|
Article two, section one, clause five of the Constitution states that "only natural
born Citizen(s) . . . shall be eligible to the office of President."
The Constitution does not define the meaning of "natural born citizen" and only uses the term
once to describe the President. The Constitution does not even define what it means to be a citizen of the United States.
But it is clear that the framers of the Constitution would never have intended for Barack Obama to be eligible to be President
for one simple reason: they never intended for a person of African decent to hold the highest office.
The founding fathers also never intended for a woman to be President (sorry Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton).
They also would have excluded from the presidency individuals whose parents voluntarily expatriated themselves and who
were subsequently born abroad (sorry George Romney, who was born in a Mormon colony in Mexico). The framers of
the Constitution probably would not have had much sympathy for the children of such expatriates even if they are born
in the United States (sorry Mitt Romney who was born in Detroit).
However, the original Constitution has been amended many times. The
Fourteen Amendment, ratified
July 9, 1868 after the Civil War, states in part: “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” In
1898 the Supreme Court ruled in United
States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 that the Fourteenth Amendment applies to children born
in the United States to parents who are not citizens of the United States such that the children automatically become citizens
upon birth. However, there are narrow-minded people who are stuck in the pre-civil war mentality who will never accept
an African American, woman or Mormon as President. Since they cannot even get a federal court anywhere in the country to seriously
consider their pre-Civil War interpretation of the Constitution, they fabricate facts and create phony birth certificates.
Ironically, John McCain is the only Presidential candidate in the history of the United States
to have a federal court rule on whether or not he was a “natural born citizen” within the meaning of the Constitution.
The Federal Judge in that case, William Alsop, the former head of the litigation department at the liberal San Francisco
based firm Morrison & Foerster, ruled in McCain’s favor.
The term “natural born citizen” has been traced by many scholars to a 1787 letter
from John Jay to George Washington which reads in part:
“Permit
me to hint, whether it would not be wise ... to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration
of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in chief of the american army shall not be given to,
nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.”
It
is likely that John Jay was first introduced to this concept by Benjamin Franklin. On March 31, 1783, David
Hartley, a British Member of Parliament who represented the British Monarch, King George III, in the negotiation of a peace
treaty between the United States and Great Britain, transmitted a draft treaty to Benjamin Franklin. Article
10 of this draft reads:
“Neither shall the independence
of the United States be construed any further than as independence, absolute and unlimited, in matters of government, as well
as commerce. Not into alienation, and therefore the subjects of his Britannic majesty and the citizens of the
United States shall mutually be considered as natural born subjects, and enjoy all rights and privileges
as such in the respective dominions and territories in the manner heretofore accustomed.”
This Article appears designed to protect from alienation British subjects who are in the
United States and remain loyal to King George III when England recognizes the United States' independence and ends the
Revolutionary War. However, this Article did not appear in the final version of the treaty, called the
Treaty of Paris signed September 3, 1783. But it is worth noting that Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and
John Jay did sign this final version of the Treaty on behalf of the United States and it is likely that the draft containing
the reference to “natural born subjects” was shared by Franklin with Adams and Jay. That means that it is likely
that John Jay and the other two signatories who were also Framers of the Constitution may have been influenced by the use
of the term in the draft Treaty.
In December of 1783, Thomas Jefferson
apparently drafted notes on British and American citizenship and alienage because he was studying the Treaty and because he
had received a specific request for information from Elizabeth House Trist concerning the status of her son Browse, whose
father was a British officer. A transcription of these handwritten notes can be found in a source called the Collection of Letters of Delegates in Congress: Volume 21, October 1, 1783
- October 31, 1784.
|
