Third Party & Independents: Archives

does this mean i can run for prime minister of any other country?

no?

hmmmm……

You realize the first person who will want to use this provision will be a certain Austrian with an affinity for cigars. Far be it for me to be speculative of Austrians who want to be president of a nation at war though, I’m sure history smiles on these types of things.

While I agree that the time has come for that particular provision of the Constitution to go, I do not believe that Ah-nold is the right man to challenge it.

It’s entirely inappropriate for Arnold to be the one championing this at this time. He’s basically wanting to we-write the Constitution to feed his ego by running for President. His suggestion that the rule require 20 years of citizenship (well look at that, he’d just qualify) is almost comical in his attempting to conform the Amendment to his liking. Why not say only foreigners from Austria can run?

I’m not entirely against this idea, but I have some misgivings about it on some levels. For example what if we had a President born in a country that then later became an opponent for some reason. Whould that cloud judgement of the situation? Say we had a President born in Cuba. Would he act rationally in regards to U.S.-Cuban relations? As much as one could claim to be logical and level headed, people always have an emotional attachment to where they come from, whether a different city, state or country.

On the other hand, we are a land of immigrants. Other then a tiny fraction of our population, we’re all from someplace else originally. And maybe laws should reflect this.

If you really believe someone who was born in another country cant be a good president, do not vote for him. As for people who seem to be opposing this cause of Arnold, please take off your partisan hats for a couple of minutes and support something that is right on principle.

It is not entirely outside the realm of possibility for a foreign country, oh say China, or Iran, or Syria to hatch a plot to gain the Presidency of the United States if such an Amendment were to pass and become part of our Constitution. That is not a risk I personally are willing to take.

Mr. Martin, exactly right. They are called “sleepers” and we didn’t know who they were during the cold war and we aren’t going to know who they are in the future.

One of the worst possible ideas every brought up - to allow former foreigners to legally achieve the office of President, with the awesome power that that office has.

Unbelieveable!

As John Walker Lind proved, you do not need to be born in another nation to be a traitor to this country and want to fight for her enemies. People born in other nations have to pay taxes, fight and die in wars for this country, and yet you think its too dangerous to allow them to even run for president. I guess nativism isnt as dead among intellectual circles as I thought- never underestimate the power of prejudice, I guess. There is absolutely no evidence to back up these conspiracy theories- no sign that a foriegn country has been able to buy a large portion of our elected officials in other branches, just prejudicial fear massecarading as reasoned arguments.

The assumption is that because someone is born in another country, they are somehow disloyal and we cant trust the voters to tell the difference. I am sorry, but I am absolutely shocked and sickened by those last two responses.

when someone runs for president they are subjected to sucha level of press scrutinity that to say that something like being a sleeper for another nation would not come out is insane. Especially given that nativist fears like your would drive journalists to ESPECIALLY look at connections between the candidate and the country he was born in. A person cant even become president without one of their silly sexual affairs coming out- again, these arguments are just rationalization in my book.

David and Edward I am surprised by your opinions, What Misha wrote is a good idea, if you don’t trust a foreign-born person don’t vote for them. This is a WORLD we live in first and formost. I think your comments paralel racisim, to say “sorry you weren’t born here, you can’t be trusted!”

I would absolutly vote for the best canidate no matter where they were born. If a canidate is an American Citizen how dare we limit their rights!

Misha:

No one is saying that ” because someone is born in another country, they are somehow disloyal”. What people ARE saying is that allowing people of non-US birth opens the door to potential long range problems. They are easy to see, and are in fact not far fetched at all.

As far as Schwarzenegger is concerned, I personally dont think he has the profile nor the desire to be President. And any decisions on such an issue must be made without reference to any particular person. To make decisions with such long ranging effect based simply on one person is foolish and ignorant.

Misha while your sick and overcome by my concern over “sleeper agents” may I recommend recovering with a good book (there are hundreds) about the cold war sleeper spy hunts and why we could never be sure if they existed or not unless the the Soviet Union confirmed them in one way or another, or, they awoke and did their business.

