what is the age requirement to be elected president of the united states?
The popular rum-maker Captain Morgan is proposing to eliminate any age requirements for citizens to serve as President of the United states of america. The ad stunt does raise a question with an interesting constitutional background.
The Captain Morgan entrada claims that "Under 35s tin exercise anything: Except be President," and it lists some very famous business organisation people who currently tin't run for President. The campaign as well has a White House website petition request President Barack Obama to "phone call on Congress to accost the historic period requirement necessary for presidential role with an amendment to the Constitution to permit adults under 35 to be President."
The Constitution clearly spells out iii age requirements for public office. First, the President and Vice President must exist 35 years of age or older when assuming office; a Senator must exist xxx years of age, and a fellow member of the House must be 25 years of historic period. There are no historic period requirements for Supreme Court Justices.
Those requirements haven't changed since the Constitution was written in 1787 and went into consequence in 1789. Prior to that, the Manufactures of Confederation didn't say how one-time members needed to exist to serve in the Confederation Congress.
At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, in that location was little public debate about the age requirements and no discussion about the historic period requirement for the presidency.
The 1 give-and-take of note involved two important Founders: James Wilson, a future Supreme Court Justice, and George Mason, a constitutional dissenter. Mason, who was 62 years of historic period, argued that a requirement of 25 years of age was needed for the House considering of his own feel. Bricklayer said, "if interrogated [he would] be obliged to declare that his political opinions at the age of 21 were besides crude and erroneous to merit an influence on public measures."
Wilson, who was 45 years of historic period, said that whatever age limit on serving in public office would "clammy the efforts of genius, and of laudable ambition. At that place was no more reason for incapacitating youth than age, where the requisite qualifications were institute." Wilson pointed to William Pitt the Younger, who served equally British prime number minister at the age of 24, and Lord Bolingbroke, who served in Parliament in his early on 20s.
In the stop, Bricklayer won the argument and the drafting committee canonical historic period limits by a 7-3 vote. There was some insight afterwards from James Madison, writing in The Federalist 62, about why Senators needed to be older than House members.
Madison talked about the need for "senatorial trust" which required "greater extent of information and stability of character … that the senator should have reached a period of life near probable to supply these advantages."
Madison as well discussed some points that some scholars believe led to the age requirements: a distrust of foreign influence and a fright of families trying to put children in identify in federal office to serve in a hereditary manner. He feared the "indiscriminate and hasty admission" of people to Congress that "might create a channel for foreign influence on the national councils."
James Monroe also wrote about the presidential age requirement making information technology hard for a male parent and son to serve in a dynastic way. "The Constitution has provided, that no person shall be eligible to the office, who is not thirty five years old; and in the course of nature very few fathers leave a son who has arrived to that age," he said in "A Native of Virginia, Observations upon the Proposed Plan of Federal Government."
One interesting comment came from a Continental Congress member who was in Philadelphia in 1787 but non a delegate at the Constitutional Convention: Tench Coxe.
Coxe wrote a newspaper essay defending the need for the Constitution right after the debates were concluded. "In America, as the President is to be 1 of the people at the end of his short term, so volition he and his fellow citizens remember that he was originally one of the people; and that he is created past their breath. Further, he cannot be an idiot, probably not a knave or a tyrant, for those whom nature makes so, discover it before the age of thirty-five, until which catamenia he cannot be elected."
Ironically, 12 of the delegates at the Constitution Convention were under the age of 35, including Alexander Hamilton. Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the Preamble, was 35 years of age and James Madison was 36 years of age. Thomas Jefferson was besides 33 years of age when he drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Today, the age limits on the presidency and Congress haven't been successfully challenged in court. In 2012, Peta Lindsay challenged the presidential historic period brake past running equally a presidential candidate for the Peace and Liberty Party candidate, at the age of 27, within the state of California.
In 2014, Federal appeals Judge Alex Kozinski and two other federal judges rejected arguments that Lindsay's rights were violated under the Starting time Amendment and the 14thursday Amendment'southward Equal Protection Clause and that the 12th Amendment'southward linguistic communication didn't allow states to set age requirements.
"Belongings that [the state] couldn't exclude Lindsay from the ballot, despite her access that she was underage, would mean that anyone, regardless of age, citizenship or whatsoever other constitutional ineligibility would be entitled to clutter and confuse our electoral ballot. Nothing in the First Amendment compels such an absurd result," wrote Judge Kozinski.
That doesn't mean that a few underage people haven't been admitted to the Senate, despite the Constitution'south intent. At least three Senators – Henry Clay, Armistead Bricklayer, and John H. Eaton – took their Senate oaths before they were legally xxx years old. The oversights weren't evidently noticed or challenged.
In 1972, Joe Biden, a 29-year-quondam candidate from Delaware, was elected to the Senate. Biden turned thirty just a few weeks after his election and well earlier he took the oath of part in January 1973.
And William Jennings Bryam was the youngest major party candidate to run in a general ballot. Bryan was just 36 years one-time when he opposed William McKinley in the 1896 election.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in primary of the National Constitution Center.
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Source: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/why-does-a-presidential-candidate-need-to-be-35-years-old-anyway
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