On April 18, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed HB 2177, the bill that required political parties to furnish a birth certificate for their presidential nominees. See this story. The bill had been sent to her on Friday, April 15. Thanks to Bill Van Allen for the news.
The veto is appropriate, because it is not the presidential candidate who is being elected. It is his electors, and there is no requirement for them to be natural-born citizens. The appropriate legislation would be to exclude electors from the ballot who have not verified the eligibility of the candidate to whom they are pledged. The wording of the bill is a monument to constitutional ignorance.
A better way to elect a president is specified in this proposed amendment:
Selecting electors for president and vice-president
The electors for president and vice-president shall be selected in each state by the following procedure:
1. An initial panel of citizens qualified to vote in that state equal to one hundred times the number of electors to be selected from that state shall be selected at random, in a process that shall be supervised by a randomly-selected grand jury specially empaneled for that task;
2. Members of this initial panel shall take an examination in which each shall recite from memory 20 randomly selected clauses of this Constitution, and shall receive a score of one for each clause he or she is able to recite without error;
3. A second panel shall be selected from the first, consisting of ten times the number of electors to be selected, with the odds of selecting each weighted by the score he or she received in the examination, and with exclusion of any who scored zero;
4. Members of the second panel shall meet, and each shall rank all the others in descending order of civic virtue, giving a score indicating the rank consisting of the number of panelists for the highest down to one for the lowest;
5. The electors shall then be selected from this second panel at random, but weighted by his or her average rank from the previous round of peer assessments.
More at http://constitution.org/reform/us/con_amend.htm
Jon: Instead of the constitution quiz bowl, how about we directly elect the president with a popular vote? You know, like how we elect every other office…
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Arizona may now be included with such problem states as Hawaii as a “covered” state requiring pre-clearance of all future POTUS-CINC election ballots for the next 25 years under the proposed federal “Natural Born Citizen Eligibility Act”.
???
The E.C. is 1 of the 3 ANTI-Democracy gerrymander parts of the U.S.A. regime of monarchs-oligarchs.
House of Reps, Senate [semi-permanent], E.C.
Result – the growing political-social-economic chaos in the U.S.A. — directly heading for a super-crisis — perhaps the debt limit stuff.
ONE regular election day
Uniform definition of Elector in ALL of the U.S.A.
Equal nominating petitions
P.R. and App.V.
Difficult only for ANTI-Democracy morons stuck in the EVIL past.
nATURAL bORN cITIZEN pARTY
The “Natural Born Citizen Eligibility Act” is news to me. Please post details.
The problem with both Obama and McCain was both were not
citizens, either State or Federal. The issue for them
both were besides not being NATURAL BORN CITIZENS they
were not even citizens. McCain at birth was a citizen
of the Republc of Panama and Obama at birth was a Subject of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
Sincerely, Mark Seidenberg, Vice Chairman, American Independent Party
You are right Mark S…I thought I smelled some Tanzanian clove spice when Obama was down here campaigning in 08.