You must be pretty young to not have these headlines and stories within your personal memory. But, youth should be no excuse for ignorance when so much history abounds. Do your homework before you start painting historical fact for pathological conspiracy theories. Sleepers did exist, and may still exist (without a mission or boss) from the cold war.

Also, there is a bonding that occurs when one is born and raised in a nation that has provided well for you. That bonding is often called patriotism and while immigrants can become as patriotic as a person born here, it is clear persons born here have no divided loyalties, whereas immigrants, at least have that potential for divided loyalty.

Finally, there is the pandora’s box. Open the Constitution up to amendments to such basic prescriptions which certainly do our country no harm, will make it easier and more likely to ammend other provisions with short term popularity and long term potentially devastating consequences, like dynastic presidencies without term limits, shifts in the checks and balances of the branches of government by ammendment, or enhancements to the fostering of police state provisions which may be appealing now, but, mark the beginning of a violent civil war in our future.

By all means, tinker away because it burns you up that someone else may disagree. Changing the Constitution should never be a process brought about by feelings and gut intutions. There is no graver activity the American people can undertake than to alter its own Constitution. It had better do so with its very best risk-reward thinking cap on and push emotions out of the assessment. The future of our children and their children depends on it.

martin, it has nothing to do with distrusting immigrants as a lot, and that is certainly my feeling or thought. Immigration makes this country great and immigrants are usually more patriotic and knowledgeable of our history and government than 10’s of millions of citizens born here.

So, don’t even try to turn this careful risk assessment of the potential danger of ammending the Constitution in this way into some kind of racist anti-immigrant stance on my part. You will simply be completely missing the point and misunderstanding whom you are discussing this with.

The argument is based on introducing a potential threat which we have demonstrable historical fact to support could exist if this ammendment were to pass. The issue is whether the benefits outweigh the potential risks of security in our government, not whether immigrants make good Americans. They almost always do.

ok, let me get this straight- you actually think the following is a big enough possibility that you are willing to a priori stop nerely 1/10 of our loyal citizens from running for the highest office in the land:

1. a sleeper cell agent will get so popular that he will get national attention.

2. he will be able to secure a party nomination (one of the two major parties, I assume), all while maintaning his cover while being funded and aided by a foriegn government.

3. he will do all this while tricking not only all of our intellegience agencies, but thousands of reporters, who will surely be focusing on ANY connection they can find between him and his country of birth.

4. he will continue to perpetrate this ruse through the general election, and the people will elect him president, all while the press will have NO idea that he is a sleeper cell?

I would call that as crazy a conspiracy theory as one can think of. the reason sleeper cells can work is because the person flies under the radar. Like i said before, a person cant run for president without every little detail of his life being all of msnbc and cnn= to think that a foriegn born sleeper agent could actually go through the 2 year cycle of a presidential campaign and actually win the presidency of the united states is so luny that Oliver Stone wouldnt make such a movie.

Also, every other position in the U.S. (other than president and V.P.) is avaliable for foriegn born people, and I have yet to see any evidence of those comperatively minor positions (in terms of public scrutinity) being infultrated with a foreign-born sleeper cell.

As for your rather silly comments about how ammending the constitution is oh so scared that we shouldnt touch it to allow 1/10 of our citizens a chance at the highest office- most of our ammendments have hardly been momentous and have done no damage as a result. just a decade ago we had a minor ammendment about how congressmen would be compensated…

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from the dead.” - Thomas Jefferson

Misha, this conversation appears to be going nowhere, unless you do a little research on sleeper agents. And I don’t have the time or desire to take you there.

Your condescension of others with whom you disagree does not foster very intelligent debate. It also refelects an excited emotional state which will lead to burn out if one debates in such a state on a daily basis. Often your arguments are well laid out and informed. I hope more of them will be as well.

Good enough for the Founders good enough for me. The Constitutions should nt be amended on a whim, or because a man who won a popularity contest in California now has aspirations for the nation’s top political office. We didn’t win the Cold War to lose it to such foolishness.

Actually, I think Arnold has no such aspirations….

however, the RNC is looking for a guaranteed win.

who better than a man who has no political experience…but hey he was the terminator….

and he won california in a landslide based on his popularity alone.

both dems and reps voted for him….

which the GOP knows they would if he ran for President.

this amendment isn’t to allow Juan or Kalib to run for President….it’s for Arnold or some other rich white non-native born man with a very republican agenda.

