Schwarzenegger 2020: Equal Opportunity to Govern

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Getting a portion of the constitution rendered unconstitutional strikes me as a complete non-starter, so it would need to be a constitutional amendment.

Well, actual legal scholars have advanced the interpretation below and there have been court cases of this nature. In real life, I believe that you would lose such a court case like this, but as an attorney, I know better than to trust 100% in any prediction of how a court will rule.

And it seems that convincing a series of judges, up to the Supreme Court, to make a controversial, but not actually wrong* decision, would fulfil the requirements of my ASBs, i.e. requiring minimal change to the world. Changing the mind of a few people, no matter how important or invested with formal power, is less of a change than changing the mind of everyone who'd need to be convinced to pass a Constitutional Amendment.

*There are crucial pillars of modern US case law with much more contrived arguments behind them, generally because the Supreme Court disagreed with the text of the Constitution, felt a given right ought to be protected and twisted and pulled until they could argue it was.

Originally Posted by RyanW

The only conceivable way is an interpretation of some amendment to have already repealed the requirement. The most reasonable way is via a reading of the 14th amendment as eliminating any idea of different tiers of citizenship. "Natural born citizen" can't be a privileged class given rights beyond those of other citizens (by the same logic, age and residence requirements are probably in jeopardy).

That would almost certainly require the intervention of alien space bats and probably a few voodoo sharks, but it's about the only legal sounding argument I can think of.

From a jurisprudential point of view, it's about as plausible as the arguments behind most other decisions where the Supreme Court legislated from the bench.

Note that age and residence requirements are different in kind from privileging place of birth. Those are objective factors that would still pass legal muster as impacting the ability of someone to do the job and from a political standpoint, limiting fundamental civil rights such as voting or running for office on the basis of age and residence has a long, fairly uncontroversial history, with opposition to such arguments being fairly fringe point of views.

On the other hand, any philosophical and political defense of 'natural-born citizens' having more rights than other, inferior types of citizens is going to contradict some deeply held principles of equality under law and be really tough to pull off, politically, for any public figure unwilling to be painted as the newest nativist candidate for the Know Nothing Party.

As an outsider looking in, I can say that I support the legal rights that derive from several controversial Supreme Court rulings, but cannot honestly say that they are sound legal judgements. On several vital occasions, it was very much a case of 'X should be a right and so we will say that Y in the Constuitution actually means X, even if that isn't supported by the text'.

The reality is, however, that when the Supreme Court rules, it doesn't matter if it's a convoluted argument and not the most reasonable interpretation of the text. Their ruling still becomes the law of the land, in some ways, even more unassilable than actual legislation.

However, this can only work for alt-Schwarzenegger if the public would be supportive or at least indifferent enough of the functional change in law resulting from the court challenge so that there is no mass movement against him.

I don't have a handle on public opinion here. It seems fairly innocuous to interpret the 5th Amendment, as per the 14th Amendment, to strictly forbid any class of 'second-class citizens' by US law. I mean, there would be those who hated it, sure, but I'm guessing most of those would already be prone to hate an immigrant candidate anyway.

Originally Posted by TGLS

A semi-plausible series of events:

2008: Trolls attack McCain and Obama over the Natural-Born Citizen Clause. This makes some noise in the media. (Comment: McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and Obama needs no further comment)

2015: Continued nonsense of similar magnitude targets Ted Cruz (born in Calgary, Alberta), Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal (just nonsense on those two). A bipartisan movement promoting the reform of the Natural-Born Citizen Clause emerges.

After failing to resolve the issue through the courts (see the efforts of Abdul Karim Hassan), a constitutional scholar suggests resolving the issue by applying the Enforcement Clause of the 14th Amendment (Laurence Tribe noted this in Sept 2016). The movement passes a radical version of this law that effectively eliminates the Natural-Born Citizen Clause.

Late 2010s: The law is upheld by the courts.

2019: Arnold Schwarzenegger Announces his Candidacy.

That's pretty much what I was thinking, but wasn't sure if it would pass the plausibility muster. Passing a law based on a controversial Constitutional interpretation seems like the path of less resistance than needing to convince the almost absolutely everyone who needs to sign off on a Constitutional Amendment.

I was thinking that somehow, in my campaign, Ted Cruz could have pushed harder on this issue, not because he felt any more able to win, but because the ASBs wanted to use him as the plaintiff in their legal test case.