Ummmm, Constitution before Amendment for anything explicitly stated … unless explicitly ratified by Congress and 3/5th of all states and signed by a president.
See any amendment impacting age of president, vice president, or congresscritters?
Besides, clearly-defined elected Federal office is a privilege, not a first-class citizen nor a rights, much less citizen-related.
Furthermore, only the 7th Federal District ruled like you advocate. None of the remaining 12 districts agree with this and only one ruled against it.
IMHO, Supreme Court will likely vote this down given leaning 1-12 opinion count but a third district probably needs to chime in with any ruling on this before SCOTUS can take it up and put it on their docket.
But even so if it should get ruled in favor, it remains a far, far, far-away tenuous claim toward an age-nostic but voter-elected president/VP/Congress of what are already well-defined clearly-concise Constitutional job descriptions.
Besides, 14th Amendment is an instruction toward the 50 states and not toward Federal. See “No state shall …” part of the 14th.
Nothing amendment, as currently written and ratified, would be able to touch those said Federal job descriptions.
And yet…the 14th Amendment (and CRA) still applies, so…gay marriage is the law of the land.
All adult, non-felon American citizens legally have the same rights, responsibilities, and privileges regardless of their age, sex, country of origin, marriage status, etc., etc., etc.
It's 2022 and that's the law. Why would you think it would be anything else?
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
And the lack of an amendment explicitly changing that.
I would contend that marriage is neither a privilege, nor a right. Government recognition of your marriage is a privilege. In theory you can jump the fence with anybody and say we are married. With contractual law what it is today, you don’t need government recognition for your marriage to be valid.
While, of course, the current activist Supreme Court might change the law, marriage has been recognized not only as a right but as a fundamental right since (as at the latest) Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
The court’s opinion in the case disagrees, stating “Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.”
The age limit for the presidency is explicit in the Constitution. It may be implicitly overturned by 14A, but there's an argument that authors of 14A knew about the presidential age limit, and chose not to overturn it explicitly, thus, the age limit for the presidency stands as an exception.
I'm not claiming to be correct, nor you to be wrong, but I don't see this as being as cut-and-dry as you do. I don't see current SCOTUS majorly agreeing with your assessment, especially by those who claim to be constitution originalists.
If I were on SCOTUS, I would concur with your argument.
Let’s look at the text of the 14th amendment (The pertinent Section 1):
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Clearly applies only to the states. Not sure how anyone could reasonably interpret this as affecting presidential eligibility.
> Not sure how anyone could reasonably interpret this as affecting presidential eligibility.
You could say the same thing about gay marriage. Obviously, the Supreme Court…disagrees.
The Civil Rights Act clarified the meaning of the 14th Amendment, and they now go together whenever the Supreme Court is deciding what the Constitution requires/allows.
> You could say the same thing about gay marriage. Obviously, the Supreme Court…disagrees.
How so? Marriages are performed under state law, not federal law. How does the court ruling on gay marriage demonstrate that the 14th Amendment applies to the federal government, rather than (as it explicitly says) the states?
One might also note that both the federal government and individual states have age limits on things like getting married, having sex, driving a car, buying alcohol, voting, etc.
To the best of my knowledge, no such age limit has ever been successfully challenged on 14th Amendment grounds. Can you provide a citation to one?
Gay marriage and eligibility for office aren't remotely comparable. There is nothing in the US Constitution that explicitly denies marriage to any class of people, therefore the 14th amendment can claim to be applicable, whereas the Constitution specifically sets 35 as the minimum age to be appointed as president, and this has never been repealed. Nor is there any chance that the so-called originalists who make up our current Supreme Court would reject an explicit limitation in the Constitution for an uncertain interpretation of the language in the 14th amendment.
On top of which, the position that the 14th amendment prohibits discrimination is not accurate. (Even the ADEA itself only prohibits age discrimination against individuals 40 and older.) The 14th amendment merely requires that the government have a good reason to discriminate. See McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961) for starters, wherein it was stated that, "The Fourteenth Amendment permits the States a wide scope for discretion in enacting laws which affect some groups of citizens differently than others. The Constitutional safeguard is offended only if the classification rests on grounds wholly irrelevant to the achievement of the State's objective. State legislatures are presumed to have acted within their constitutional power despite the fact that, in practice, their laws result in some inequality." In particular, age related laws generally fall under the "rational basis" standard. Meaning, that the scrutiny of such laws is not as strict as gender and religion related discrimination, but just entails some "rational basis" by the state for the law to pass constitutional muster.
