What if it had turned out Obama was NOT a citizen?

Great Debates
1

But not just the birther thing. What would happen if, subsequent to a Presidential election and taking office, the President is discovered NOT to be constitutionally eligible?

Not a natural born citizen after all. Or age was not clear for some reason, and the President was found to be too young to serve.

There are Constitutional eligibility criteria for President, including,

  • natural born citizen of the United States (we’ve had plenty of that lately)
  • at least thirty-five years old
  • permanent resident in the United States for at least fourteen years

What if, for some reason, it came to light after starting service, heck even after serving a full term, that the President had been Constitutionally ineligible for office.

What would happen? Are all laws voided during the time of Presidential service?

Unlikely? Of course, but not impossible.

I don’t think I’ve seen this “what if?” discussed anywhere. If already discussed here, my apologies, I looked but didn’t notice it anywhere.

2

If a president’s ineligibility was found to nullify anything he or she did, most laws would still be valid. The only ones that wouldn’t be would be ones passed within 10 days of an adjournment. A bill that the president ignores for 10 days becomes law automatically. Some things would also become law if every action was nullified, because the pseudopresident presumably would have vetoed some things.

3

I think this is a better fit for Great Debates than the Elections forum.

4

I’m not going to do the search, but we had a thread about this in the last year, and we had some good comments from our resident legal experts. FYI.

5

No actions taken by an officeholder would be automatically invalidated just because we later found that the officeholder was ineligible to hold the office. As long as they were certified by the appropriate authority, they are the valid officeholder. The most that can happen is that they are removed from office by the appropriate authority. Of course they could also later be prosecuted if it turned out that they committed any crimes such as fraud while pursuing the office.

6

I don’t think any precedent remotely exists from this.

On the one hand my feeling has always been that since Obama was part of fifty state elections and on fifty state ballots, the time and place to verify his eligibility to hold office was back then, when he was put on those ballots.

Due to Federal supremacy, the States have to follow the Constitution when putting individuals on the ballot. So the individual States can’t have 21 year olds or non-natural born citizens on the ballot. However, if they went ahead and put one on the ballot anyway, I would think a citizen of that State would have to sue in Federal court to block the action (at which point the SCOTUS/lower level Federal courts would note the obvious ineligibility of the candidate and order he be removed from the ballot.)

That didn’t happen, or rather if anyone did actually sue to prevent Obama from staying on the ballot, those cases did not go anywhere.

So once election day was past, all the State electoral votes were sent to the “Seat of Government” and certified by the President of the Senate. The individual who had a majority of EVs then became President, that is exactly what happened.

I would imagine that if a concerned citizen felt that Obama was not a natural-born citizen, he could have filed suit against the President of the Senate to stop their certifying the results until the natural-born citizen issue was resolved. That didn’t happen, or if it did the suit didn’t go anywhere.

Once those results are certified though, and especially once Obama was sworn in, I do not know that there is any mechanism aside from impeachment that could remove Obama from power.

The Constitution sets rules as to who can be President, and it clearly says anyone who is not a natural born citizen is ineligible to hold the office. At the same time, there is absolutely no precedent for a President just being declared ineligible and removed, for example let’s say we had 100% definitive proof Obama was born in Kenya. Someone proved this in court and it made it up to the SCOTUS level, the SCOTUS ruled Obama was “no longer President.” Well, I don’t know that the SCOTUS can do that, because even if it was 100% certain Obama was ineligible to be elected, once sworn in there is absolutely no constitutional support for the concept of the SCOTUS being able to unilaterally remove a sitting President, for any reason.

Congress could, as always, impeach him and remove him from office. The impeachment power is entirely discretionary, though, and Congress would be under no obligation to impeach him.

As far as the validity of the laws Obama signed, as the properly sworn in President, they would all still have full force of law and persons who ignored their validity would almost certainly find themselves in serious legal trouble.

7

Aside from impeachment this could theoretically work:

I suppose if Biden convinced the cabinet that Obama’s constitutional inability to serve as President, due to his place of birth, made him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” Biden could become “acting President” in this manner, and if Obama contested it and Congress sided with Biden, Biden would serve out the rest of Obama’s term as acting President while Obama would remain President without power.

8

There were three Senators in the 19th century who took office in the Senate despite not yet being thirty years old (as required by the Constitution). John Henry Eaton, Armistead Mason and Henry Clay.

I don’t recall anyone ever asking whether or not we need to go back and check the really close Senate votes and seeing if the “invalid” vote made a difference.

Zev Steinhardt

9

In order to verify a candidate’s eligibility as a meaningful form of protection against ineligible people being elected president, you’d have to determine exactly what makes someone eligible, and exactly what makes someone ineligible. There would need to be precise definitions of who is and is not a natural born citizen, and who is and is not a resident of the United States. There would also need to be a concrete answer on whether or not a person who becomes eligible mid-term can be elected.

10

George W. apparently was not even elected president. SCOTUS took care of that and all things he did subsequently were completely and legally presidential. No problem, should a person who was not eligible be elected and the court give it’s approval, I should think.

11

The problem isn’t whether he was born in America or not. The problem is the term “Natural born citizen” has never been defined.

