Boom! Nancy Mace Unveils a Bombshell Plan to Force Ilhan Omar Out of Congress
Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has proposed a constitutional amendment that would fundamentally rewrite who may serve in Congress and a wide range of other senior federal positions, using Rep. Ilhan Omar as one of her most prominent political examples while advancing a rule that would apply far beyond any single lawmaker.
Mace introduced H.J.Res.188 on May 20, 2026. The measure would require members of the House and Senate, federal judges, ambassadors and other Senate-confirmed federal officers to be natural-born U.S. citizens.
As of Aug. 25, the proposal remains at the introduced stage and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. The official legislative record lists no House vote, no Senate action and no state-ratification process underway.
That means the Constitution has not changed, naturalized citizens remain eligible to serve in Congress under the existing rules, and Omar has not been removed or disqualified by Mace's proposal.
But the amendment is significant because it would change a constitutional principle that has existed since the founding: naturalized citizens may serve in Congress once they satisfy the Constitution's age, residency and minimum-citizenship requirements.
Article I currently requires a House member to be at least 25 years old, to have been a U.S. citizen for seven years and to be an inhabitant of the state from which the member is elected.
For the Senate, the Constitution requires a minimum age of 30, at least nine years of U.S. citizenship and residency in the state represented.
Neither clause distinguishes between citizens by birth and citizens by naturalization.
That was not an accidental omission.
The Constitution Annotated, published by the Library of Congress, notes that the Framers designed the House qualifications to leave the door open to both native-born and adopted citizens after a period of attachment to the United States.
The Supreme Court has also held that Congress cannot simply add new qualifications for membership by ordinary legislation.
In Powell v. McCormack in 1969, the Court held that the House could not exclude a member-elect who met the constitutional qualifications merely by inventing an additional qualification of its own.
In U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton in 1995, the Court reaffirmed that principle and held that states could not impose additional qualifications on congressional candidates either.
That legal history is one reason Mace chose the constitutional-amendment route.
If Congress wants to add a natural-born-citizenship requirement to Article I, it cannot accomplish that with a normal statute or a simple House rule. It would have to change the Constitution itself.
Mace's stated argument is based on national allegiance.
Announcing the amendment, she said people who write federal laws, sit on the federal bench and represent the United States in senior government positions should have one loyalty: the United States.
She explicitly named Omar, along with Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Shri Thanedar of Michigan, as examples of foreign-born lawmakers she believes illustrate the need for the change.
Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, fled the country's civil war with her family, came to the United States as a refugee and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000 at age 17.
Jayapal and Thanedar were born in India and later became U.S. citizens.
Mace has repeatedly accused Omar of disloyalty and has also repeated disputed allegations involving Omar's past marriage and immigration history.
Those allegations have not produced a public court judgment establishing that Omar fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship.
That distinction matters because H.J.Res.188 does not depend on proving fraud, espionage, dual allegiance or any individualized misconduct.
If ratified as written, the amendment would create a status-based qualification.
A naturalized citizen could be disqualified from the covered offices even after decades of lawful citizenship, military service, public service or repeated election by American voters.
Omar therefore functions politically as a leading example in Mace's case, but the legal rule would not be Omar-specific.
It would apply equally to naturalized Republicans, Democrats and independents.
That is one of the biggest differences between the rhetoric surrounding the amendment and its actual constitutional effect.
Several Republican lawmakers have their own immigrant stories that illustrate the proposal's reach.
Rep. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona was born in Mexico and describes himself as the first naturalized American citizen from Mexico elected to the U.S. House from Arizona.
Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio was born in Colombia, moved to the United States as a child and became an American citizen at age 18.
Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana was born in Ukraine and later became a U.S. citizen.
Rep. Young Kim of California was born in South Korea and came to the United States as an immigrant.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida was born in Cuba and arrived in the United States as a child after the communist takeover of the island.
Not every person born outside the United States is necessarily outside the category 'natural born citizen,' however, and that creates another important complication.
H.J.Res.188 does not define the phrase.
The Constitution itself also does not define 'natural born Citizen.'
The phrase is most familiar from Article II, which requires the president to be a natural-born citizen.