One can see this looking by at various policies set by the Federal government. People under 62 may not apply for Social Security Retirement. People over 26 are not covered under the their parents' policies in the Affordable Care Act. Children under 5 can ride WMATA for free in DC.
The article mentions a recent case where federal courts rejected your argument:
> In 2012, Peta Lindsay challenged the presidential age restriction by running as a presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party candidate, at the age of 27, within the state of California.
> In 2014, Federal appeals Judge Alex Kozinski and two other federal judges rejected arguments that Lindsay’s rights were violated under the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and that the 12th Amendment’s language didn’t allow states to set age requirements.
Maybe your right that the 14th overrides the 35 year minimum (I can see legal arguments going both ways), but until you get a court ruling to that effect then in practice the limitation exists.
the Civil Rights Act: (1) does not, and does not purport to, interpret the 14th Amendment, and (2) does not prohibit age discrimination.
The main restriction on age discrimination is the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which restricts most discrimination based on age over 40, but not age discrimination generally, and is not 14th Amendment based (but instead is Commerce Clause based.)
> It also prohibits discrimination based on country of origin, so non-US-born individuals (that are US citizens) can become President, too
14th Amendment anti-discrinination rules only restrict the states, not the federal government, so it cannot impact the pre-existing federal Constitutional qualifications for the Presidency.
Age is not a suspect classification for purposes of equal protection analysis. It is subject to rational-basis analysis only. This is why laws such as minimum drinking age are Constitutional. There is clearly a rational basis for ensuring the leadership of the country is of a certain (proxy for) maturity.
The Civil Rights Act has no bearing on this question, as the Office of the President of the United States is not a place of public accommodation. Additionally, the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with the Fourteenth Amendment, but sounds in Congress' commerce power.
Your argument is not quite as weak with regard to national origin; however, courts have rejected your argument on numerous occasions, both because there isn't a "positive repugnancy" between the two provisions that would justify Constitutional repeal by implication, and because equal protection with regard to generalized rights and privileges does not have any bearing on eligibility for a specific office.
The 14th Amendment was passed in the wake of the Civil War. It clarified the citizenship of former slaves and their rights in southern states. The amendment goes on to overturn the three-fifths compromise, to disqualify insurrectionists from office, and to cancel the Confederacy's debts.
The amendment did not alter Article II's requirements for Office of the President.
Interesting, this is a very jaded take. A this point it seems most of the constitution has been changed with amendments and legal precedents. That said, what constitution do you consider to be better written than the US?
I don't know about most of it being changed, but yeah, a number of things have been changed. The argument there is that you need to strike a balance between making changes too difficult and too easy, and of course there are arguments on both sides.
One point of comparison might be France, which is currently on its fifth attempt at a republic (with intervening reigns of terror, emperors, restored kings, anarchies, and Nazi collaborationist regimes), while we're still on our first one (or second, if you want to count the Articles of Confederation). Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. have all had multiple attempts as well.
The fact the same document survived so long, with a population so large, makes me think that they succeeded where other governments continuously failed. The US constitution was certainly a unique document with a number of power checks we've certainly (as a nation) worked hard to erode.
Most founding documents seem to be more focused on maintaing the rights of the rich from the start (i.e. no free speech or protesting allowed), the US seemed to focus on it's citizens more.
For sure. I wouldn't argue that it's optimal (given that it's been amended 27 times, obviously it is subject to improvement) but it's clear that they did a really, really good job.
If you look at the German one (it's the one I know best) it took in learnings from a) failures of previous iterations in German, but also b) from constitutions like the American as the Allies consulted and had to agree on it.
Maybe the American survived for so long as for one it changed quite a bit over time, via amendments and via interpretation.
And mind: America had a civil war ... but then found a way to reunite under the constitution (with three amendments) that could also have torn it apart easily.