No where in the US Constitution does it say the president must be born on US soil. It simply says “Natural born citizen.”

So even if if Mr Obama was born in Kenya, so what?

Let’s say this is so.

OK then it would wind up in the Supreme Court to define what “natural born citizen” means.

The Supreme Court could decide or it could simply decline to get involved saying that is political in nature and not a question for the court.

If the Supreme Court takes the first option, we have an answer.

If it takes the latter option, we are basically stuck with the status quo.

That is unless congress takes steps to remove the president, through impeachment or the 25th Amendment.

Since “natural born citizen” has never been defined, we won’t know till it happens. The current thinking about what the phrase means is that said person would be a citizen of the United States without taking out any papers to do so.

Mr Obama certainly is a citizen. And as far as I know he’s never taken out any papers to establish that he is a citizen. Thus from the day he was born he was a citizen.

But again until we have a person born to US citizens outside of US controlled territory we won’t ever know.

12

It is virtually impossible in this media age for a person to run for president and be able to successfully cover up the fact that he or she was actually born in a foreign country. Which is one of many reasons why the Obama birther issue was so laughable.

13

In 1961 (the year Mr Obama was born), the law said that if his parents were married and one was a citizen and one wasn’t a citizen, the citizen parent had to have lived in the United States or its outlying territories for at least 10 years before the birth. Of those ten years, at least 5 had to be after reaching age 14.

Mr Obama’s mother was 18 at the time he was born. She could not have fulfilled the requirement of living in the United States or its outlying territories for at least 5 years after she was 14.

He certainly would not have been a citizen if he had been born in Kenya. But, of course, as we knew all along, he was born in Hawaii, not Kenya. Being born in Hawaii in 1961 automatically made him a citizen regardless of his parents’ nationalities.

14

Ooops. I should have said in my previous posting that the citizen parent had to have lived at least 10 years in the United States, 5 of which were after turning age 14, in order to pass citizenship to their child who was born outside of the United States or its outlying territories.

THE EVOLUTION OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP LAW SINCE 1790 WITH A SPECFIC FOCUS ON
THE CITIZENSHIP OF A CHILD BORN ABROAD TO A U.S. CITIZEN PARENT
See, specifically, “1952 THE ‘IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT OF 1952’”

15

Was Obama’s parents legally married considering his dad was married in Kenya? If not then 1409© states
Notwithstanding the provision of subsection (a) of this section, a person
born, after December 23, 1952, outside the United States and out of wedlock
shall be held to have acquired at birth the nationality status of his mother, if the
mother had the nationality of the United States at the time of such person’s
birth, and if the mother had previously been physically present in the United
States or one of its outlying possessions for a continuous period of one year.
(66 Stat. 163, 235, 8 U.S. Code Section 1409, June 27, 1952.)

16

It’s entirely possible that obama was born in Kenya. His mother had renounced her American citizenship about the time he was born. No one has been able to find the flight record where she had, supposedly flew back to the U.S. just before he was born. Although flight records before and after have been able to be seen.
His birth certificate was requested not long after he had entered the race for the democratic nomination. He was running against hillary who demanded he produce a birth certificate. In his typical arrogance (and, possibly, his fight to stay in the ring as a legitinmate candidate, or both) he refused. Unlike Ted Cruz who had no issue with presenting his birth certificate from Canada. He (obama) never produced a birth certificate until he had been in office for two years. It was then that a woman by the name of Loretta Fuddy was named as the Director of Health for Hawaii. Coincidentally (or maybe not) Ms Fuddy had belonged to the same group (a small, somewhat radical Islamic group, in India) as obama’s mother. It’s not known if they knew each other. However, given how small the membership was, it’s possible they had known, or at least had knowledge of each other. Just a few short months after Ms Fuddy produced a birth certificate (that a number of people have questioned due to the numbering on the certificate) she boarded a small plane carrying just a few other passengers, to fly to one of the other islands. During flight there was a problem where the plane lost power. A passenger on the flight had been video taping and continued to tape as the pilot explaibed they were going to go down. The plane landed in the ocean just off the coast of Hawaii. All passengers survived, including Ms Fuddy. Again, this had all been filmed. It wasn’t long before a rescue plane showed up and circled above until they were rescued from the ocean. During the time they were waiting to be rescued all the passengers, including Ms Fuddy seemed to be in good spurits and were making conversation, and even joked around. The video taping continued. However, sometime between when the first person was rescued, until they got to Ms Fuddy, she (Ms Fuddy) ended up dead. No body understood as she seemed in good spirits and juat fine. There was an autopsy done. The official report was that she died of a heart attack which, they claim, was due to the stress of the crash. All the witnesses said she was fine and showed no sign of stress. Her brother demanded an investigation stating his sister had just had a full physical just a few months earlier and was given a clean bill of health. No heart conditions existed in their family.
I don’t think there’s anything obvious about obama exceot that he is a moslem and he hates America

17

What an utterly unsubstantiated load of bullshit.

18

I’m going to close this as a zombie.

SmileyPixie, I’d prefer that if you wish to comment on an old thread you consider starting a new one. It’s possible - with an old thread - that some of the participants are no longer posting here. Better to create a new one than bounce an old one.