The most disappointing thing for Cenk Uygur about his long-shot presidential bid has been the lack of support from civil liberties and immigrant rights groups, which have been unwilling to help him get onto state primary ballots.
Mr. Uygur, a Turkey-born naturalized citizen, figured his campaign would be the perfect rallying point for those groups as he tried to break down constitutional barriers that reserve the presidency for “natural born” citizens.
Instead, he has heard crickets.
“Not one of them helped,” he told The Washington Times.
Mr. Uygur, known for founding “The Young Turks,” a show with a following among younger liberals, finds himself in the same position as former President Donald Trump. Both men are trying to surmount state roadblocks contending that the candidates are ineligible to serve as president and, therefore, cannot have their names on ballots.
For Mr. Trump, it’s his actions surrounding the events of Jan. 6, 2021, which his challengers say makes him ineligible under the Constitution’s insurrection clause. For Mr. Uygur, it’s his birthplace and the more than 200-year-old founding document that excludes those born off U.S. soil and not to American parents.
Mr. Uygur understands the arguments, but he says they are wrong. He said the 14th Amendment overturned the natural-born language by declaring that all people born or naturalized have “equal protection of the laws.”
He argued that there is precedent for an amendment repealing part of the Constitution without explicitly saying it. The 14th Amendment overturns the three-fifths clause without using those words.
“The slaves were not natural-born citizens, and no one thought they couldn’t run for president after the 14th Amendment was passed,” he said.
He said the courts could revisit the overall thrust of the 14th Amendment and conclude that prohibitions on discrimination apply to national origin, thus implicitly overturning the natural-born qualification for the presidency.
He noted that women gained the right to hold office in some states before the 19th Amendment guaranteed them the nationwide right to vote. What it took was a rethink of the terms of equality.
Mr. Uygur launched his campaign last year when hardly anybody else challenged President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. He said he jumped into the race because he was convinced that Mr. Trump would defeat Mr. Biden, and he wanted to force the conversation on his party.
In an interview with The Times, he seemed to waver between whether his candidacy was a serious attempt to derail Mr. Biden or a chance to make waves over what he sees as an injustice to naturalized citizens.
He said a path to victory required a federal court to agree that he belonged on ballots.
He made his big stand in South Carolina, but U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. wasn’t buying it.
“Uygur is not the first naturalized candidate to assert such an argument. Unfortunately for him, each court to consider such an argument has repeatedly found that the Fourteenth Amendment has not repealed the natural born citizenship requirement,” the judge wrote in upholding the state’s blockade on Mr. Uygur.
The New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission also upheld election officials’ decision to keep Mr. Uygur’s name off the ballot.
“If, in the future, a final court decision invalidates the requirement that to run for President a person must be a ‘natural born citizen,’ or changes the common and traditional understanding of that term, the result may be different,” the five-member commission wrote in its decision.
Mr. Uygur said he has little faith that the state officials can get it right. The state documents cite the wrong place in the Constitution for excluding those who are not natural-born citizens. He said the state said it was Article II, Section 1, clause 4, but the language is found in clause 5.
Mr. Uygur’s name will be on ballots in seven states: Vermont, Minnesota, Texas and Oklahoma in this week’s Super Tuesday contests and Louisiana, North Dakota and Connecticut later in the season.
Notably, he is not on the ballot in Colorado, another Super Tuesday state. The state Supreme Court kicked Mr. Trump off its ballot in December, sparking a battle that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. A decision is expected any day, though analysts said it was clear from oral argument that the high court would back Mr. Trump.
What is not clear is whether that will help Mr. Uygur, whose case turns on a different part of the Constitution.
He was referenced in the oral argument last month by attorneys for Colorado’s secretary of state and the group of voters that brought the initial challenge against Mr. Trump.
Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson, in arguing that states have wide latitude to police their ballots, pointed out that the state hadn’t denied only the former president but also Mr. Uygur.
“Just this election, there’s a candidate who Colorado excluded from the primary ballot who is on the ballot in other states even though he is not a natural-born citizen,” she said. “That’s a feature of our process. It’s not a bug.”
It doesn’t feel like much of a feature to Mr. Uygur, who said state officials aren’t up to the task of sorting out complex constitutional questions.
“State officials that made a decision to exclude me know literally nothing about constitutional law. That’s just a fact,” he told The Times. “If your answer to basic constitutional law questions is ‘Huh,’ you shouldn’t be making the decision. That’s kind of obvious, except the fact that it’s the opposite of what happens.”
Mr. Uygur said his challenge to Mr. Biden largely drives the lack of support for his cause. Had he been a Republican challenging Mr. Trump, he said, he would have been welcomed by more coverage in the press and civil liberties groups. “They make a very active decision: ‘We’re going to make very sure no one hears about this guy,’” he said.
“I think civil rights groups instantly would be ‘Of course you can run,’ especially since I’m a very harsh critic about Donald Trump,” Mr. Uygur told The Times.
“I just wish that I would have been treated as a person who was fighting for equality,” he said. “You can argue I shouldn’t have equality, a second-class citizen, one that shouldn’t have the same rights as a natural-born citizen, but I wish that fight for equality had been taken seriously.”
He said the insult is to 25 million naturalized citizens like him.
“We came hoping for the American dream, for equality. And when one of us ran for the presidency, the whole country treated it with utter disdain,” he said. “That sucks. I hope they don’t do that to the next person.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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