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When will requirements to qualify to run for Portland City Council or Multnomah County commissioner be upgraded to weed out unqualified goofballs before an election starts? As it stands, anyone qualifies as long as they’re a city resident and can breathe. —Marv T.
Are you suggesting that high office should only be occupied by the currently breathing, Marv? (If so, Joe Biden would like a word.) In any case, electing unqualified goofballs is pretty much our national sport, so I wouldn’t hold my respiratorily privileged breath waiting for a change.
Everyone knows the basic qualifications to run for president: natural-born citizen, 35 or older, resident of the U.S. for 14 years. Congressional requirements are similarly minimal. These rules are bare bones by design. Indeed, requirements beyond these—even at the state or local level—are generally unconstitutional. Eligibility requirements were unnecessary, the founders believed, because competence would be enforced by elections.
I’ll pause here to wait for your bitter, mocking laughter to subside. In the founders’ defense, they were responding to property and class restrictions on candidates common in 18th century Europe. Today, this doctrine of quilibet asinus* has so suffused our state constitutions and case law that we couldn’t impose stricter standards if we wanted to.
Other countries are another matter. Several require candidates to be “of good moral character.” Lebanon requires the president to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of Parliament a Shi’a Muslim. (This even-handedness is no doubt the reason that Beirut has become a watchword for sectarian harmony.) Preindustrial Sweden required its farmer-legislators to produce over a certain amount of grain.
Such restrictions sound as un-American to us as bidets, Nutella and universal literacy. However, with more than 100 candidates in our last city election, the herd could use culling somehow. Thus, Portland is proposing to raise candidate filing fees for mayor and City Council from $100 and $75 (respectively) to $500 and $250, with fee waivers for low-income candidates.
Any candidate can skip the fee by collecting 500 signatures. Personally, I’d prefer the fee to be one trillion dollars—if we’re going to let people who are too lazy or unappealing to collect a measly 500 signatures buy their way onto the ballot, we should at least get something for it—but nobody asked me.
*Short for quilibet asinus candidatus esse, “any jackass can be a candidate.” And yes, I did just make that up.
Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com .