Flowery language about the people and claims about rights are common even amongst states which are - in practice - the worst oligarchies or dictatorships, and I can't think of any democratic constitutions containing as an egregious a provision in favour of the rich as the Three Fifths Compromise. (In fairness to the US Constitution, claims about inalienable rights were relative novelty at the time, and a lot of the flowery language and claims about rights in other countries' constitutions are borrowed from it and its Enlightenment inspirations)
The one feature of its design which has helped it persist is that it's quite heavily weighted against change (federal structure, separation of powers, supermajorities for amendments) but in some contexts that looks more like a bug than a feature. But overall I'd say its continuity is primarily the result of simple fact the US has existed for longer and under less external pressure than most states than anything particularly outstanding about the text or polity design. That and the Confederacy losing. The quasi-Biblical reverence most Americans treat it with doesn't hurt either, but then some of us Brits get misty eyed at the thought of the Magna Carta, and that's a load of waffle about Cinque Ports and Earls' heirs!
It didn't reduce slave states' powers as much the alternatives of not permitting slavery (which would have been actually consistent with the preamble...) or not counting slaves towards the level of representation their masters got in Congress at all
>It didn't reduce slave states' powers as much the alternatives of not permitting slavery (which would have been actually consistent with the preamble...)
Gosh, it would have been nice if the US had never had legal slavery. Thank you for that keen insight.
>or not counting slaves towards the level of representation their masters got in Congress at all
As you yourself said it was a compromise, between what the free and slave states wanted. Just like everything else in the Constitution, such as the Electoral College being a compromise between the large and small states. Such compromises made the Constitution possible, which in turn made possible the Bill of Rights and the post-Civil War amendments that ended said legal slavery.
The larger point is that the clause was not the means by which slaveholders wrote into the Constitution what their view of the value of a slave's life was, again because the clause reduced their political power.
That's a lot of words to expend basically reinforcing my original point (and refuting a claim that I never made... obviously slaveowners tended to consider slaves lives as far less than three fifths of a non-slave except when it came to inflating their voting power in Congress)
Of course it was a compromise and sometimes compromise renders evils necessary, but codifying the existence of slaves into the constitution obviously made the high ideals spoken of in the preamble look more than a little insincere, and the three fifths clause explicitly granted power to the slaveholders over the more sensible alternative weighting system for Congressional Representatives (number of voters/adults/free people) campaigned for by abolitionists at the time. If we're comparing the US Constitution to other constitutions written under their own unique pressures, its a clear case of the US Constitution not being drafted with more commitment to equality under the law.
The fact that it was ultimately rectified after a war which killed 1 in 50 Americans isn't a particularly strong argument in favour of it being an effective compromise either.
It's really not a jaded perspective, just an honest one—and one that everyone else in the world largely recognizes except Americans.
American's today hold up the US Constitution as some kind of divine and immutable document. They treat it like The Bible, where all the "bad" or ambiguous parts are just kind of forgotten about or supposed to be interpreted a certain way. I mean, the 3/5ths compromise is literally in Article 1. That's how important institutionalized racism was.
"… a horrible mess of weird ideas and compromise and intentional ambiguity," actually describes the US Constitution quite marvelously IMO. It's purpose was to unite a group of states that had no unity and no singular identity. The binding force was a common enemy.
People read into all this mystical nonsense about what the "Founding Fathers" would think about this, that, or the other thing as if they had some kind of divine wisdom. No one was really thinking that far ahead. A quarter of them were willing to sign anything that let them keep their slaves.
It's just a document with a few good ideas. That's it. That's all it is.
It's such a common view in poli-sci I'd consider it practically standard, to the point that it doesn't come up much because everyone just assumes everyone else thinks the US constitution's kinda crap. It's such an old discussion and views on it are often-enough in line with one another that it's a boring topic.
> That said, what constitution do you consider to be better written than the US?
I think the usual poli-sci answer would be "there's a reason most new democracies—including the ones the US sets up—tend to model the Westminster system rather than the US". Even US officials helping nascent democracies generally don't try to push anything like our constitution on them, because it's widely regarded as pretty bad.
That's why in the real world no one takes poli-sci seriously. It's largely an irrelevant field, populated by ivory tower academics who lack the intelligence to contribute to a real science.
