Bet Appétit

Le Guide Rouge · Jim × Whit

The citizenship pair
Not settleable as written

Does the natural-born-citizen requirement for the presidency get redefined or removed?

No closing dateDate struck not recorded

How it settles

No rule a stranger could check.

Redefined or removed has no threshold. A constitutional amendment would obviously count, but so might a Supreme Court reinterpretation, an act of Congress, or a legal opinion inside the executive branch that nobody notices. Naming which of those settles it is the missing term — and it is the same gap Jim pressed on at the time.

Jim

Getting there means overcoming the plain meaning of the words, which points to a constitutional amendment, and nobody has set out the steps.

Whit

The phrase is never defined in the Constitution. Ending birthright forces citizenship to be redefined, and that is the opening to define the phrase at last — by test or by criteria, potentially applied backwards.

The Inspector last looked · 1 Aug 2026

On 30 June 2026 the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara that Trump's January 2025 executive order trying to restrict birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment was unconstitutional, so the attempt to redefine who counts as a citizen at birth was blocked rather than succeeding. This is the exact pathway Whit pointed to (ending birthright citizenship forcing a redefinition of citizenship that could bleed into 'natural born citizen'), and it failed at the Supreme Court, so no redefinition or removal of the presidential eligibility clause happened here. The bet's own rule has no defined threshold for what counts as 'redefined or removed,' so this cannot settle it, but the news cuts against Whit's mechanism and leaves Jim's 'nobody has set out the steps' position looking stronger for now.

Found by an automated search of the news, judged against this bet's own rule. Its own confidence: medium. It cannot settle a bet — only one of you can.

The stake

Loser books Anywhere on the map — proposed by this app, not agreed

The passport · Worth a special journey · Winner picks a table anywhere on earth and the loser books it. The tier that makes the map worth building.

Terms to agree · 4
  • Closing date
  • Stake
  • Date struck
  • A rule anyone could check

No closing date was agreed, and this one has no natural end.

Notes · 2

The second half of the pair, and only in play if the first half lands. Jim took both.

Stake and closing date are both proposals from this app. Neither was agreed.

Close a checkpoint

Goes on the record next to the closing. Nothing checks it, so it is worth being honest about.

Optional. What settled it, in a line.

Remove this bet

This takes Does the natural-born-citizen requirement for the presidency get redefined or removed? out of the book for good, along with its sides, notes and any amendments. It cannot be undone — there is no bin to fish it back out of.

Bets are denominated in dinners. build w15-a-card-worth-pasting-3f70c2