“Some men,” an old saying has it, “are sent to Washington because their hometowns want them somewhere else.”
Although Melbourne Beach, Florida isn’t US Representative Randy Fine’s hometown — he was born in Arizona, raised in Kentucky, and subsequently managed to wear out his welcome in Massachusetts, Nevada, and Michigan before landing there — I have to think the remark explains his career in the state legislature and now Congress. He’s a generally unpleasant character with lots of stupid and bigoted ideas. Not the kind of guy you want wandering around getting into fights with the tourists during Bike Week in Daytona Beach.
Last October, Fine introduced the “Disqualifying Dual Loyalty Act of 2025,” which would mandate that “[n]o person, without regard to whether that person is a United States national, may be elected to the office of Representative or Senator if that person is a national of any country other than the United States.”
Not a terrible idea, you might say, but it’s got one technical problem and one PR problem.
The technical problem:
The US Constitution specifies the qualifications for election to Congress, which do not include a prohibition on “dual citizens,” and Congress doesn’t get to change those qualifications through legislation. It would take a constitutional amendment — requiring approval by 2/3 of both houses of Congress and ratification by 3/4 of state legislatures — to do that.
In other words, Fine’s bill is just public virtue signaling. It’s gone approximately nowhere, apparently dead in the Committee on House Administration, which is better — or at least less tedious — than it possibly getting passed by the House, passed by the Senate, signed by the president … and thrown out by the US Supreme Court at its first challenge because it’s clearly, unambiguously, and irrefutably unconstitutional.
The PR problem is Randy Fine. He loves to talk about his bill, all the time and everywhere, especially on social media.
Sample recent tweet: “You CANNOT serve two masters. My bill makes it simple: Only Americans. Full allegiance to the United States and the United States alone. No more dual loyalty in Congress.”
Unfortunately for the PR angle, Fine spends a great deal of time and effort publicly demonstrating his own loyalty — not to the US, and not to his constituents, but to a foreign power.
In the state legislature, Fine successfully pushed legislation requiring businesses which contract with the state to demonstrate THEIR loyalty … not to the state of Florida, but to the state of Israel.
In 2023, Fine arranged to have messages inscribed on Israeli shells to be fired into Gaza: “Regards from Randy Fine.”
Right before his election to Congress, Fine confided to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he’d been considering a move anyway — and not to Washington: “He had been fully prepared to move his family to Israel in the event Kamala Harris had won the presidential election, he says.”
Since his election to the House, Fine’s agenda has remained clear: The Israeli regime must receive everything it demands from Americans, without question or objection, and the Israeli regime must never, under any circumstances, be held to any behavioral standard as a condition of receiving whatever it demands.
Can you see the problem there?
The only respect in which the “dual loyalty” Fine loves to grandstand on isn’t a problem for Fine himself is that his own loyalty clearly isn’t “dual.” It’s not to America, Florida, his constituents or the Constitution he swore an oath to. It’s to the state of Israel.
A state that he readily can, and probably should, claim citizenship with and move to. All sane Americans and Floridians very much want him somewhere else.
Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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