Democrats and liberal Republicans dismiss the constitutional
amendment to protect marriage against judicial redefinition as
hasty fiddling with the Constitution. But it turns out that they
would like to fiddle with the Constitution this year themselves.
Barney Frank and others in Congress are advancing a constitutional
amendment that would permit foreign-born presidents. The
constitutional prohibition tells immigrants “that they are somehow
flawed,” says Frank.
The left’s mania for concocted rights and egalitarian leveling
is unremitting. Democrats in California made news earlier this year
by demanding that the franchise be extended to children at
elementary schools. Can minors, criminals, the insane, foreigners
vote and run for office? Sure, why not? Let’s take egalitarian
democracy all the way — that’s basically the attitude on the left,
and it drives everything from abolishing the electoral college to
provisional balloting to Frank’s amendment. For the purposes of
stalling the marriage amendment, Frank and his liberal friends
faked up an interest in “federalism” earlier in the year — arguing
that the people’s use of a constitutional amendment was somehow
unconstitutional even though the Constitution gives them that
amendment power — but normally they have contempt for the
republican concepts underlying the Constitution and seek to erase
any distinction, no matter how rational, that interferes with their
egalitarian vision. The United Nations hasn’t enumerated a right to
run for the U.S. presidency as a universal human right, but give it
time.
Let’s not change the Constitution for light and transient
reasons, say the critics of the marriage amendment. But the “Arnold
amendment” satisfies their search for constitutional gravity.
Journalists who reject the marriage amendment as election-year
hackery are listening respectfully to the creators of amendus.org, a website
where you can learn about the need to amend the Constitution “for
Arnold” Schwarzenegger as well as “join Arnold’s team” and “get
Arnold stuff.”
Fortunately, Barney Frank’s amendment and the others floating
around aren’t likely to go anywhere. As John Kerry learned, the
egalitarian internationalist impulse — of which these amendments
are effects — is political poison at this point: the American
people didn’t care for Kerry’s vacation homes abroad; imagine if he
had had a childhood one.
Moreover, the framers’ reasons for prohibiting foreign-born
presidents remain perfectly valid. Perhaps they are even stronger
in post-9/11 America. Has the threat of “undue foreign influence,”
as they put it, passed? No, it has probably intensified in the
American people’s mind. Alexander Hamilton wrote of the “desire in
foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How
could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their
own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” It is clear that foreign
powers, as illustrated by Clinton’s White House coffees with
Chinese spies and dubious Middle Eastern money sloshing through
American politics, still seek an improper ascendant in our
councils.
But the risk goes beyond the potential of foreign powers
planting someone in the presidency or influencing a president born
and raised abroad. Even a foreign-born president not subject to
malign foreign influence is a risk not worth taking, given that
unavoidably divided loyalties (due to an attachment to a country in
which the president was born and raised, has fond memories of,
family in, and so on) could make him either dangerous or
ineffectual. Would an American president, born and raised in the
Middle East, with extensive friends and family there, have bombed
Kabul? Fought the war on terrorism aggressively in the Middle East?
Invaded Iraq? Or would conflicted feelings have made him hesitant
and dithering? Could he identify wholly with the American interest?
The framers’ concern about divided loyalties wasn’t nativist
caprice but a realistic recognition that a president needs to have
an extremely deep attachment to America in order to serve it
effectively in times of crisis.
Why are the eligibility requirements for the presidency devised
more strictly than they are for other offices? Because it is much
more important than other offices. The founders wanted to be
certain that the most powerful official in government — the
official with the fewest restraints on him in time of crisis — had
complete identification with the United States.
Disallowing foreign-born presidents was an obvious proposition
to the delegates at the Constitutional Convention. The importance
of the safeguard was so obvious to them it was barely even
discussed, which is why it is difficult to find very much on what
they actually said about it. Historians note that nobody voted
against the prohibition, and nobody even felt the need to
articulate much of a justification for it since it was such a
clearly bad idea to everyone there. Historians do note the comment
of Charles Pinckney, a constitutional delegate from South Carolina.
He warned that what had happened in Poland fifteen years before the
convention — Poland was carved up after Austria, Prussia, and
Russia planted a puppet in its election — might happen in America:
“we shall soon have the scenes of the Polish Diets and elections
reenacted here, and in not many years the fate of Poland may be
that of United America.” And they also note John Jay’s comment that
it would be “wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the
admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national
Government; and to declare expressly that the Commander in chief of
the army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural
born citizen.”
It is not hard to imagine the delegates of the Constitutional
Convention endorsing the people’s use of their amendment power to
secure marriage from judicial despots. It is impossible to imagine
them endorsing it to expose the presidency to foreign ones.
