“New Rule” on Presidential Qualifications

I’m afraid I have bad news.  If there is a legal mechanism by which we can arrive at the “new rule” discussed here, it will have to pass muster with the supporters of Donald Trump, the world’s most famous convicted felon, and that doesn’t sound too likely.

What seems to have bitten us in the butt here is it never entered into the minds of the framers of the Constitution that Americans would someday be enthusiastic about putting a felon in the White House; otherwise they would have written it into Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5, along with “the President must be at least 35 years of age, be a natural born citizen, and must have lived in the United States for at least 14 years.”

Or maybe it did enter their minds, but they thought, “If future Americans are that ignorant and demented, they’ll get exactly what they deserve.”