There has to be a constitutional line drawn somewhere. Even with twenty years, we could concievably get a president who has spent most of their adult life as a foreign citizen. Now that’s alright if you have somebody who’s a representative, or Senator, because immigration can create the kind of Demographic shifts that would put immigrants in a leadership role.

But America, as a whole, is represented by our president. It would not be fitting to put into office at the head of our armed forces, as the executor of our laws, as the maker of our treaties, and the representative of our nations interest at home and abroad, a person whose loyalties could very well be divided between the land of his birth, and the land of his new citizenship.

I mean, consider what would happen if our president was to be faced with an international crisis whose solution would disadvantage Austria. Would Arnold Schwarzenneger be capable of working that out with only American interests at heart? Would he be capable of taking the opposite side in a war, and could we trust him if he actually did?

This is about a candidate having a major conflict of interest, one that could seriously harm this country. Better to never let the possibility arise, even if immigrant children cannot become president.

> Like i said before, a person cant run for
> president without every little detail of his
> life being all of msnbc and cnn

Actually, there are long stretches of President Bush’s life that are still pretty much blanks, either because record-keeping was so poor or because the press hasn’t looked into it. Why did it take until the eve of the 2000 election for his DUI record (one of probably many others) to surface? Was it because the press wasn’t looking very hard, or because such records are easily lost or easily concealed? Either way, it shows how easy it is for a candidate’s past to become murky.

I’m just making a point that if, say, Arnold Schwarzeneggar spent three or four years of his youth at a Soviet indoctrination camp, it would probably be pretty easy to cover it up (“I was skiing!”) and nobody would be the wiser.

I’m not saying I think this is likely, I’m just saying that a candidate’s past cannot possibly be investigated even to a level of detail where we know where they were for entire years at a time, in particular for immigrants from countries which may not keep good records. Or from countries which are deliberately hiding records from us.

Perhaps the Amendment should deliberately exclude people who are alive at the time of the passage of the amendment, ensuring that no foreign-born candidate will emerge for at least 35 years. That should give us enough time to prepare for this sort of change.

-Cf

I can think of a much better Amendment anyway: Make the Senate a proportionally-representative body. It’s not fair that my little neighborhood of Brooklyn, which has the same population as Vermont, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota **combined** only gets 1/3 of a Senator to their eight senators. And in the Electoral college, the vote of a citizen of Montana or Delaware counts measurably more than mine. This is my idea of a Constitutional Sacred Cow that needs to be overturned.

Oh, and DC statehood.

Of course, neither is likely to occur because by extending voting rights fairly this way the Republican lock on the Senate - and the Presidency - would be shattered. Sigh.

-Cf

Christopher- the third chapter of my thesis on the united states constitutional convention is exactly about what you are writing about- the need to change the method of representation in the senate (there are many problems in this- not hte least of which is that it is the only part of the constitution which is not “allowed” to be ammended by the terms of the consititution). Actually, since I wrote that thesis I have been slowly working on my book about that issue.

Most conservatives would be shocked if they realized that all the founders they venerate actually were opposed the 2-senators per state model- people like Madison, Wilson and Hamilton ALL supported proportional representation in the senate. The arguments on the other side were rather weak. If you are more interested in the arguments at the convention on this, I would be more than happy to foward you the last chapter of my thesis for your enjoyment :)

by the way, D.C. statehood would be a terrible idea beacuse it would give D.C. two senators, further exacerbating the problems caused by the 2-senators-per-state model.

That’s a good point, Misha, that DC statehood and proportional represenation are contradictory. But if I can’t have one I’ll take the other.

I’m curious about what you mean by “it is the only part of the constitution which is not “allowed” to be ammended”. I wasn’t aware of that - where does it say that?

