He had a point though. The movie is too much setup and feels like the pilot to a new X-men show. Compare it to ANH, which told a complete story.
Of course he can't be removed simply because people demanded it, but there would be utter chaos and such a huge outcry that he'd either be forced to step down for the good of the country, or congress would be forced to impeach him to avoid paying the consequences themselves.
That is nonsense. There is no legal way for that to happen. As I've already repeatedly explained, you can't impeach a president for not being human. That's not a high crime or misdemeanor. There's no law against it. Maybe Congress could trump up some BS charge, like Ken Starr did with Clinton, but the president would still need to be convicted of the offense, and if it were a bogus charge invented for political reasons, then it couldn't be proven. I suppose we do have the precedent of President Nixon resigning to spare the country from the damage of impeachment proceedings. A voluntary resignation is the only possible way the scenario you describe could happen. But I suspect you may be exaggerating the ferocity of the prejudice against mutants in the X-Men movie universe. Surely there were people who accepted or tolerated mutants as well as people who hated and feared them. Just because Senator Kelly was stirring up those people who did hate mutants, that doesn't mean everyone in the country did. Heck, if we count The Last Stand, then the US appointed Hank McCoy as a cabinet secretary, so it's not as if it was impossible for a mutant to hold executive office. Yes, there would be a lot of people who would be prejudiced against a mutant president (or actually a "mutate" president, to use the Marvel term for someone whose genetics are altered postnatally). But you know what? There are a lot of people today who are prejudiced against a black president. There were a lot of people in 1960 who were prejudiced against the idea of a Catholic president. And hell, the bigots are a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Americans who can't tolerate the idea of a Democratic president or a Republican president. Every president has people who hate him and want him kicked out of office. This is not new. Many presidents have been the victims of orchestrated campaigns to discredit or impeach them, but actual impeachments have only happened twice and neither has resulted in a conviction or removal. Of course, our hypothetical mutate president could potentially fall victim to the one means that has been repeatedly employed to remove presidents from office prematurely: assassination. But the Secret Service keeps getting better at its job, and there hasn't been a successful presidential assassination in 48 years (and hopefully there never will be again). Heck, if I were responsible for the POTUS's security in the X-Men universe, I'd be hiring mutants for his or her Secret Service detail. Who better to protect the POTUS than people with superpowers?
Like I said, there is no specific definition for "human" under US law. The Constitution only specifies a "person," and being human is not a specific legal requirement for being a person. Under the laws of the land as they are already defined, being mutated into something other than human would not disqualify a person from the presidency, so long as that person remained capable of fulfilling the duties of the office. Let's face it, that's their current rumor, if you dig beneath the surface. It's no longer socially acceptable to be openly racist, so the racists have to encode their "He's not one of us" rhetoric in other terms, like claiming President Obama wasn't born in the US or that he's secretly a Muslim. The overwhelming proof to the contrary doesn't alter their accusations because that's not what their accusations are really about. They're just dogwhistle code to stir up the racists. Beneath the surface of those accusations is the belief that the president is less than human because he isn't white. Which is what I've been saying all along. The scenario of people arguing that a president should be kicked out of office because of his identity is not some hypothetical future/alternate-reality scenario. It's something that's happened in reality more than once, that's happening to an extent right now. So we can evaluate that hypothetical scenario -- the reaction to a mutant (or mutate) president -- based on the real-world parallels and precedents we already have.
As others have said, since we have never had a non human president, we will never know. But I'm willing to bet that if the President shows up at the White House with blue fur and able to lift a car, it wouldn't be business as usual for him. I still stand by my original point that Magneto's plan wasn't very well thought out, and wouldn't benefit him or other mutants in any way. It would make them society's number one enemy.
Darth Cheney doesn't have a heart, which pretty much excludes him from being human, not really sure why there'd be a difference between having a non-Human President, versus Vice President? Darth Cheney served for 8 years as VP
I was just being silly, which apparently you didn't pick up on. However, this got me thinking. In theory, the John Bryne Post-Crisis Superman could have run for president since he was technically born in the US.