One of the weirdest things to me about the US constitution is how rarely the amendment process is used to actually amend it.
Instead it is mostly used to pass unrepeatable laws. The only big changes to the constitution were allowing federal taxes on the general population and making the Senate semi democratic.
And even the other amendments are the same format: ambiguous and very open to interpretation.
Take the bill of rights. Nothing there specifically changes how the constitution works. It just adds some laws about what congress can or can't do. And it does so in very broad strokes.
"The right to bear arms" has been litigated and re-litigated 1000 times and seems to be almost entirely down to the preferences of the day. It's been left up to judges to decide what parts to ignore entirely (the militia bit) and what it applies to (no surface air missiles or fireworks, rifles are ok). Yet everyone acts like the 2nd amendment is settled and either has to be accepted as it is today or repealed entirely.
I don't know who has a better constitution. I just find it really weird that Americans think so highly of their one despite it breaking or failing all the time. Don't get me wrong, we all have our national blink spots. :)
That 'horrible mess of weird ideas' did manage to keep the 'U' in 'U.S.A.' relevant even through a civil war and all that followed. Now that your country more and more starts to resemble the D.S.A. is is to be hoped the 'horrible mess of weird ideas' turns out to be strong enough to allow you to continue on the path set out some 250 years ago. For that you need more "We, the people" and less "They, the deplorables/-ists/-phobes".
You also need to let go of the nihilism which lies behind what you just stated, a statement easily disproven by ~250 years of history. It is very easy to pick out the warts in that history from the comfortable environment created in part due to it, far harder to set out a course to create that history and make it last for so long.
Listening to these old arguments are interesting, because it comes during a time where there wasn't mass disillusionment about American democracy, and the people arguing for no age restriction didn't take into account how disillusioned voters may behave. I'd assert that people are far more willing to "meme" vote today than they were at our founding, and the chances of the next Shirley Temple becoming president are uncomfortably high should there be no age restriction.
What? This was hardly the first time of such political hardship in the USA. Have you heard of Pigasus the Immortal? The founders were remarkably cognizant of how things could go wrong.
Indeed they were. If one examines the debates and arguments, it's clear that they spent much time studying the failure modes of previous republics, and attempting to build in safeguards against those modes.
It'd be nice if we even had viable candidates who were close to this line. It may be an improper statement, but a president at 70-80 won't be around long enough to see the full impact of many of the decisions they make. Maybe an upper limit is needed...
I think a 1-line amendment would be one of the more plausible amendments to pass.
"No person may be inaugurated as President if they are 70 years or older on the day of the election"
Neither party or area of the country would be impacted any more than any other, so there's no partisan angle. Just a few older politicians would be excluded.
That doesn't sound very democratic at all. If the people want to nominate older candidates in the primaries, who are we to criticize that? Isn't that what democracy is all about?
Most democratic processes have limits. While it's amusing to have subs named Boaty McBoatface, completely unfettered democracy isn't as amusing when there are serious consequences, such as long-term elections to national office.
We have primaries and qualifications for getting on the ballot, and while one might quibble about the exact details, I don't think most people would be happy if we somehow collectively elected a 10-year-old, or a goat, as President of the United States of America.
I disagree. The world needs more democracy, not less.
I think the main problem is in how we are only allowed to vote on representatives and not on the actual issues.
Take a look at Switzerland how their democracy is organized, with as much power with the local Gemeinde as possible and voting directly on whatever issue has been raised.
Or they already owe lots of favors to donors who helped them throughout their career and are helped into a spot to pay them back... with no risk of future consequences.
> It'd be nice if we even had viable candidates who were close to this line.
Ron DeSantis is 44 years old, quite close to that line. He is likely to be candidate for your presidency one of these years. You may not like him - or maybe you do - but he seems to be quite viable. If your former president does not get in the way he is likely to be the candidate for the Republican party and with that the next president of the USA given the dearth of viable candidates on "the other side".
Newsom is probably their most viable candidate, true. If the population statistics are anything to go by he won't be able to win seeing how as people move (they often call it 'flee') from California to Florida (and Texas and some other places but Florida seems to be the #1 destination?). Newsom is also burdened with a number of scandals which DeSantis thus far seems to have avoided, all the more remarkable since Newsom mostly has the media on his side. California is also marked by a number of problems which Florida has largely avoided, from rolling blackouts to cities being taken over by homeless encampments and more. This would make the debate centre around Newsom which does not bode well for his chances.
