See any amendment impacting age of president, vice president, or congresscritters?
Besides, clearly-defined elected Federal office is a privilege, not a first-class citizen nor a rights, much less citizen-related.
Furthermore, only the 7th Federal District ruled like you advocate. None of the remaining 12 districts agree with this and only one ruled against it.
IMHO, Supreme Court will likely vote this down given leaning 1-12 opinion count but a third district probably needs to chime in with any ruling on this before SCOTUS can take it up and put it on their docket.
But even so if it should get ruled in favor, it remains a far, far, far-away tenuous claim toward an age-nostic but voter-elected president/VP/Congress of what are already well-defined clearly-concise Constitutional job descriptions.
Besides, 14th Amendment is an instruction toward the 50 states and not toward Federal. See “No state shall …” part of the 14th.
Nothing amendment, as currently written and ratified, would be able to touch those said Federal job descriptions.
Sorry.
Source: Levin v. Madigan, 692 F.3d 607, 615-22 (7th Cir. 2012).
And yet…the 14th Amendment (and CRA) still applies, so…gay marriage is the law of the land.
All adult, non-felon American citizens legally have the same rights, responsibilities, and privileges regardless of their age, sex, country of origin, marriage status, etc., etc., etc.
It's 2022 and that's the law. Why would you think it would be anything else?
While, of course, the current activist Supreme Court might change the law, marriage has been recognized not only as a right but as a fundamental right since (as at the latest) Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
That case is overturning a 90 year old precedent based on 14A equal protection.
The court’s opinion in the case disagrees, stating “Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.”
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 to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
The 14th Amendment (and the CRA) didn't explicitly change the definition of marriage, either.
You are hung up on technicalities that the Supreme Court has already rejected many, many times.
Marriage, not so much.
The age limit for the presidency is explicit in the Constitution. It may be implicitly overturned by 14A, but there's an argument that authors of 14A knew about the presidential age limit, and chose not to overturn it explicitly, thus, the age limit for the presidency stands as an exception.
I'm not claiming to be correct, nor you to be wrong, but I don't see this as being as cut-and-dry as you do. I don't see current SCOTUS majorly agreeing with your assessment, especially by those who claim to be constitution originalists.
If I were on SCOTUS, I would concur with your argument.
Then there is this definition of a common-law wife that varied wildly amongst 50 states and territories.
No, it doesn't.
> as interpreted by the Civil Rights Act
the Civil Rights Act: (1) does not, and does not purport to, interpret the 14th Amendment, and (2) does not prohibit age discrimination.
The main restriction on age discrimination is the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which restricts most discrimination based on age over 40, but not age discrimination generally, and is not 14th Amendment based (but instead is Commerce Clause based.)
> It also prohibits discrimination based on country of origin, so non-US-born individuals (that are US citizens) can become President, too
14th Amendment anti-discrinination rules only restrict the states, not the federal government, so it cannot impact the pre-existing federal Constitutional qualifications for the Presidency.
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Clearly applies only to the states. Not sure how anyone could reasonably interpret this as affecting presidential eligibility.
You could say the same thing about gay marriage. Obviously, the Supreme Court…disagrees.
The Civil Rights Act clarified the meaning of the 14th Amendment, and they now go together whenever the Supreme Court is deciding what the Constitution requires/allows.
On top of which, the position that the 14th amendment prohibits discrimination is not accurate. (Even the ADEA itself only prohibits age discrimination against individuals 40 and older.) The 14th amendment merely requires that the government have a good reason to discriminate. See McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961) for starters, wherein it was stated that, "The Fourteenth Amendment permits the States a wide scope for discretion in enacting laws which affect some groups of citizens differently than others. The Constitutional safeguard is offended only if the classification rests on grounds wholly irrelevant to the achievement of the State's objective. State legislatures are presumed to have acted within their constitutional power despite the fact that, in practice, their laws result in some inequality." In particular, age related laws generally fall under the "rational basis" standard. Meaning, that the scrutiny of such laws is not as strict as gender and religion related discrimination, but just entails some "rational basis" by the state for the law to pass constitutional muster.
One can see this looking by at various policies set by the Federal government. People under 62 may not apply for Social Security Retirement. People over 26 are not covered under the their parents' policies in the Affordable Care Act. Children under 5 can ride WMATA for free in DC.
How so? Marriages are performed under state law, not federal law. How does the court ruling on gay marriage demonstrate that the 14th Amendment applies to the federal government, rather than (as it explicitly says) the states?
To the best of my knowledge, no such age limit has ever been successfully challenged on 14th Amendment grounds. Can you provide a citation to one?
> In 2012, Peta Lindsay challenged the presidential age restriction by running as a presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom 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 First Amendment and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and that the 12th Amendment’s language didn’t allow states to set age requirements.
Age is not a suspect classification for purposes of equal protection analysis. It is subject to rational-basis analysis only. This is why laws such as minimum drinking age are Constitutional. There is clearly a rational basis for ensuring the leadership of the country is of a certain (proxy for) maturity.
The Civil Rights Act has no bearing on this question, as the Office of the President of the United States is not a place of public accommodation. Additionally, the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with the Fourteenth Amendment, but sounds in Congress' commerce power.
Your argument is not quite as weak with regard to national origin; however, courts have rejected your argument on numerous occasions, both because there isn't a "positive repugnancy" between the two provisions that would justify Constitutional repeal by implication, and because equal protection with regard to generalized rights and privileges does not have any bearing on eligibility for a specific office.
The amendment did not alter Article II's requirements for Office of the President.
What are you trying to do?