Hatch didn't get too much opposition from a bipartisan group of House members who have floated similar constitutional resolutions, or from constitutional scholars who maintained the framers' original intent behind the prohibition - to block wealthy foreign monarchs from usurping the fledgling democracy - is no longer a threat.

"When our Founding Fathers put this into the Constitution, it was impossible for people voting for a president to get to know them," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. "Today, when you are voting for a president of the United States - "

"You are going to know a lot more than you want to know," Hatch interjected during the hearing of his Senate Judiciary Committee.

Rohrabacher, whose bill to require hospitals to report undocumented immigrants to the government and encourage physicians to deny them medical care in certain cases failed on the House floor in May, backed the Hatch proposal.

But his California colleague, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said she was reluctant. California's Republican movie star governor, Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the focal point of potential beneficiaries of such a constitutional amendment.

Feinstein called the native-born presidential requirement a "healthy burden because it connotes with it a deeper responsibility" to the nation and "I don't think we can easily dispense with it because it is so dispositively written into the Constitution."

Hatch framed the question as giving voters the right to choose whomever they wish to lead the country, noting that his proposed resolution would open the Oval Office only to immigrants who have held citizenship for at least 20 years.

"It is time for us, the elected representatives of this nation of immigrants, to begin the process that can result in removing this artificial, outdated, unnecessary and unfair barrier," said Hatch.

"This restriction has become an anachronism that is decidedly un-American."