An interesting idea, but even in the 1700s it would have been easy enough to keep it in the extended family, should the voters have been in favour. The first US president to have kids was the beginning of the US' first political dynasty
He'd have been eligible for the presidency at the end of his dad's second term, if his dad had served one. The obstacle to reliable succession was voters, not age.
This is just another example of laws necessarily needing to create discrete benchmarks for continuous realities. Yes, it probably is true that age 35 is more mature and experienced than age 30 and 25. And while arguable, it's at least defensible that the presidency should require a higher bar of maturity and experience than other government offices. But beyond that, the question of where to draw the line is just gonna be clumsy, because the law is a blunt instrument.
Feels related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox . Yeah, you can say there's not a big difference between 34 and 35. And you can say there's not a big difference between 33 and 34. And so on.
Trump was 70 and rather immature. You could more easily argue that having to drop out of school to pay the bills because your single
mom got cancer will mature you so much faster than being a rich and spoiled heir.
At age 25, I would've thought that I was better suited for the job than a 35 year old. At age 32, I'm quite sure I'd be better suited at 35 than I am now.
Given the lower limit, and upper limit only seems right. The world that formed 79 year old Biden, or 76 year old Trump, is not the same world that we live in today.
Most people would probably agree an age limit of some sort makes sense. Very few people would want a 10 year old elected president.
Once you agree on the premise, it’s only a matter of asking what the limit ought to be, and while there may be some theoretical value to that discussion, it seems the average voter in practice is at most ambivalent about candidate age, and I definitely don’t think it’s a given that were the limit ever changed, that the number would be lowered, rather than increased.
By way of example, people in the last decade seem to currently have a preference towards significantly older candidates. Biden took office as this nation’s oldest president at 78 [1], and Trump was our nation’s second oldest president at 70. [1]. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s largest competitor for delegates in the 2016 primary, would have been 75 had he been nominated. [2]
America, for better or worse, seems to like old people.
Maybe? With current systems, a surprising number of people vote without any belief that their vote will make a big difference. And yet, if enough people do that, those votes do in fact make a big difference.
Celebrities have been elected quite a few times, and presumably at least some of those votes came from people who assumed the celebrity in question wasn't going to win, and so there was no risk in their vote.
The better question should be why if there is bottom limit for age of candidacy, why there is no upper limit. If candidate needs to be adult at least 14 years he should be also at least 14 years away from average retirement age (63) so he will be productive, thus upper limit should be 49.
Personally I wouldn't be so strict and let run anyone adult in productive age from 18-68 to avoid having there people with dementia like certain democratic president.
What I would make another condition for all politicians is they must work at least few years in private sector before running for office, I don't really like we are often governed by people who "worked" whole life in comfort and safety net of their gov funded job with no risks and productivity requirements detached from experience of majority population. They should also pass basic test how much cost milk, bread, etc. and how to deal with daily scenarios.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadSee any amendment impacting age of president, vice president, or congresscritters?
Besides, clearly-defined elected Federal office is a privilege, not a first-class citizen nor a rights, much less citizen-related.
Furthermore, only the 7th Federal District ruled like you advocate. None of the remaining 12 districts agree with this and only one ruled against it.
IMHO, Supreme Court will likely vote this down given leaning 1-12 opinion count but a third district probably needs to chime in with any ruling on this before SCOTUS can take it up and put it on their docket.
But even so if it should get ruled in favor, it remains a far, far, far-away tenuous claim toward an age-nostic but voter-elected president/VP/Congress of what are already well-defined clearly-concise Constitutional job descriptions.
Besides, 14th Amendment is an instruction toward the 50 states and not toward Federal. See “No state shall …” part of the 14th.
Nothing amendment, as currently written and ratified, would be able to touch those said Federal job descriptions.
Sorry.
Source: Levin v. Madigan, 692 F.3d 607, 615-22 (7th Cir. 2012).
And yet…the 14th Amendment (and CRA) still applies, so…gay marriage is the law of the land.
