This week on some cable-television stations in California, an ad is running that promotes a constitutional amendment to change the criteria -- or more accurately, the proscriptions -- for who can and can't be a president of the United States. It calls for eliminating the language that requires the president to be native-born, and it is sponsored by a group called Amend for Arnold.
Mindful that changing the Constitution of the United States “for Arnold” might not strike dispassionate observers as grounds for an amendment in itself, though, the sponsors take a different tack on their Web site. When you go to the Amend for Arnold home page, the site is called “Amend for Arnold & Jen.”
Arnold, of course, needs no introduction. Jen does, but she doesn't get one -- at least not on the home page. The eponymous Jen is Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, a star in the Democratic firmament whose presidential aspirations, if any, were throttled in the cradle when she was born in Canada. The fact that her name adorns the home page, which then doesn't even bother to explain who she is, suggests that the Arnoldistas who are promoting the amendment recognize that they have a political problem (how to secure Democratic support for a proposal plainly crafted to put California's Republican governor in the White House), but haven't quite come up with a solution yet.
The case for eliminating the restriction on foreign-born citizens from serving as president is a strong one on the merits, but the relationship between merits and viability, while not inverse, is always a shaky one. As the quintessential nation of immigrants, and as the only country to bill itself as a “melting pot,” the United States would be doing no more than ratifying its very essence by eliminating the proscription on presidents who became American by choice (their own or their parents') rather than birth. Which is not to say, however, that an argument based on quintessential American-ness actually plays with quintessential (or just plain) Americans. When Gallup polled on amending the constitution to this end in mid-November, just 31 percent favored the amendment and 67 percent opposed it. When Schwarzenegger's name was added to the question, opposition dropped, but only to 58 percent.
For a number of years, the idea of ending the constitutional prohibition on foreign-born presidents was a very back burner (all but off the stove, actually) concern of some liberal Democrats. With Schwarzenegger's election as California governor, and with his ongoing popularity in that office (his approval rating is still 65 percent), some Republicans suddenly awakened to the injustice of the prohibition, too. In October 2004, outgoing Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch held hearings to promote Schwarzenegger's candidacy -- excuse me, to promote the amendment.
Whether congressional Republicans have any real interest in moving the amendment in the new session is anybody's guess. The status of immigrants has already emerged as an issue that deeply divides the House Republican caucus, with Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin on an anti-immigrant jihad that would, among other things, override the laws of 11 states (Jeb Bush's Florida among them) that allow undocumented immigrants to have drivers' licenses. Other Republicans, mindful of the gains the party made among Latino voters this November, have no such inclinations. While there's hardly a GOP groundswell to make it possible for an immigrant to become president, such a measure could emerge as a painless way the party could signal that it actually likes immigrants -- a mild form of damage control as Sensenbrenner and his nativist band start whacking immigrants hither and yon.
Which would leave the Democrats where? After all, the Democrats have historically been the party of immigrants and, by contrast to the Republicans, at least, remain so to this day. Of course, that didn't daunt the inimitable Dianne Feinstein, California's nominally Democratic senator, who took on Hatch's proposal at the October hearings by declaring, “I don't think it is unfair to say the president of the United States should be a native-born citizen. Your allegiance is driven by your birth.” (Feinstein herself was born in a land where brains were scarce, to which she affirms her loyalty daily.)
Still, the Republican realpolitik of the proposal, should it ever get rolling, will never set Democratic hearts aflutter, and the amendment -- which requires a two-thirds supermajority in each house of Congress and then passage by 37 state legislatures -- clearly needs Democratic support to be codified in the constitution. How can the Arnoldistas sweeten the pot for the Dems? Herewith, a modest suggestion:
There are currently three constitutional proscriptions on who can serve as president. As laid out in the original document, nobody under age 35 and nobody who's not a native-born citizen can serve. As laid out in the 22nd Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1952, nobody who's already served two terms as president can be president again. The 22nd amendment was the Republicans' posthumous revenge against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had the temerity to have been elected president four times. FDR had been dead seven years when the amendment was ratified, but it showed him good.
Now, I don't think there's much of a case either for the prohibition on the foreign-born or on two-termers who seek to become three-termers. If the American people think a two-term president deserves another term, that should be their own damn business. If they want to return Bill Clinton to the White House -- and Clinton (B., not H.) is far and away the strongest candidate the Democrats could field in 2008 -- who are we to say they shouldn't?
So, you amend-for-Arnold zealots, eager to muck with the Constitution in the cause of an Austro-American amateur who's done nothing to address California's budget crisis and who's putting college out of reach for working-class Californians rather than raise taxes on the rich, you want to amend him in to the White House? OK -- let's repeal the language banning foreign-born citizens and the language banning two-term presidents. That, my friends, is a bipartisan compromise. If you want the possibility of a President Arnold, accept the prospect of a President Bill. Again.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