The Twelfth Amendment effectively extends presidential eligibility requirements to the vice presidency by providing that no person constitutionally ineligible to be president may be vice president.
Naturalized citizens clearly fall outside the natural-born requirement for the presidency.
But foreign birth and naturalization are not the same thing.
Federal law recognizes several categories of people born abroad who are U.S. citizens from birth because of their American parents.
Legal authorities have long argued that many such citizens are natural-born citizens for presidential-eligibility purposes, although the Supreme Court has never definitively resolved every possible application of the phrase.
That means shorthand descriptions saying Mace's proposal would simply ban everyone 'foreign-born' are too broad.
The clearest people affected would be citizens who acquired citizenship through naturalization after birth, including Omar.
People born abroad who were U.S. citizens at birth could present a different constitutional question depending on the circumstances.
The timing provisions in H.J.Res.188 are also more precise than much of the political commentary surrounding it.
Section 1 says that no person who is not a natural-born citizen may be a Representative and that the restriction would take effect on Jan. 3 of the first odd-numbered calendar year following ratification.
Because House terms begin and end on Jan. 3 of odd-numbered years, the language would not operate like an immediate expulsion vote removing a sitting member in the middle of a term.
Instead, once the provision became effective, a naturalized citizen could no longer serve as a House member under the new constitutional qualification.
For senators, the proposal contains an explicit transition rule.
The Senate restriction would take effect on Jan. 3 of the first odd-numbered year after ratification, but it would apply to an individual senator beginning when the term for which that senator was elected ends.
That language would allow a sitting senator to finish the existing elected term before the new qualification applied.
The treatment of judges and executive officers is more abrupt.
Under Sections 3 and 4, the natural-born requirement for Supreme Court justices, lower federal judges, ambassadors, public ministers, consuls and other officers requiring Senate advice and consent would take effect six months after ratification.
The resolution does not contain the same express term-completion language for judges that it gives senators.
That feature could produce major institutional consequences if the amendment were ever ratified, particularly because Article III judges ordinarily hold office during good behavior rather than fixed electoral terms.
The amendment would therefore do much more than change candidate eligibility.
It would write a new citizenship qualification into the constitutional structure of all three branches of the federal government.
The House and Senate would lose eligibility for naturalized members.
The federal judiciary would gain a birth-status qualification it does not have today.
And many of the most important executive appointments requiring Senate confirmation would be limited in the same way.
Cabinet secretaries, ambassadors and numerous other senior officers could potentially fall within the language depending on whether their offices require Senate advice and consent.
That breadth makes the proposal considerably larger than a political fight between Mace and Omar.
It would create a permanent distinction between two categories of American citizens for access to some of the most powerful federal offices.
Supporters argue that such a distinction already exists at the presidency and that expanding it is a legitimate national-security safeguard.
The Constitution's presidential natural-born requirement has historically been understood as a protection against foreign influence at the top of the executive branch.
Mace's argument is that lawmakers, judges and senior executive officers now exercise enough authority that the same safeguard should apply to them.
From that perspective, the amendment is not a punishment for immigration.
It is a proposed qualification for unusually powerful federal positions.
Critics begin from the opposite premise.
They argue that naturalized citizens are not lesser citizens once naturalization is complete and that birthplace is not evidence of divided loyalty.
Many naturalized Americans arrived as refugees from authoritarian or communist systems, served in the U.S. military, built businesses, held state and local office and eventually won federal elections.
Under the current Constitution, the citizenship waiting periods for Congress were designed partly to allow immigrants to become sufficiently attached to and knowledgeable about the United States before exercising national legislative power.
Critics therefore see Mace's proposal as replacing a test based on years of citizenship with a permanent distinction that no naturalized American could ever overcome.
Pramila Jayapal attacked the proposal as xenophobic and argued that it denies the country's history of being shaped by immigrants.
Omar offered a much shorter response when asked by Fox News Digital about Mace's proposal.
'Good luck to her,' Omar said.
Her confidence reflects the extraordinary difficulty of amending the Constitution.
H.J.Res.188 cannot advance through the normal legislative process with a simple majority and a presidential signature.