All adult, non-felon American citizens legally have the same rights, responsibilities, and privileges regardless of their age, sex, country of origin, marriage status, etc., etc., etc.
It's 2022 and that's the law. Why would you think it would be anything else?
The 14th Amendment (and the CRA) didn't explicitly change the definition of marriage, either.
You are hung up on technicalities that the Supreme Court has already rejected many, many times.
Marriage, not so much.
Then there is this definition of a common-law wife that varied wildly amongst 50 states and territories.
While, of course, the current activist Supreme Court might change the law, marriage has been recognized not only as a right but as a fundamental right since (as at the latest) Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
That case is overturning a 90 year old precedent based on 14A equal protection.
The court’s opinion in the case disagrees, stating “Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.”
The age limit for the presidency is explicit in the Constitution. It may be implicitly overturned by 14A, but there's an argument that authors of 14A knew about the presidential age limit, and chose not to overturn it explicitly, thus, the age limit for the presidency stands as an exception.
I'm not claiming to be correct, nor you to be wrong, but I don't see this as being as cut-and-dry as you do. I don't see current SCOTUS majorly agreeing with your assessment, especially by those who claim to be constitution originalists.
If I were on SCOTUS, I would concur with your argument.
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Clearly applies only to the states. Not sure how anyone could reasonably interpret this as affecting presidential eligibility.
You could say the same thing about gay marriage. Obviously, the Supreme Court…disagrees.
The Civil Rights Act clarified the meaning of the 14th Amendment, and they now go together whenever the Supreme Court is deciding what the Constitution requires/allows.
How so? Marriages are performed under state law, not federal law. How does the court ruling on gay marriage demonstrate that the 14th Amendment applies to the federal government, rather than (as it explicitly says) the states?
To the best of my knowledge, no such age limit has ever been successfully challenged on 14th Amendment grounds. Can you provide a citation to one?
On top of which, the position that the 14th amendment prohibits discrimination is not accurate. (Even the ADEA itself only prohibits age discrimination against individuals 40 and older.) The 14th amendment merely requires that the government have a good reason to discriminate. See McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961) for starters, wherein it was stated that, "The Fourteenth Amendment permits the States a wide scope for discretion in enacting laws which affect some groups of citizens differently than others. The Constitutional safeguard is offended only if the classification rests on grounds wholly irrelevant to the achievement of the State's objective. State legislatures are presumed to have acted within their constitutional power despite the fact that, in practice, their laws result in some inequality." In particular, age related laws generally fall under the "rational basis" standard. Meaning, that the scrutiny of such laws is not as strict as gender and religion related discrimination, but just entails some "rational basis" by the state for the law to pass constitutional muster.
One can see this looking by at various policies set by the Federal government. People under 62 may not apply for Social Security Retirement. People over 26 are not covered under the their parents' policies in the Affordable Care Act. Children under 5 can ride WMATA for free in DC.
> In 2012, Peta Lindsay challenged the presidential age restriction by running as a presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party candidate, at the age of 27, within the state of California.
> In 2014, Federal appeals Judge Alex Kozinski and two other federal judges rejected arguments that Lindsay’s rights were violated under the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and that the 12th Amendment’s language didn’t allow states to set age requirements.
No, it doesn't.
> as interpreted by the Civil Rights Act
the Civil Rights Act: (1) does not, and does not purport to, interpret the 14th Amendment, and (2) does not prohibit age discrimination.
The main restriction on age discrimination is the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which restricts most discrimination based on age over 40, but not age discrimination generally, and is not 14th Amendment based (but instead is Commerce Clause based.)
> It also prohibits discrimination based on country of origin, so non-US-born individuals (that are US citizens) can become President, too
14th Amendment anti-discrinination rules only restrict the states, not the federal government, so it cannot impact the pre-existing federal Constitutional qualifications for the Presidency.
What are you trying to do?
Age is not a suspect classification for purposes of equal protection analysis. It is subject to rational-basis analysis only. This is why laws such as minimum drinking age are Constitutional. There is clearly a rational basis for ensuring the leadership of the country is of a certain (proxy for) maturity.
The Civil Rights Act has no bearing on this question, as the Office of the President of the United States is not a place of public accommodation. Additionally, the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with the Fourteenth Amendment, but sounds in Congress' commerce power.
