Qualifications for office in US Constitution

Could the Constitution have simply said that any US Citizen may hold any office?

Is the detail about age in the Constitution a reaction against Pitt the Younger.

If that happened how likely is it that there would be very young legislators and or a naturalized immigrant President?
 
Could the Constitution have simply said that any US Citizen may hold any office?

I don't see why it couldn't have, but in that age the idea of the "elder statesman" as the ideal leader of the nation was strong, and politics and who could be involved in politics was still very paternalistic, so in all likelihood something like in OTL would be thrown it, but it doesn't seem like something that was inevitable.

Is the detail about age in the Constitution a reaction against Pitt the Younger.

I doubt it.

If that happened how likely is it that there would be very young legislators and or a naturalized immigrant President?

The latter would be much more likely to happen than the former, I think. No President even close to the lower age boundary has been elected, but in modern times at least one foreign-born politician I can think of would be taking a run at the Presidency, and there would likely be more in the future.
 
I was actually just reading about this, and I guess at some point early on there was some debate over whether naturalized citizens could (or should) become eligible, and it was fairly soundly rejected at the time. As things moved later along, that's gotten more criticism, but.

Based upon what I was seeing, I don't think you'd end up being able to start with naturalized citizens being allowed to vote, but there are points where it could have conceivably been changed to permit that without opposition, if only there were more support for the idea.

As for age, no idea.
 
I was actually just reading about this, and I guess at some point early on there was some debate over whether naturalized citizens could (or should) become eligible, and it was fairly soundly rejected at the time. As things moved later along, that's gotten more criticism.

I thought that naturalized citizens were eligable, providing they became citizens before the constitution was adopted. That's meaningless now, but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, theoretically a naturalized immigrant could have become President.

Cheers,
Nigel.
 
I thought that naturalized citizens were eligable, providing they became citizens before the constitution was adopted. That's meaningless now, but in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, theoretically a naturalized immigrant could have become President.

Cheers,
Nigel.

Well, yes, I was referring to the period just after that. It's natural-born or a citizen at the time the Constitution was adopted.
 
There were rumours the Duke of York would run for President - I think that's what the citizenship clause and possibly the age clause were mainly there to prevent.
 
Given that those two sons were actually the same person, and I couldnt find this repeated anywhere when I searched last night, I'm not sure that specific cause was necessarily accirate.

That being said, I wouldnt be surprised if British succession laws are the ones that inspired the decision.
 
Actually, there is something to the story about the Duke of York. It was never a true possibility, but the rumor did exist at the time, and it caused a great big panic. Akhil Reed Amar - a prominent constitutional scholar actually wrote an interesting article on the subject.

I quote from the article:

Several months before the Constitution was drafted, one prominent American politician, Confederation Congress president Nathaniel Gorham, had apparently written to Prince Henry of Prussia, a brother of Frederick the Great, to inquire whether the prince might consider coming to the New World to serve as a constitutional monarch. Though few in 1787 knew about this feeler, the summer-long secret constitutional drafting sessions in Philadelphia did fuel widespread speculation that the delegates were working to fasten a monarchy upon America. One leading rumor was that the bishop of Osnaburgh, the second son of George III, would be invited to become America's king.

The natural-born clause clearly gave the lie to such rumors and thereby eased anxieties about foreign nobility.

So the rumor mentioned in this thread did exist, and an offer to Henry of Prussia was actually made (in fact, that offer likely caused the rumor about the Duke of York).

Of course, it wasn't just the rumor. While such (irrational) fears certainly existed at the time, the idea behind the 'natural born citizen' clause was really a far more general wish to guard against foreign influence. Keep in mind that at the time, many people in Europe still believed that the American 'experiment' would fail within a few years, and the Americans would come begging for some prince to be their new king. Many American politicians feared foreign powers would scheme against the Republic to 'help along' such a failure.

Dixit Alexander Hamilton: "Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils." He wrote that in the Federalist Papers, specifically in nr. 68, which is about the election of a president for the Republic. Washington's repeated urging for America to remain uninvolved in European schemes ("trade with all nations; alliance with none") should be read in the very same context.

Bottom line: Americans feared foreign scheming (just how real this fear was at the time can be observed from the fact that the ridiculous rumor about the Duke of York caused a big panic), and they put up barriers against it. The 'natural born citizen' clause was one of those barriers.

If you want the clause out, though... eliminating the offer to prince Henry might actually be a goof start. That will prevent the Duke of York rumor, and that might just be enough to help the clause be removed from the Constitution altogether.
 
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