Of course he does

And it's not like the courts would actually rely on the plain language used by a bunch of old, white, privileged slave-owners, am I right?

Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to run for President

I mean, he was born in another country and served as Governor of the most populous State, so why not let him serve as President of all 50?

Well, Article 5, Section 2 of California's State Constitution only requires that the Governor be both a citizen of the United States and a resident of California, for the five years preceding the election.


The United States Constitution is a little more stringent. Article 2, Section 1, Paragraph 5:

No person except a natural born Citizen, ... shall be eligible to the Office of President;

Arnold was born in Austria, so that rules him out. Of course, given that the courts have repeatedly ignored the plain language of the Constitution on multiple occasions, I wouldn't be in the least surprised. And he's been thinking about it for a while, it seems...

Columbia University Law School professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said about the Governator’s case in 2007, “The law is very clear, but it’s not 100 percent clear that the courts would enforce that law rather than leave it to the political process.”

Oh, one other thing. If you cannot run for President, you cannot run for Vice-President*, either, although there have been numerous Senators and Representatives, and even Cabinet members who were foreign-born. (If disaster strikes, and they have to start figuring out who the senior Executive Department Secretary is, they would just skip over who is ineligible.) So he could get to attend meetings in the White House, and maybe even stay overnight a few times, but he won't get to live there...

* - Last sentence of the 12th Amendment: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."