Dear LII editors,
I would like to contribute an article to replace an erroneous, misleading, politically biased article at
http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/natural_born_citizen .
Rather than attempt to debunk all the errors in the above article, may I contribute the following
to replace it. (The text is my own and does not infringe upon copyrighted text.)
_____________________________________
The U.S. Constitution, Art. ii, § 1, ¶ 5, lists THREE eligibility requirements for the Office of President:
No person except a natural born Citizen ... shall be eligible to the Office of President;
neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age
of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.
A legal idiom or term of art, "natural born Citizen" means,
a citizen
born in the country
of citizen parents.
The definition of "natural born Citizen" did not come from the Common Law. Far from it. Although most of the U.S. Constitution derives from the Common Law and the writings of John Locke and William Blackstone, the notion of "Crown and subjects" was anathema to free men who had just fought a war to free themselves from tyranny. For such a reason, the Framers - John Jay, Geo. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, David Ramsay, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, except for Alexander Hamilton - sought an alternative to the Common Law on matters of citizenship, nationality, naturalization, loyalty, and allegiance.
Looking beyond England and the Crown, the Framers were enamored of the liberation and freedom of the Enlightenment in France and Germany, which derived from the 17th century Rationalism of Gottfried Leibniz (German), René Descartes (French), and Baruch Spinoza (a Portuguese Jew in exile in Amsterdam). In the 18th century, Christian Wolff (German) and Emerich de Vattel (Swiss) built upon the philosophy of Leibniz. The Framers were well learned in The Law of Nations (1758 ), in which Emerich de Vattel wrote:
The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those
born in the country, of parents who are citizens.
N.B.: "parents" is plural, meaning the biological father and mother: not adopting parents, not the mother and her legal husband, and plainly, not one citizen parent and one alien parent.
This definition of "natural born Citizen," "born in the country, of parents who are citizens," was:
the norm in Western Civilization dating back to Plato and Herodotus
in the 4th and 5th c. BC;
used in correspondence among the Framers of the Constitution;
for example, in a letter to George Washington, John Jay wrote:
"Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and seasonable
to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into
the administration of our national Government; and to declare
expressly that the Commander in Chief of the American army
shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen."
quoted nearly verbatim in as many as eight U.S. Supreme Court cases *,
and although the lower courts were confused and conflicted about nbC,
never contradicted in any Supreme Court decision (except Justice Gray's
Tory attempt in Wong Kim Ark to conform the errant colonies with the
Common Law of Mother England, while Gray ignored that the Common
Law required those born to foreigners within the jurisdiction of the Crown
to have a letter of patent from the Crown, which assured that they were
not enemies or foreign emissaries, making them naturalized by the Crown,
and therefore NOT natural born citizens);
quoted by U.S. Rep. John A. Bingham and U.S. Sen. Jacob M. Howard,
authors of Amendment XIV, which concerns only citizens and
never mentions natural born Citizens; and
characteristic of every duly-elected President born since the Constitution
was ratified in 1787... except Chester A. Arthur, the Vice-President who
became President when James Garfield was assassinated, and who even
burned his Presidential papers to hide his father's Canadian citizenship.
* Cf. The Venus (1814), Shanks v. DuPont (1830), Dred Scott v. Sandford
(1857), The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), Minor v. Happersett (1874),
Elk v. Wilkins (1884), Perkins v. Elg (1939), and Chief Justice Melville
Weston Fuller's dissent in Wong Kim Ark (1898 ).
"At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country, of [169 U.S. 649, 680] parents who were its citizens, became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further, and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction, without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case, it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient, for everything we have now to consider, that all children, born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction, are themselves citizens."
Minor v. Happersett (1874) 21 Wall. 162, 166-168. (N.B. the distinction Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite made between "natives or natural-born citizens" and "citizens".)
Refer to http://www.alipac.us/threads/129743-Barack-Obama-s-citizenship-questioned for thousands of supporting posts on this subject.