WE'RE NOT QUITE ready to endorse Arnold Schwarzenegger for president. But it doesn't seem too early to endorse the idea that California's governor-elect ought to be able to run for president if he wants. Yet unless the Constitution is changed, the country at large can never be asked to "Join Arnold." The nation's charter specifies that "No person except a natural born Citizen . . . shall be eligible to the Office of President" -- and no electoral victory can change the fact that Mr. Schwarzenegger was born in Austria. We generally oppose tampering with the Constitution, but the natural-born citizen requirement is a relic that should be repealed.

Mr. Schwarzenegger's election, in fact, creates an unusual political moment for reconsidering this question, because the Democrats also have a rising star who is barred from the highest office, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who was born in Canada. Indeed, a serious move to repeal the restriction may be afoot. In the past few months, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has introduced an amendment to do so, as did a bipartisan group of representatives including Victor F. Snyder (D-Ark.), Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). Maybe neither party feels so flush with first-rate, nationally electable politicians that it is eager to categorically exclude potential leaders who happen to have been born somewhere else.

The Framers included the restriction out of fear, as Justice Joseph Story wrote in the 1830s, of "those corrupt interferences of foreign governments in executive elections which have afflicted the most serious evils upon the elective monarchies of Europe." That hardly seems like a pressing concern these days. There is no reason to doubt the electorate's ability to decide in the context of a campaign whether a President Schwarzenegger or Granholm would sell America out to Austrian or Canadian interests. The nation has profited from the service of naturalized citizens in sensitive posts such as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and American public life is rife with people whose commitment to this country is one of choice, rather than birth. In every other sphere, American law welcomes such citizens and acknowledges parity between them and the native-born. The peculiar anachronism that the presidency alone is different should not persist.

© 2003