Bills have been introduced in each house of the Tennessee legislature to bar naturalized citizens from running for congress in a party primary. They are SB 1825 by Senator Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) and HB 2036 by Representative Johnny Garrett (R-Goodlettsville). Here is the text. The two bills are identical.
It is clear that this bill, if enacted into law, would violate the U.S. Supreme Court decision U.S. Term Limits v Thornton, which said that states cannot add to the qualifications for congress that are mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
TN MINORITY RULE GERRYMANDER LEGISLATURE IN REBELLION AGST USA CONST ???
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2026/01/22/federal-funding-democratic-states/88305028007/
TYRANT TRUMP — DATA ON FED $$$ FOR DONKEY STATES/DC
LESS TRUMP GOONS – JUST NOOO FED CASH FOR SUCH STATES/DC — AKA STARVE THEM OUT — TO GET SURRENDER ???
More fascist censorship of voters right to choose. The voter is not bound to cast their ballots only for qualified candidates. It is the Congress alone who can pass on the constitutional qualifications of elected persons to serve in their respective bodies.
Supreme court decisions get overturned, and if Trump was a tyrant, the spambot would have already been deprogrammed and deprived of a forum to spread these lies.
Someone can be a tyrant and yet still not have complete control of the government.
The power to determine who may run in a party’s primary is up to each party.
Richard – that wouldn’t be a tyrant. It would be a chief executive in a government with limited and divided powers.
Calling Trump a tyrant is not only factually wrong and absurd, it’s dangerous and directly encourages more assassination attempts.
Trump is as far from a tyrant as possible. He has been thwarted at every turn. Calling him a tyrant is dangerous and wrong.
Cho Bai-Din even failed at tyranny, but he really was a puppet of Chinese tyrant Xi who worked in concert with Xi and the CCP to replicate their tyrannical system here.
Of course, if Trump was a tyrant, Xi and his American puppet Cho Bai-Din would have never had a chance to even try.
What sort of tyrant leaves office after an election, is constantly thwarted in the courts, vilified relentlessly in traditional and social media, deplatformed, debanked, tried to be kept off ballots, shot at, lawfared, and the many other constant attacks on Trump?
If anything, Trump is finally fighting back against the globalist elite, deep state, fake news axis of evil and Fabian communist conspiracy’s tyranny that had essentially complete control of US government for decades until Trump got in office and still has the lion’s share of it.
Baraq Insane Osama and Cho Bai-Din were both a lot closer to being tyrants than Trump. Bushes and Clinton’s are puppets of globalist elite tyranny. Trump is the first president since Reagan to break with any part of their lockstep plans for total global tyranny. For this he gets maligned and slimed as a tyrant when he’s the opposite. Precisely for standing in the way of the real tyrants and their sick plans for a hell on earth prison planet where freedom isn’t even a concept after 90%+ of humanity is killed off and all races, governments and governing structures, religions and everything else is merged.
Compare TRUMP to say Maduro. Under maduro opposition were put wholesale in secret prisons, disappeared, opposition voices were silenced. The vast majority of the population was driven into severe poverty and millions of people fled the country in all directions. Election results were ignored as Maduro stayed in office.
Nothing like this is happening under Trump.
In Iran, thousands of protesters are killed. Nothing like that here.
There is just no realistic comparison.
Trump has about exactly as much power as Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford had when they were presidents. He’s a more effective communicator and less wholly owned by the agents of the real tyranny – but that’s about it.
This bill is unconstitutional. The only offices which require a person to be a Natural Born citizen are President and Vice President.
Naturalized citizens can legally run for and hold any other office in government at all levels.
What part of the Constitution bars states from creating criteria for who can or can’t run for offices elected completely within those individual states? Certainly it says naturalized citizens can’t be president, but i see nothing requiring every state to allow them to run for every other office. What am I missing? How would that not be a matter left up to the states per bill of rights?
Walter, EXACTLY! This is about winning a particular party’s (freedom of association, right?) nomination. The primaries simply replaced nominating conventions – of which they all need to go back to. The legislation, if passed, would face legal challenges. But if the Tennessee GOP were to instead nominate by convention and add prohibition on naturalized candidates into their rules, I think THAT would hold up. Now, the party would be shooting itself in the foot, but hey, worth a shot.
nominations by public electors for public offices by PUBLIC L-A-W-S
PARTY GANGS ARE NOT INDEPENDENT EMPIRES – SEE NOW OLDE 1928-1932 TX WHITE PRIMARY CASES
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alex-pretti-minneapolis-shooting-causes-internal-anger-dhs/
TRUMP KILLERS AT WORK – MURDER / LIES — AND MORE LIES
HOW LONG TO 19 APR 2026 ??? — 251 ANNIV OF 19 APR 1775 – R W DAY ONE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Japanese_general_election
JAPAN – ECON CRISIS ELECTION – 8 FEB 2026
ONE MORE FATAL *PARLIAMENTARY* REGIME
@Q,
14th Amendment equal protection: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
The US Constitution requires citizenship for a period of time. An elected senator was once booted from the senate because he had not been a US Citizen the required nine years. By the time he was elected a second time, the nine years had passed.
