arnold_vote4me

This is just one of those hypothetical scenarios, like something in a John Grisham book, with absolutely no connection to anyone in real life, of course.

But, just for the sake of argument, what would happen if someone won election to a position he couldn’t legally hold?

Say, President of the United States.

When would legal measures catch up with him?

As far as we can tell, nothing could stop someone from running for president if he was constitutionally unable to hold the position because of, just say, a sticky situation involving whether or not he was a “natural born US citizen” versus a “naturalized US citizen”.

Who would come forward and stop such a person from running for president? There doesn’t seem to be a government agency that could interfere in the presidential primaries, because while the Obama campaign was engaged in deliberate voter fraud and intimidation in the caucuses, in particular, we were repeatedly told that “voter fraud” in Democratic primaries and caucuses didn’t legally exist because party primaries and caucuses are not covered by election law. They are at the parties’ discretion, governed by party rules, not by federal legislation.

But, is there a mechanism that would catch a Constitutional crisis in the making before someone who has won his party’s nomination could appear on the ballots for the presidential election?

Is there a government agency with oversight over who appears on the presidential ballots – an agency that would determine, 100%, once and for all that all the candidates on the ballot can, in fact, legally take the Oath of Office and serve as President?

It doesn’t appear that there is such oversight.

Is there any government agency that can force a presidential candidate, or a president-elect, to produce his vault copy birth certificate to prove he is, indeed, a “natural born US citizen”?

There doesn’t appear to be any way to do this, or any agency that can, in fact, do it.

Does the Supreme Court have any interest or ability to intercede to defend the Constitution and ensure the person preparing to take the Oath of Office is indeed eligible to do so?

It’s all very interesting, from a hypothetical viewpoint, because what happens if someone who is not a natural born US citizen (and is instead just a naturalized US citizen) becomes President of the United States?

Wouldn’t that set a precedent that could allow Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president in 2012?

Schwarzenegger is a naturalized US citizen, but was not born a US citizen because his parents did not automatically extend US citizenship to him at birth (because he was born in Austria to parents who did not have the legal ability to extend American citizenship to him at birth). If another man is ever shown to have been sworn in as POTUS who was also not a natural born US citizen, then Schwarzenegger can cite this precedent for his own eligibility claim.

Hypothetically speaking, a baby born in the 50s. 60s, and even 70s, even if born on US soil, would not have automatically been a “natural born” US citizen. That’s not how the citizenship laws, as we understand them, worked back then. If a child had a father who was a citizen of another country, that means the father could not have passed US citizenship to the son automatically. If the child’s mother was very young, she could not have passed US citizenship to the son automatically, either, because a parent had to have lived in the United States for at least 5 years after the age of 16 to automatically make a child a “natural born US citizen”.

For argument’s sake, purely in the hypothetical, if a foreign citizen of any age and an American citizen who was only 18 in 1961 had a baby, that baby would not have been recorded as a “natural born US citizen” because the mother, at 18, would not have fulfilled the requirement of “living in the US at least 5 years after the age of 16″. The mother would have needed to be 21 for her child to be natural born. Instead, the child would be considered “naturalized”.

Now, in a John Grisham novel, two things could happen:

(1) There could be a last-minute challenge in the Supreme Court to the President-Elect’s eligibility to hold the highest office in the land, with a Constitutional crisis ensuing, especially if the President-Elect continued to refuse release of his orginal vault-copy birth certificate because of whatever he’s hiding on it.

or

(2) The opposition party could allow a man who’s Constitutionally ineligible for the presidency to take the Oath of Office to set a precedent that could benefit them in 4 years, with a celebrity phenomenon candidate of their own suddenly made viable because of this “natural born” versus “naturalized” citizen catch instantly becoming irrelevent.

That not only makes Schwarzenegger presidential material, but it also gives the Democrats Jennifer Granholm as a potential POTUS, or at least VP, down the line (she’s also a naturalized US citizen, born in Canada). True, Granholm’s stock looked a lot better 4 years ago, when she would have been a good VP pick for Kerry, if that nagging “naturalized” citizen bit didn’t get in her way.

In Grisham novels, there is always some huge dam about to break, straining with all its might to hold back some colossal secret. By the end of his books, you usually forget who the “good” and “bad” guys even are anymore, and you realize the twists and turns of the story were so Byzantine and numerous that you end up somewhere you never expected to be originally.

In the end, most characters are royally screwed, while one or two miraculously seem to get exactly what they wanted all along.

Because they were smarter than the rest of us.

But, that’s just in books and has no bearing whatsoever on real life.

But we do still wonder, and no one has ever articulated a decent answer to the question, who exactly is responsible for ensuring the person elected president can actually, Constitutionally, assume the highest office in the land?

What’s the policy and procedure for this, and where is that recorded in federal statute?