Letter: Roll back limits on who can run

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 | 8:57 a.m.

I read with much amusement Ruth DiMaggio's March 10 letter in which she advocates that we "finally place restrictions and establish rules as to who may be eligible to run for the office of the president of the United States."

Typical of a bleeding heart, she fails to realize that those rules already exist. They are spelled out in a document called the Constitution of the United States.

But using her ideas that nobody should be president who may have "investments in oil, pharmaceuticals or weapons of mass destruction," and "make certain that none of the candidates' relatives have ever held office," I think we should go one step further. This rule should be retroactive. Maybe not as far back as John and John Quincy Adams, but at least to the beginning of the 20th Century.

By doing so, all nanny-state policies, and infringements on the rights of The People, shoved down our throats by the Democrats' poster child, FDR, should be declared null and void.

After all, he was a rich boy from a rich family, heavily invested in many industries, whose cousin was president, and whose vice president is the only man in American history to use a weapon of mass destruction in anger. But why let facts cloud the issue?

VIC MOSS