My thought is that something like that would force the federal judiciary to rule on the constitutionality of it. If a state directly defined NBC it would test the idea of federalism and who the Constitution authorizes to define NBC. That might be as far as a federal ruling would go with it. That is, they might just rule that the state acted out of line in defining it so the court doesn’t have to address whether the definition the state gave was constitutional. So you might get a ruling regarding whose responsibility the NBC definition is but not a ruling on what NBC means.
We know that the states have the Constitutional duty to run Presidential elections, so if NBC wasn’t specifically defined in a state law but a particular definition was relied upon for the administration of elections, the feds couldn’t find the state out of line from a federal v state standpoint. But they would have to rule on whether the state was violating the federal/constitutional definition of NBC.
For the feds to hear it they’d need a case, which means that the law itself would have to grant specific standing for normal people to challenge it. If standing was given to anybody, then it wouldn’t have to be somebody claiming to suffer particularized harm - which would mean that it could use ANY definition for NBC and not necessarily one that would exclude somebody from eligibility and thus create a “particularized harm”.
That’s how it seems to me anyway. Am I making sense? Is there something you’re seeing that I’ve got wrong or that I’ve not taken into account?
If the state’s definition went with the current law of both those born in the country and those born overseas with at least one qualifying US citizen parent, then the only ones potentially harmed would be anyone denied something like ballot access in a presidential primary because they didn’t fit current law. It’s hard to imagine that becoming a lawsuit.
If all states adopted a similar law, then we’d have the bodies authorized to conduct elections, state legislatures, in charge of the definition, and that would be just about what the Constitution envisions.