Your argument is not quite as weak with regard to national origin; however, courts have rejected your argument on numerous occasions, both because there isn't a "positive repugnancy" between the two provisions that would justify Constitutional repeal by implication, and because equal protection with regard to generalized rights and privileges does not have any bearing on eligibility for a specific office.
The amendment did not alter Article II's requirements for Office of the President.
Stop trying to discern the hidden wisdom. There isn't any.
One point of comparison might be France, which is currently on its fifth attempt at a republic (with intervening reigns of terror, emperors, restored kings, anarchies, and Nazi collaborationist regimes), while we're still on our first one (or second, if you want to count the Articles of Confederation). Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. have all had multiple attempts as well.
Most founding documents seem to be more focused on maintaing the rights of the rich from the start (i.e. no free speech or protesting allowed), the US seemed to focus on it's citizens more.
Maybe the American survived for so long as for one it changed quite a bit over time, via amendments and via interpretation.
And mind: America had a civil war ... but then found a way to reunite under the constitution (with three amendments) that could also have torn it apart easily.
Flowery language about the people and claims about rights are common even amongst states which are - in practice - the worst oligarchies or dictatorships, and I can't think of any democratic constitutions containing as an egregious a provision in favour of the rich as the Three Fifths Compromise. (In fairness to the US Constitution, claims about inalienable rights were relative novelty at the time, and a lot of the flowery language and claims about rights in other countries' constitutions are borrowed from it and its Enlightenment inspirations)
The one feature of its design which has helped it persist is that it's quite heavily weighted against change (federal structure, separation of powers, supermajorities for amendments) but in some contexts that looks more like a bug than a feature. But overall I'd say its continuity is primarily the result of simple fact the US has existed for longer and under less external pressure than most states than anything particularly outstanding about the text or polity design. That and the Confederacy losing. The quasi-Biblical reverence most Americans treat it with doesn't hurt either, but then some of us Brits get misty eyed at the thought of the Magna Carta, and that's a load of waffle about Cinque Ports and Earls' heirs!
Ah yes, yet another person who presumes to pontificate on the Three Fifths Clause without actually having thought about the actual consequences.
The clause reduced slave states' power.
Gosh, it would have been nice if the US had never had legal slavery. Thank you for that keen insight.
>or not counting slaves towards the level of representation their masters got in Congress at all
As you yourself said it was a compromise, between what the free and slave states wanted. Just like everything else in the Constitution, such as the Electoral College being a compromise between the large and small states. Such compromises made the Constitution possible, which in turn made possible the Bill of Rights and the post-Civil War amendments that ended said legal slavery.
The larger point is that the clause was not the means by which slaveholders wrote into the Constitution what their view of the value of a slave's life was, again because the clause reduced their political power.
Of course it was a compromise and sometimes compromise renders evils necessary, but codifying the existence of slaves into the constitution obviously made the high ideals spoken of in the preamble look more than a little insincere, and the three fifths clause explicitly granted power to the slaveholders over the more sensible alternative weighting system for Congressional Representatives (number of voters/adults/free people) campaigned for by abolitionists at the time. If we're comparing the US Constitution to other constitutions written under their own unique pressures, its a clear case of the US Constitution not being drafted with more commitment to equality under the law.
The fact that it was ultimately rectified after a war which killed 1 in 50 Americans isn't a particularly strong argument in favour of it being an effective compromise either.
American's today hold up the US Constitution as some kind of divine and immutable document. They treat it like The Bible, where all the "bad" or ambiguous parts are just kind of forgotten about or supposed to be interpreted a certain way. I mean, the 3/5ths compromise is literally in Article 1. That's how important institutionalized racism was.
"… a horrible mess of weird ideas and compromise and intentional ambiguity," actually describes the US Constitution quite marvelously IMO. It's purpose was to unite a group of states that had no unity and no singular identity. The binding force was a common enemy.
People read into all this mystical nonsense about what the "Founding Fathers" would think about this, that, or the other thing as if they had some kind of divine wisdom. No one was really thinking that far ahead. A quarter of them were willing to sign anything that let them keep their slaves.
