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Natural Leadership: During the time of the Constitutional Convention, John Jay wrote to George Washington about the need to "provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government." More to the point at hand, he argued in 1787, it would be wise to "declare expressly that the Command in chief of the american [sic] army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen." According to a 1988 essay in the Yale Law Journal, Jay's use of the term "natural born Citizen" is generally assumed to be the basis for the portion of the Constitution in Article II that came to read: "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 for the Office of President ...." As to why Jay wrote as he did, Jill Pryor, the author of the journal piece, said that scholars generally believe that he was responding to rumors that "foreign princes" might be recruited to serve as president. But the only certain conclusions that should be drawn, she went on to claim, are that Jay was interested in creating some "guarantee of allegiance to the United States for high office holders and that he placed special significance on the word 'born."' Jump ahead, if you will, to our present multicultural moment. What I'm about to argue should be taken seriously, though not necessarily literally. By which I mean the "allegiance" of naturalized citizens ought to be assumed in the same way that the loyalty of "natural born" Americans is usually taken for granted. This is the part that should be taken quite seriously. The part that should not be read with total literalness--as I'm more interested in striking a chord than in announcing the kickoff of a national movement-- starts this way: All would remain fundamentally right with this corner of the world, I do believe, if the Constitution were never fiddled with or amended again. Oh, I can think of a few things I would like to add to it. But on balance, I'd just as soon leave it be, forever. Still, if I somehow were inclined to subtract from the document, I might start with its prohibition against immigrants ever becoming president, as it no longer fits in even the slimmest way with any right understanding of either citizenship or patriotism. Obviously, deleting the ban on naturalized Americans becoming president does not promise to be one of our nation's more salient issues anytime soon. But it is an issue--figuratively, anyhow--that lends itself to making a valuable point, not just about celebrating diversity but, more to the heart, honoring unity. I've dwelled on the fact many times that much of what goes by the name of celebrating diversity, multiculturalism, and the rest is anything but cohering, in either spirit or effect. Here's just one of a million examples, as reported by historian Alan Kors of the University of Pennsylvania. Freshmen at Swarthmore College recently were asked to ''line up by skin color, from lightest to darkest, and to step forward and talk about how they felt concerning their place" in line. Makes you feel warm and fuzzy all over, doesn't it? In contrast, I start from the premise that few American institutions have the potential to manifest, to "celebrate," our complicated oneness as a people as well as the presidency. I also start from the premise that allowing someone of "foreign birth" to rise to the presidency reinforces a core idea about this country. Namely, that citizenship, at some pivotal if poetic level, has more to do with a commonality of devotion than with the arbitrariness of birth. Sure, one is automatically a citizen if born to American parents or merely on this soil. But it's also useful to appreciate how citizenship and full standing in this republic is rooted no less in the sharing of first principles. Which is to say, more explicitly, that subscribing to the idea that the United States can be led, at the highest reach, by someone who first lived elsewhere, someone who first saluted another flag, says more about the extraordinary openness of this nation than just about anything proposed by many of those who routinely lecture on how we might better "get along"--but who then line us up by complexion. So what does Rudy Boschwitz have to do with any of this? As someone whose family immigrated to the United States from Nazi Germany when he was a young boy, and who is therefore a naturalized American citizen, the former two-term senator from Minnesota was never able to imagine himself as president in the same way that his 99 colleagues likely did. Then again, as unfair as this sling and arrow might have been, no less an eminence than Henry Kissinger, someone of similar background, was known to assure him: "Rudy, while neither one of us can ever be president, there's nothing in the Constitution about being emperor." --Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis |