Two’s a Crowd When It Comes to Citizenship

Teddy Roosevelt once described dual citizenship as “a self-evident absurdity.” One can only imagine what he’d make of dual citizens in public office.

To be a citizen is to own and be owned in turn. The civis possesses a stake in the civitas, and is entitled to a share in its common life, even as he is bound by its rules and regulations. He is a subject of the same laws that protect him; he is bound by the same standard of justice he appeals to for redress of grievances. The citizen and the city belong to one another, and it is — by necessity — a marriage of exclusivity. If the city were open to all, its rights and privileges would be available to none. If the citizen belonged to all, it would dilute the very concept of belonging itself.
The bill proposes to do exactly what its title implies: “Require newly elected Members to disclose dual citizenship within 90 days of being sworn in.”
It is for this reason that Teddy Roosevelt denounced the concept of dual citizenship as “a self-evident absurdity”: “The full performance of the duties of American citizenship,” Roosevelt wrote in 1915, are “necessarily exclusive of and inconsistent with the profession of citizenship in or allegiance to any other nation.” At the time, Roosevelt was merely expressing the common citizenship assumption of the early 20th century” — i.e., “that national loyalty is indivisible,” wrote David A. Martin, a law professor at the University of Virginia. “This was not just an American view. “By 1915 virtually all other governments followed the same theory of nationality.” 
But “the consensus against dual nationality was subtly eroding from what may have been its high-water mark around the time when TR wrote, in 1915,” Martin wrote. “As far as American rules are concerned, the erosion started in the political arena, but later found its real momentum in the courts.” (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Tim Walz: The Mogadishuan Candidate)
A long line of legal rulings over the course of the next half century steadily weakened the federal government’s safeguards against Americans (or would-be Americans) seeking to voluntarily naturalize in — or take an oat...