That is not true. We do know what would happen, because we know that the United States is governed by the Constitution, and the Constitution is very clear on what the parameters for removing a president from office are. That's the whole point of having a Constitution. It's a set of guidelines that tell you in advance how to deal with problems that may arise. So it's nonsense to say "we can't know what would happen." All we have to do is consult the Constitution and the law, and those codified, systematic guidelines allow us to predict what would happen. The Constitution does not require a president to be human. A nonhuman absolutely could be president, as long as he, she, or it met the legal definition of a person, was born within the United States, was at least 35 years old, and had resided within the US for at least 14 years. It's certainly possible that the voters might be unwilling to elect a nonhuman president, or to re-elect a president who somehow "turned" nonhuman during his or her term, but there is absolutely no legal way to remove a sitting president from office unless he or she is convicted of high crimes or misdemeanors, or is rendered incompetent to fulfill the duties of the office. Certainly if the president were mutated, there could be those who would attempt to argue that the mutation rendered him or her incompetent, but so long as the president retained his or her intelligence and reason, that argument would be difficult to prove. It might lead to a Supreme Court challenge, maybe an attempt to pass laws defining a "person" as a human being only, but there's no guarantee that such laws would be passed or would hold up to a Supreme Court challenge if they were passed. It would depend on a variety of factors, including just how pervasive the prejudice against mutants (or other nonhuman sophonts) was in the society, how powerful the President's political opposition was, and the like. It would obviously create controversy, but it would just as obviously have no effect on the President's Constitutionally defined eligibility for the office. Remember, as I've said already, many presidents have been wildly unpopular or hated while in office, yet have still managed to complete their terms. And the mistake you're making is assuming that Magneto's professed goal was his actual goal. The stuff about bringing enlightenment and tolerance to the world's leaders was just his rhetoric to justify his actions. At the core, what he wanted was to punish them and inflict poetic justice upon them -- to make them suffer the same persecution and exclusion they'd inflicted on him and people like him. Given that that was his true purpose, the plan was about as well thought out as it needed to be -- aside from the error that resulted in the field actually killing humans rather than simply mutating them. Yes, they actually did a big crossover event (the name slips my mind) that showed the possible futures of various superheroes, and the one for Superman showed him becoming the US President, with this exact justification being used (that his birthing matrix didn't decant him until he arrived in Kansas so he was technically a US native).
It was ARMAGEDDON 2001. If I remember correctly Superman had a different (possible) future in each of his Annuals.
^Yeah, that was the name. (I was confused because I was getting it mixed up in my head with Armageddon 2419 A.D., which I now remember to be the novella that introduced Buck Rogers, and I knew that date was way too far in the future for the comics crossover.)
I'm a big fan of the first X-Men movie and I'm kind of weird because I don't so much like X2. As a huge X-Men fan, I feel this film best captured the X-Men and what they are about and even though Wolverine was clearly the main focus, it was the closest to an ensemble film with Cyclops, Jean, Storm, Rogue and even the villains having some kind of focus. Anyone who complains that Storm didn't get enough focus in this film, yet still like X2 is kidding themselves. X2 should have just been called Wolverine: X-Men United. Unfortunately, for the the X-Men franchise lost steam and meandered directionlessly. I think that there is potential for a good X-Men franchise, bu t I don't think we've seen it yet. Even with the promise that FC brought.
Just another brief note on how difficult it is to reconcile the continuity between all of the movies, I watched Wolverine earlier tonight (yeah, yeah, I know ) and at the end of the scene in which Logan leaves Team X, after they started massacring a village in rural Nigeria, they showed a small girl (maybe around five years old) with white hair, with thunder booming in the background when she came on screen. Apparently they were implying that this was a very young Ororo Munroe, which would make her either around 32 during the first movie (if we decide it took place in 2000), or around 26 if we accept that X-Men/X2 were instead set around 1994 (fifteen years after Logan's last encounter with Stryker). And then we have a brief glimpse at another apparent young Storm during the Cerebro sequence in First Class! But since we also saw Cyclops during that scene, when neither character should have even been born yet when you take the first four movies into account, First Class moves closer to being more of a pure reboot than a genuine prequel. Although if we go with the 1994 thing, and ignore Cyclops and Storm being located by Xavier through Cerebro, then most everything else still lines up fairly okay. Gah. I wish the people in charge of the X-Men movies had been better about continuity, like Marvel has (mostly) been with the MCU.
It certainly feels that way. Oddly, however, the hero gets a magic sword during the course of the story but actually never gets to use it against the bad guys. On that specific point it seems like a setup for a future film.
There were many things in Star Wars that one knew at the time to be left unresolved for future films, including the following. The light saber given but not used. Han's debts (which his change of heart essentially suggests that he didn't have time to pay off). Darth Vader flying away. The unresolved question of who will get the princess, Luke or Han. The fact that we never see the Emperor. But this is not the same thing as saying that the viewer was short-changed by the 1977 film. Not to speak presumptively, but I think the nature of the complaint is that X-Men appeared simply to set the stage for the film series. It was largely just a showcase for introducing all the different characters. I agree with this point.
Which is curious, given that it is often claimed that sequels weren't originally planned due to uncertainty regarding the film's potential for success.
The things that were not "resolved" were incredibly minor with the story being told in ANH. Many movies have that sort of things. If the movie was unsuccessful and no sequels (or prequels) were ever made, then no one would really think twice about stuff "unresolved". Alternatively, if, say, ESB was the first Star Wars movie, then that would have been a gamble because there is a lot to be resolved since the film ended on a cliffhanger.