“Everyone in DC wanted that changed without the hassle of amending the Constitution.”
Correct!
Exactly, if you do the research, you will find that at least 20 times, various Senators and Congressman have written bills to try and change the NBC requirement.
This goes back to the 1970’s. Depending on which bill that you examine, some wrote in, “having lived in America as a citizen for 10, 15, or 20 years” as the new standard. As I recall, most of those bills were not specifying that either parent must have been an American citizen, nor even a US resident.
Think about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans were pumping him up, big-time and the NBC requirement was the roadblock. He was likely promised by others congressmen that they would dismantle the roadblock to the presidency and that’s why Arnold jumped into politics in California. Big eyes-big ego-Kennedy clan- POTUS was always the true goal.
There’s likely plenty of other foreigners that are unfamiliar names to us that would have risen had they been successful in those attempts to disassemble the Constitutional requirements.