-Cf

Article V: “The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. “

basically every single state in the union would have to approve this ammendment for it to work in any meaningfull way- thats not likely. I do think, however, that if we resorted to a constitutional convention, this is something that could be gotten around. It does not make any sense that the constitution can set a higher barrier for its modification than its adoption- because then a small % of a previous generation would be able to bind a future one- this would go against the classic justification of constitutionalism…

Oh wait, I found it: “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”

Dammit. Wait, there’s an interesting (and pedantic) logical dilemma there: How can one state consent to a change in it’s equal suffrage without causing all other states to have their equal suffrage changed (if one state is decreased, all others are increased)?

Boy that really sucks. So DC Statehood is really where it’s at then. Perhaps New York City should split up into 8 states (NYC is about as big as the 8 smallest states combined). There’s got to be some way to combat the ridiculous fact that tiny groups of people spread out over vast chunks of land like Wyoming and Alaska get to be states.

I guess part of your thesis should be about how, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century, our country allowed these frontier outposts to join the country as states in the first place, when I’ll bet none of them ever had a population comparable to any of the big east coast cities, much less the existing states. Did one party dominate so strongly that they were able to bring on new states likely to produce Senators from their party? Or was everyone so stupid as to think that things would balance out and that North Dakota would someday be as populated as Virginia or Massachusetts?

-Cf

Christopher- the way it actually happend was not based upon party, but based upon region. the north and south states would basically bring in states in pairs so as to maintain the free-slave balance in the Senate. My thesis was about only the constitutional convention, but my book will take a longer historical view- especially emaphisizing the role of the civil war and the 17th ammendment.

Misha, my question wasn’t about the framers of the Constitution, but about the various legislative bodies in the US during the period of westward expansion (late 19th and early 20th century) where so many barely-populated states joined the nation. The politics around this must have been partisan, no?

-Cf

I think I was unclear in my answer. The period if westword expansion involved several political periods- the first of which involved only the democratic party running, with no opposition (basically everyone was a democrat after the federalists went away very early in the 19th cenutry). Then in 1840 the whigs emerged for several election cycles as a viable alternative to the democrats- winning a couple of elections ect (Lincoln was a whig in his younger days, for example). However, the issue over which states to allow in was not split based upon party lines, but rather upon sectional lines. This is what the missouri compromise, the compromise of 1850 ect were all about. the north and the south each had democrats and whigs; the south would push for more slave states after bellow the missouri compromise line, and the north would push for more states to get allowed in above that line. basically, they ended up trying to keep the balance. The problem came when this compromise broke down in 1854 and the south started demanding more and more slave states, or at least to allow the people (who they thought would vote for slavery) to choose if the state would be admitted based upon slavery. Then the republican party emerged damanding no more slavery in the terrorities, which would insure that all new states would be free- thus secession.

This is my long way of saying that population percentages and partisan politics were not the motivating consideration of whether states were let in or not, but it was rather a concern by north and the south to maintain the section balance on the issue of slavery. So it was partisan in terms of section not political party, for the most part.

that story, of course, only takes us up to around 37 states. There were a bunch of states admited in 1889-1890. Sadly, even though I am a U.S. history major, I did not take any course in that time period in U.S. history. I do not know what role partisan politics played in those admissions and I do not recall anything from my general knowledge of the time period that would help with that. perhaps someone could look it up :)

The constitution is not easily Amendable, and thank God for that. I mean, look at Texas. Texas is good evidence of what modifying the constitution on a whim does to your state’s document. Truth is, we’ve gotten along fine by making sure that most problems don’t escalate into bloodily divisive issues. The constitution is consistent about pitting one side of government against another, making sure that nobody would end up with permanent advantages over anybody else, the kind that we see tearing countries apart all over the world. We let people worship as they will. We let the press print what it wants, as long as it doesn’t go obscene, or knowingly print or maintain lies. We let people peaceably assemble, and ask the government to atone for its mistakes and injustices. Some countries would block these things out of fear, but we don’t, and because we don’t, we don’t have as many people stewing in their own convictions, unable to stand up for what they believe without breaking the law, or overthrowing it.

Our system is not built to ensure somebody’s ability to railroad somebody else out of their rights. That’s why we can enjoy more peace and contentment than Iran or other countries of that type.

Don’t knock it. Our nation has existed under one system of government continously for over 200 years. Few countries, even in Europe have been able to maintain that kind of unity for that long.