It's just a document with a few good ideas. That's it. That's all it is.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
> That said, what constitution do you consider to be better written than the US?
I think the usual poli-sci answer would be "there's a reason most new democracies—including the ones the US sets up—tend to model the Westminster system rather than the US". Even US officials helping nascent democracies generally don't try to push anything like our constitution on them, because it's widely regarded as pretty bad.
Instead it is mostly used to pass unrepeatable laws. The only big changes to the constitution were allowing federal taxes on the general population and making the Senate semi democratic.
And even the other amendments are the same format: ambiguous and very open to interpretation.
Take the bill of rights. Nothing there specifically changes how the constitution works. It just adds some laws about what congress can or can't do. And it does so in very broad strokes.
"The right to bear arms" has been litigated and re-litigated 1000 times and seems to be almost entirely down to the preferences of the day. It's been left up to judges to decide what parts to ignore entirely (the militia bit) and what it applies to (no surface air missiles or fireworks, rifles are ok). Yet everyone acts like the 2nd amendment is settled and either has to be accepted as it is today or repealed entirely.
I don't know who has a better constitution. I just find it really weird that Americans think so highly of their one despite it breaking or failing all the time. Don't get me wrong, we all have our national blink spots. :)
You also need to let go of the nihilism which lies behind what you just stated, a statement easily disproven by ~250 years of history. It is very easy to pick out the warts in that history from the comfortable environment created in part due to it, far harder to set out a course to create that history and make it last for so long.
If we could just get approval voting implemented universally, maybe we wouldn't need an enforced upper limit.
"No person may be inaugurated as President if they are 70 years or older on the day of the election"
Neither party or area of the country would be impacted any more than any other, so there's no partisan angle. Just a few older politicians would be excluded.
We have primaries and qualifications for getting on the ballot, and while one might quibble about the exact details, I don't think most people would be happy if we somehow collectively elected a 10-year-old, or a goat, as President of the United States of America.
An old person doesn't have to care about a future career once out of office and can ignore bribes. (Yeah yeah reality might prove differently)
Presumably there are advantages there too. Perhaps harder to bribe or threaten someone older (they don’t care as much?)
Ron DeSantis is 44 years old, quite close to that line. He is likely to be candidate for your presidency one of these years. You may not like him - or maybe you do - but he seems to be quite viable. If your former president does not get in the way he is likely to be the candidate for the Republican party and with that the next president of the USA given the dearth of viable candidates on "the other side".
It would be very hard to consistently pass an office from parent to child when the officer holder has to be at least 35.
Especially since there was already a de facto requirement the office holder be male, excluding older daughters.
Are you talking pre-US monarchies? If so did you mean to say not be female?
I didn’t mean monarchies per se. Plenty of things were passed father to son: titles, property, reputation.
That’s not exactly reliable succession.
Feels related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox . Yeah, you can say there's not a big difference between 34 and 35. And you can say there's not a big difference between 33 and 34. And so on.
Once you agree on the premise, it’s only a matter of asking what the limit ought to be, and while there may be some theoretical value to that discussion, it seems the average voter in practice is at most ambivalent about candidate age, and I definitely don’t think it’s a given that were the limit ever changed, that the number would be lowered, rather than increased.
By way of example, people in the last decade seem to currently have a preference towards significantly older candidates. Biden took office as this nation’s oldest president at 78 [1], and Trump was our nation’s second oldest president at 70. [1]. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s largest competitor for delegates in the 2016 primary, would have been 75 had he been nominated. [2]
America, for better or worse, seems to like old people.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Un...
[2] September 8, 1941 birthdate; +75 gets to 2016
Wouldn't they just... not elect them, then?
Celebrities have been elected quite a few times, and presumably at least some of those votes came from people who assumed the celebrity in question wasn't going to win, and so there was no risk in their vote.
and I oop
Personally I wouldn't be so strict and let run anyone adult in productive age from 18-68 to avoid having there people with dementia like certain democratic president.
What I would make another condition for all politicians is they must work at least few years in private sector before running for office, I don't really like we are often governed by people who "worked" whole life in comfort and safety net of their gov funded job with no risks and productivity requirements detached from experience of majority population. They should also pass basic test how much cost milk, bread, etc. and how to deal with daily scenarios.