Under Article V, Congress can propose a constitutional amendment only with two-thirds support in both the House and Senate.
The president has no formal constitutional role in approving a congressional amendment resolution.
If Congress clears that threshold, the amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the states.
H.J.Res.188 specifically directs ratification through state legislatures and gives the states seven years from submission to complete the process.
With 50 states, three-fourths means 38 states would have to ratify the amendment.
The United States has adopted only 27 constitutional amendments in its history, and the most recent one to be ratified was the 27th Amendment in 1992.
Those numbers do not make a new amendment impossible.
They do explain why introducing one and actually changing the Constitution are entirely different political achievements.
As of Aug. 25, H.J.Res.188 has not moved beyond the House Judiciary Committee.
There has been no two-thirds House vote, no Senate vote and no transmission to the states.
Mace has continued developing related citizenship proposals.
On June 3, she introduced H.J.Res.194, a separate constitutional amendment aimed at federal officeholders who possess citizenship, nationality or allegiance to another country.
That later proposal is different from H.J.Res.188 in a revealing way.
H.J.Res.194 would allow a person with foreign citizenship or allegiance to become eligible by formally and permanently relinquishing those foreign ties.
H.J.Res.188 offers no comparable cure for a person who was naturalized.
A naturalized citizen cannot change the historical fact that he or she was not a citizen at birth.
That makes the May proposal substantially more categorical.
It is also why Mace's loyalty argument and the amendment's legal mechanism do not perfectly match.
Divided allegiance can change.
A person can renounce another nationality or sever a foreign connection.
Naturalized status cannot be converted retroactively into citizenship from birth.
H.J.Res.188 therefore uses citizenship at birth as a proxy for the allegiance concern Mace says she is addressing.
Whether that proxy is appropriate is the central policy debate.
Supporters say the Constitution already accepts exactly that principle for the presidency.
Critics say extending the distinction to Congress, the judiciary and much of the senior executive branch would exclude loyal Americans based on an immutable fact about how their citizenship began.
The amendment also does not solve separate disputes about alleged misconduct by particular lawmakers.
If the government believes a naturalized citizen obtained citizenship through fraud, federal law already provides a denaturalization process requiring evidence and legal proceedings.
If a member of Congress commits a crime, criminal law applies.
If the House believes one of its members engaged in serious misconduct, the Constitution gives the chamber disciplinary powers, including expulsion by a two-thirds vote.
H.J.Res.188 is different from all of those mechanisms.
It would not require proof that Omar or any other naturalized officeholder committed wrongdoing.
It would change the eligibility rule itself.
That is why the most accurate description is neither 'Mace introduced a bill to deport Omar' nor 'Mace can kick Omar out of Congress.'
She introduced a proposed constitutional amendment that, if it survived one of the hardest legal and political processes in American government, would make natural-born citizenship a qualification for service in Congress and numerous other federal offices.
For Omar, the practical consequence would be serious if the amendment were ever ratified and reached its effective date.
Because she is a naturalized citizen rather than a citizen from birth, she would not satisfy the proposed House qualification.
But the amendment's reach would not stop with her.
It would apply to every covered officeholder and future candidate under the same constitutional rule, regardless of party or ideology.
That includes naturalized conservatives whose life stories are often celebrated by Republicans as examples of the American dream.
The debate is therefore larger than whether voters approve of Omar's politics.
It asks whether citizenship acquired through lawful naturalization should continue to carry the same eligibility for Congress and most federal offices that it has carried for generations.
Mace's answer is no for the offices covered by her amendment.
Her opponents answer that naturalized citizens who meet the Constitution's existing requirements should remain eligible to serve and that voters, not birthplace, should determine who represents them.
The Constitution currently takes the latter approach for Congress.
Changing that rule would require the country to make the choice explicitly through Article V.
Until that happens, H.J.Res.188 remains a proposal, not law.
Omar remains constitutionally eligible to serve in the House.
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Naturalized Republicans and Democrats remain eligible as well.
And the larger question Mace has raised remains unresolved: should the natural-born citizenship barrier that protects access to the presidency be expanded across much of the federal government, or should American citizenship after naturalization continue to be enough?
