Schwarzenegger 2020: Equal Opportunity to Govern

[weby]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Congress can indeed pass a law that would purport to define 'natural-born citizen' and/or define who is eligible for the Presidency. If they did, the courts would then rule on the constitutionality of that statue (because someone would inevitably challenge it).

The natural born citizen does not seem to be defined in the constitution, so that is the possibility that I see be it legislative or courts without requiring a constitutional amendment that seems fairly unlikely.

However, if Congress passed an Equal Opportunity to Govern statue that essentially removed the distinction between 'natural-born citizen' and 'citizen', I'm far from convinced that courts would necessarily strike it down. As are, I note, several constitutional scholars, mostly because they feel courts would hesitate to rule based on the political-question doctrine.

Surely a candidate would have standing, either one prevented from putting his name on the ballot or an opponent wishing to challenge such ballots if it is allowed.

One option for my Alien Space Bats would be to find someone, in the period between 2011-2018, to run for President 2012 or 2016 with the explicit purpose of getting a case in front of a court in order to yield a precedent that Schwarzenegger could use when it had been established.

Basically Arnold himself could be the test case, make a try in 2016 and have him be struck down and then have the case work it through the courts in time for his 2020 run. His campaign message could then include the "The establisment tried to not allow you the choice of me, so show them wrong"

Obviously, under ordinary circumstances they wouldn't, because of the political-question doctrine and a general, sensible reluctance to seek out controversy, but as noted before, influencing a small number of judges with ASB methods is exponentially easier than influencing a majority of Congress (let alone a supermajority and all the state legislators needed).

And the thing is.. influencing some other influential people to champion the cause publicly even before the court case could make the court decision seem more "normal"

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm assuming that a rival candidate would have both legal standing and a pretty strong motive to challenge the constitutionality of a statue which made alt-Schwarzenegger eligible. After all, in the world of the setting, his political skill, charisma and popularity has grown by leaps and bounds from what it is in the real world and by the date in my setting (December 30, 2018), anyone who wants to run in 2020 must worry quite a lot about alt-Schwarzenegger.

Well the thing could have been settled before the election as suggested by my arnold2016 suggestion above.