A couple of months ago, I mentioned an effort in Congress to change the Constitution to allow U.S. citizens who may have been born outside the country to run for president. So far, the effort hasn’t exactly caught fire.
In the Senate, Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is sponsoring S.J. Res. 15, which Hatch is calling the “Equal Opportunity to Govern” amendment. Since its introduction in March, however, not a single senator has signed on to the measure as a co-sponsor. Not a good sign.
In the House, there is small but bi-partisan support for a very similar proposal — H.J. Res. 59 — sponsored by Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.). However, since Snyder’s amendment was unveiled, it has garnered only 5 co-sponsors in the last three months. The measure, in other words, is going no where fast.
Nevertheless, an American journalist living in London, Robert Cox, wrote a pretty persuasive op-ed on this issue for the LA Times today. Maybe it will help get the amendment moving.
Cox is not a disinterested observer. He and his wife have two kids. Though all four of them are U.S. citizens, he knows his children are ineligible for the presidency because they were born on European soil. Cox apparently has a romanticized vision where he wants to tell his two sons that like all other Americans, they too can one day be president of the United States, but he can’t because Article 2, Sec. 1, of the Constitution says, “No person except a natural born citizen…shall be eligible to the office of President.”
“Now, setting aside whether my children…are in any way qualified for higher office, this is just plain silly,” Cox wrote. “It may have made sense when the founding fathers, fresh from a bloody war of independence, feared attempts by crusty European aristocrats to return the nation to monarchic rule.”
Cox also points to a few good examples I was unaware of. Michigan Gov. George Romney sought the Republican nomination in 1968 despite the fact that he was born in Mexico (his parents were U.S. citizens but were Mormon missionaries in Mexico at the time). During Romney’s campaign, there was some talk of the constitutional question, but since Romney’s candidacy didn’t go far, the issue was never pursued.
Moreover, Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s nominee in 1964, was born in the territory of Arizona before it became a state. Should that have disqualified him for the presidency? Since Goldwater only won six states and lost in a landslide, it didn’t really matter.
Nevertheless, Cox points to these examples as part of the ongoing need to change the requirement.
“[W]hat is the nation waiting for?” Cox wrote. “In a properly functioning 21st century democracy of nearly 300 million people, we ought to be capable of weeding out candidates who are wily fronts for a foreign power, a feat that might have been difficult in the late 1700s. And if we are to be the world’s model for a democratic, open society, what better way to advertise that fact than by giving any American, born anywhere in the world, a chance to occupy the White House?”
I realize this effort isn’t going anywhere, but Cox makes a good case. If you’re interested in this, be sure to check out his essay.