Uh, who cares? What other governments might or might not do is irrelevant to the rights of U.S. citizenship.
This also approaches nonsense. Tell me what possible harmful consequence can be conceived.
I’ve already given a reason that is compelling – there should not be classes of citizenship. It’s fundamentally unjust. Not only is it compelling, I can’t conceive of any more compelling a reason for any proposed change in the constitution.
Is America somehow deprived by reducing the campaign pool? Not theoretically, but in reality? Where have we provably suffered by the exclusion of someone who wanted to lead but was denied?
This is drivel. The constitution is an establishment of principles, not a divine tome to be revered. It has always been flawed, in some cases fundamentally flawed, and some of those flaws have been corrected, most of them far later than they should have been.
I see no particular need for that amendment either, but it does nothing to support your argument.
This is my view too. This is effectively a non-issue. No reason to go through the expensive, time consuming and arduous process of amending the Constitution.
I don’t see it as “benefiting a handful of people.” I see it as benefiting all of us by eliminating classes of citizenship, the same way that the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments benefited all of us by specifying that black people and women had the same status under the constitution as white men did. Having a class of second-class citizens introduces a fundamental poison in the heart of our democracy, the same way that slavery and denial of full citizenship rights on the basis of race or gender did.
Do any of you who oppose removing the rule actually think an outsider could get elected President? Do any of you actually think someone who just got off the boat could network and politick their way into that office? Given how acrimonious and adversarial the nomination process is, let alone the actual campaign, do you think someone who still has definable ties to a foreign country’s policy could get into office?
The process already errs on the side of over-caution. Look how long it took us to elect a Catholic, let alone someone whose skin is a bit darker than the median. There is no reason for the rule, and rules without reason need to be removed.
(Also, the product of a c-section technically isn’t natural-born, so we’d have to filter for that as well.)
I assume that’s a joke, but maybe it needs repeating: the “natural” in question doesn’t refer to the manner of birth, but to the citizen status. Citizenship is “natural” to the newborn–inherent by the fact of birth. No process is necessary to invest the child with citizenship, to naturalize him.
Apparently you didn’t get the memo the first time so maybe it needs repeating. You don’t know that “born a citizen” is the same thing the constitution refers to with regard to presidential eligibility. You will provide no cite that says so, because there is none; the matter has never been settled.
spark240: Justice Macduff might disagree with you there.
Randy Seltzer: In common law systems, there generally aren’t cites for things that the courts don’t have to decide on, or haven’t had to decide on yet, unless someone can drag up possibly-relevant blackletter law. In fact, this might well be outside of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction as it is a political question and therefore up to Congress to decide by way of impeachment hearings.
(I mean, if anyone actually challenged the legitimacy of a President who was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d and actually got people to go along with the notion.)
More seriously, even if we never actually have to decide precisely what ‘natural-born’ means, it’s still a silly restriction that cannot possibly prevent harm better than the electoral system itself could.
Not really, not being eligible for President and Vice President is a pretty minor issue. This is not something I would like to see elected officials worry about. We have so many real issues to deal with that have real consequences.
I don’t think anyone who’s posted in this thread opposes removing the rule. We just don’t think there’s a compelling reason to do so, which is kind of the sine qua non of constitutional amendments.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think any of us would actually be upset if the rule was changed.
(underlining mine) This is exactly what I’m saying – it has not yet been decided. spark240 keeps giving a definition as if an authoritative one existed. In threads like these (see my short list above) people conflate the definitions of “natural-born citizen” and “citizen who was born as such” all the time. But we won’t know whether such definitions can be accurately conflated until a court with appropriate jurisdiction defines the constitutional term for us.
I should point out that Randy’s view is exactly the one the State Department has as well. When my daughter was born in the UK to two US citizen parents, she was a US citizen from birth - but part of the documentation we got from the Embassy stated that her status as a “natural-born citizen” had yet to be established because definition of the term had not yet been fully decided in a court of law.
I’m going by what I take to be a plain-language (contemporary to its writing) understanding of the text. That the meaning of the words hasn’t been decided yet in court shouldn’t disable our ability to comprehend our language. That it sometimes does, or that people sometimes pretend it does, is why the courts sometimes end up deciding (and sometimes “finding” things in the words beyond all previous imaginings). The note about the State Department reflects our litigious nature not our literate.
I am saying: that in the absence of a Supreme ruling to “settle”–reasonably or unreasonably, but officially–the meaning of words in the Constitution, the best we can do is to talk about plain meanings.
So with the understanding of the historical meaning of “natural,” and the unhyphenated phrase “natural born” in common law, I see no other reasonable understanding of what the phrase could mean except Citizens by birth. What is the counter-argument but we’re not sure?