I apologize if this has been asked/discussed before, but I thought a thread on this particular point might be of interest.
Let’s say, for a moment, that the birthers are right and that Obama was not born in Hawaii or anywhere else on US soil. We’ll ignore all the evidence to the contrary, cede that the birth certificate that Obama produced was a fake, that the newspaper birth announcements were fake, that the Health Dept and Governor or Hawaii have lied all this time, etc. etc. etc. OK.
Why do the birthers say that he is not a citizen? His mother was a US citizen when he was born, so it doesn’t matter if he was born on Antarctica, in a submarine in international waters, or on the moon – by having one parent who is a citizen, he is therefore a “natural born citizen” according to US law.
Are they saying the mother wasn’t a citizen? Or is there some other tin-foil reason? All you see them harp on is the birth certificate thing, I’ve never seen any of them carry the argument to the next stage, nor any reporter/interviewer take them there. I’ve seen the point brought up in comment sections on news web sites, etc., but I’ve never seen a birther finish the equation to come out with the conclusion “and therefore Obama is not qualified to be President.”
The relevant law apparently was that a person born to a US-citizen mother outside the US was a citizen only if she had resided in the US a certain number of years after turning 16. Ann Dunham was too young to have resided that number of years. (And Barack Obama Senior was not a US citizen).
Well, I’m not really plugged in to their delusion’s wavelength, but might it have to do with the fact that it’s not as simple as “his mother was a US citizen whenhe was born.”
The law says (now) that a child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child’s birth.
Thanks for the correction, and my apologies for getting that part wrong. The point is that at the time, a US-citizen mother under the age of 19 (as Ann Dunham was) could not transmit US citizenship to her child born outside the US, even if she’d lived in the US all her life except for the one day she was outside giving birth.
It does not appear that she was. He was born when she was still 18 (had not reached her 19th birthday). This precludes her from having reached the needed 5 years after turning 14.
It’s all silly, of course, since he was born in Hawaii. :rolleyes:
I don’t think so, for two reasons. “Ex post facto” has been interpreted to apply only to criminal laws. As well, it’s not that they changed the law retroactively - the Congress changed it as of a certain date, for births that occurred after that date.
I don’t see any retroactive change of status here, but I think that Congress can determine that a group of people became US citizens by birth, even though they were not citizens at the time of their birth. For example, if the US gained a new territory, Congress could determine that everyone born in that territory before it was part of the US was a US citizen by birth.
Something similar happened to me: my citizenship at birth was British subject. By an act of the Australian Parliament, I became an Australian citizen on 26th January, 1949, and by later acts of the UK Parliament and of the Australian Parliament I lost my status as a British subject. However, none of these statutes were retroactive: they just changed my future citizenship.
For what seems like the three billionth time it’s been mentioned here (and no offense to you personally, Frylock), an ex post facto law in the constitutional meaning of the phrase is one which retroactively makes an act illegal. I.e., in March you shoot a moose, and the local paper does a feature story on it. In June the legislature passes a law making the shooting of moose illegal, retroactive to January, and the game warden arrests you for shooting that moose in March. The law is null and void as to its retroactivity aspects (it may remain in force from the time of passage forward), since it criminalizes an act you committed perfectly legally as of the time you did it. Likewise if shooting a moose was a misdemeanor and they made it a felony retroactively.
A law that does something else, non-criminal in nature, retroactively, extends a period for claims, retroactively gives permission to build an already-built structure unknowingly constructed in contravention of a law in desuetude, extends a stated period for ratification of a measure, revises eligibility requirements for a entitlement or grant, etc., is not an ex post facto law. Regardless of whether it operates retroactively.
ETA: I see Northern Piper addressed this already – but I’m leaving the post up, provided Frylock and the moderators do not object, to emphasize this point. A retroactive law is void as ex post facto only if it acts to criminalize or increase penalties for an act.
Good article in Slate today indicating that even if the Birthers come up with a smoking gun, it would be a long, hard fight to get Obama out of office.
Hwere’s a hypothetical. Suppose the Bahamas seek to enter the U.S., conditioned on their receiving immediate statehood, and, of course, citizenship. The treaty is signed, a referendum is held there and union passes, and Congress admits them to the Union. Twenty years from now the Senior Senator from the Bahamas, a native of the islands of age 45, is a leading candidate for President. Is he a ‘natural born citizen’? He’s a lifelong resident of what is at that point a state of the Union.
Suppose someone were born in the Republic of Texas in 1839, and ran for President in 1888. Or a Californian in the same situation. Would they have been eligible? What if a resident of Hawaii had run in, say, 1920?
Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was just a territory, not a state. I guess back then they didn’t have 1000 blogs run by nutjobs to bring that up.
You’re making this much too complicated. One of the current brither tropes is that both parents have to be U.S. citizens for the child to be a U.S. citizen. Barark Hussein Obama Sr. was not a U.S. citizen. Therefore his son cannot be. Check any of the thousand freerepublic.com threads on this. Orly Taitz said this during her insane rant on MSNBC.
See how simple that is? No fuss about birthplaces or certificates or documents. It solves the basic issue. Obama can’t be president.
What evidence do they present for a law or ruling that says that the child of a non-U.S. citizen is not a citizen? None, of course. What about Chester A. Arthur, the son of an Irish citizen? He never should have been president, though that’s irrelevant to getting Obama out of office.
You can’t presume to ask about the logic of the rules of this game. There are no rules and there is no logic. There is only an outcome. The outcome is impossible and most of them know it, but the game allows the venting of the hate in a seemingly law-abiding, adhering to principle, and respecting of history way. Demanding that the president follow the laws of the land - just like them! - is a better stance than saying that “we’re shrieking raving lunatics who want to upend a lawful election and plunge the country into a fascistic takeover by the minority of crazies that we approve!”
As long as the argument is whether the President obeyed the law, they’ll keep themselves in the news. Taitz may have destroyed that hope. Her production of a Kenyan birth certificate so ridiculous, so historically impossible, so shot full of wink-wink references, and so similar to an Australian birth certificate that was obviously the source is causing the other birthers to backpeddle at supersonic speeds. Once you throw in a forged document to make you case, you’ve lost all your high ground. The rest of the birthers will continue their nonsense but the public will forever think of Taitz’s craziness and outright fraud as their image of the issue. I think it may be over.
There’s a quite incomprehensible mish-mash of mostly 19th century legal rulings on one reference that claims to address just the distinction between US citizen and individual state citizen. As far as I can work out they were trying to get round a very similar problem of the time, trying to disqualify ex-slaves as state citizens while forced to accept them a federal citizens.
There IS logic, it’s just that their premises are false. I agree that they will never accept any evidence to the contrary and that the ones who are deeply invested in this are loons, hate-filled, etc. They will throw anything at everything against the wall to try to get something to stick and will grasp at any straw, no matter how flimsy. Still, they are grasping at those straws and presenting arguments. Just a fringy version of the Republican hard-on for “getting” Clinton. (Ken Starr, I’m looking at you.)
The sad thing is that this fringe theory has gained more and more traction, to the point that in a recent poll the MAJORITY of self-identified Republicans doubted that Obama met the citizen requirement or were not sure. Today, a professor at my top-20-college alma mater even said, “He should just release the long form!” This is a LAW professor. Who should KNOW better. (She’s a loon of a different stripe, she loves being all contrary and controversial and stuff.) Still, it’s worrisome, in the same way that so many people, especially younger people, don’t believe the moon landing was real, the same way that so many people don’t “believe in” the theory of evolution.