Q, the US Term Limits US Supreme Court decision depends quite a bit on the minutes from the debates at the convention in which delegates wrote our Constitution. It is common for judges, when interpreting the Constitution, to refer to the minutes of the debates in 1787.
The Australian constitution bars a person who “is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power” from being an MP.
Australian citizenship did not exist until 1949; and the UK did not become a foreign power until 1986. About nine years ago the bar above was applied to about 20 sitting MPs and Senators, who had dual citizenship, with in some cases the alien citizenship inherited from a parent. They were forced from office. The MP’s could formally renounce their foreign citizenship and run in the by-election to fill the vacancy, and most did and won. For senators, who are elected by STV they did a count-back of ballots from their election, with the former senator excluded. In all cases, this resulted in a member of their party being elected.
All MP’s and senators were required to provide a mini genealogy including their parents and grandparents as well as a discussion of what other citizenship they might have.
It is possible that the natural-born clause in the proposed bill is to exclude naturalized citizens who were not required to formally renounce their other citizenship(s).
The Tennessee house sponsor of the bill is running for Congress in 2026, and says he doesn’t want Ilhan Omar to be elected in Tennessee. Apparently, he is concerned that she will move to Tennessee and run against him in the Republican primary.
@RW,
US Term Limits was a 5-4 decision. Arkansas did not bar long-term representatives from being re-elected to Congress, it just made it more difficult by forcing them to run as a write-in, presumably against nominated candidates of their same party.
The bill in Tennessee seems to be playing a similar angle by “only” applying to nominations by primary.
@Q,
The Tennessee bill applies only to Congress. If not for the Constitution, there would be no congressional elections. It is not a retained authority to set state-specific qualifications for Congress.
Congress is where states send people to represent their interests within the federal government. The federal government has a few restrictions on who can’t be in congress to represent states, but it seems like an overreach for the federal government to tell states they can’t have their own additional rules for who can and can’t represent that state’s interest.
I don’t dispute that some points brought up in 18th century debates may be interpreted, possibly out of context, to indicate otherwise, but I’m not going to read the entire record of 18th century debates to determine that this was the opinion of all, or even most, of those who took part in those debates. I think they took great pains to codify the most important points they agreed on. With an eye to limiting what the federal government would interfere with.
I don’t think anyone literally expects Omar to move to Tennessee, but they might want to prevent similar candidates from running there.
It’s not unusual for judges and justices to twist selective quotes from 18th century debates in which people with different opinions took place to support conclusions they want to reach for reasons of their own.
The death of a tiny handful of protesters who hit agents with cars, pull out guns in scuffles with federal agents, etc, is not a tyranny. It’s something which always happened many times throughout US history. There are numerous tyrannies throughout the world today, just like there have always been. When they have protests, thousands of people get killed and or disappear into secret prisons. Nothing remotely like that is happening in the US today. We are not a tyranny.
When those countries pretend to have elections, the main opposition is kept off the ballot, sometimes killed or jailed, and the rulers get fake 90 something percentage wins or don’t leave office when they lose. The closest we have come to anything like that recently was when some states tried to keep Trump off the ballot 2 years ago and the ridiculous show trials against Trump around the same time. Unlike a tyrant, Trump actually left office in 2021, despite the election being stolen.
HOW MANY ASSAULTS ON INNOCENT FOLKS IN USA BY TRUMP GESTAPO [AKA DHS GOONS] WITH LATER MURDERS OF SOME FOLKS ???
WILL TYRANT TRUMP HAVE ELECTIONS FOR CONGRESS GERRYMANDER FOLKS IN ALL STATES IN NOV 2026 ???
Zero assaults on innocent people, but plenty of people who assault other people habitually removed from the country. Of course there will be a congressional election in November, and Trump couldn’t stop it if he wanted to, which he doesn’t since he is the furthest thing from a tyrant possible.
I’m glad someone is finally defending this country from alien invasion, since I’ve said many times that’s what it is.
@LAF,
The people of the several States choose their representatives. They do not represent the States per se.
It should be up to the voters to decide who represents them. It should not be the Tennessee State government dictating to Republicans who they may nominate.
Johnny Garrett is running for Congress. He probably believes that raising the specter of Ilhan Omar running against him will garner support in the primary.
Whomever wrote this bill knows that Tennessee can not add restrictions on whom may be elected. But they have come up this subterfuge that restricting who political parties may nominate is not effectively the same as restricting the voters choice. Whether Garrett actually believes this or not is unknown.