Constitution Day Essay

I asked the author if he had second thoughts concerning the conclusion considering what has transpired since 2005 when he penned this. His appropriate answer was "I haven't given it much thought. Perhaps fitting our politicians with explosive collars for the purpose of implementing recall elections would make some difference" :-)
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"Seems that the Feds have a sense of humor. They want students to write about the very document which they ignore so well. So I decided to write something, just to exercise my brain and my typing fingers a bit.

Amending the Constitution: the issue of eligibility for Presidency.

The perfection of the US Constitution or, at least, its superiority to the alternatives has been debated ever since its drafting in 1787. While the conservative view upholds the document as the best of all available alternatives, the challenges to it come from both the authoritarians who wish for expanded state control and from libertarians who wish for the opposite. It is telling that only six of the original fifty-six signatories to the Declaration of Independence put their names of the ratified Constitution. The anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution in its ultimate form were concerned, with good reasons, that the document curbed the central federal authority but insufficiently. They had hoped for a union closer to the original Articles of Confederation, something modeled more on the Swiss and the United Provinces (Netherlands), rather than the more centralized British model. The amendment protocol added to the Constitution was a bone thrown to those who opposed it. The first ten amendments were incorporated to safeguard the individual liberties by limiting the authority of the federal government. Similarly, state Constitutions were drafted to protect individuals, with varying success, from the excesses of their local governments. The possibility of amending the Constitution, along with the provision for law nullification by jury, was the fine-tuning mechanism provided to allay the concerns about the likely trend towards centralization of federal power. As the Great Divorce Proceedings of 1861-65 demonstrated, the safeguards failed quite soon, both on the state and the federal levels.

The amendment process has always been viewed with concern because of the possibility and even the likelihood of unintended consequences. For example, the Prohibition on alcohol, enacted by an Amendment in 1919, was a horrid failure. Fortunately, it was repealed by a subsequent Amendment, though the damage from it is still with us in the form of similar prohibitions on other goods and services, enacted under the guise of interstate commerce regulation. On the other hand, an 1865 amendment effectively ended slavery in the country, except as provided by law, such as the Selective Service. With history as our guide, we can approach the process with cautious optimism.

One of the current proposals is to allow a non-natural born citizen to become President if he has been a citizen for 20 years. The original restriction was to ensure that the first loyalty of the candidate is to the United States, not to any foreign government or culture. Ironically, none of the original American Presidents, from George Washington through William Harrison, qualified under this restriction, since all were born before 1776 as British colonial subjects. Their loyalty to their own country over the Crown was not in question.

In further consideration, let us consider whose loyalty would be more conscious and constant, that of a citizen born to that privilege, or that of an immigrant who may have risked life and limb to come to the US from elsewhere, who qualified himself deliberately for the rights and the obligations of citizenship and who is likely to be a stout patriot as a result? The original expectation of the overriding importance of nationalism to an individual can hardly stand in the light of countless counter-examples provided by immigrants throughout our history.

That this issue has risen to the importance of a proposed Constitutional Amendment, illustrated starkly how much power the Presidency has gained since its inception. That noted, the issue here is both fairness and our own self-interest. America imports many of its brightest minds and most dedicated patriots, to mutual advantage. Constraining some of the elected positions to those born in America denies us the benefit of the experience and the willing commitment of many who were not fortunate enough to be born here in body, yet always American in spirit.

Would this Amendment make a great practical difference? That is unlikely. The electorate at large is quite ignorant of both the Constitution and of the reasons behind it. Yet we can hope to place at least a small obstacle in the path of the increasing federal domination by making it possible to elect those who have experience tyranny first-hand in the countries of their birth, and who would endeavor to save their chosen homeland from the like fate.

Please urge your elected representatives to support the Amendment to extend eligibility for Presidency to foreign-born naturalized citizens with twenty years of residency."

Oleg Volk, September 2005