The Constitution already lays out specific qualifications for members of Congress, including a stipulation that any House member be at least 25 years old and have been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years. Any effort to add new requirements without amending the Constitution—as some of the recent proposals have attempted—would run into legal roadblocks, Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, told me. “Those qualifications are exclusive,” she said. “The state can’t add qualifications on top of those, nor indeed can the federal government.”