I was reading a humour piece elsewhere on the internet the other day which made reference to the whole “Barack Obama is really from Kenya!” nonsense.
Since I’m not American, the fact people apparently took the notion seriously in the first place is, well, eyebrow raising to say the least, but it did give rise to an interesting hypothetical (or at least, I think it’s interesting)…
Let’s pretend, in his big closing address as he finishes his tenure as president, Mr Obama reveals that, by the way, he was actually born in Kenya after all.
What are the political or legal ramifications of this? I’m not as concerned with the tinfoil hat brigade jumping up and down with “See? See? WE TOLD YOU SO!!1!1”, but whether or not it would create some sort of sitation where some or all of his presidency might be declared invalid retroactively or something like that.
I’m going to apologise in advance if someone’s already asked this (I’m sure they have), but my thread search with the keywords “Obama” and “Kenya” turned up eleventy squillion results, and none of the ones I could see immediately appeared to address the hypothetical mentioned earlier.
Even if he was born in Kenya, he would still be a “natural-born citizen” of the US, due to being the child of a US citizen. So nothing would happen besides lots of teeth-gnashing.
No - under the law governing births out of the US at the time, the parent had to have lived a certain number of years in the US to be able to pass on citizenship. Obama’s mom hadn’t actually lived in the US the required number of years, because her parents had moved around, so by that scenario, he wouldn’t be a citizen.
But this is a bit of a hijack of the question in the OP, which assumes that Obama for whatever reason is not a natural born citizen, and asks, “What happens then?”
Fascinating hypothetical! If not for the notable absence of any Continua Buggies or bees, I would be tempted to suggest that someone had hijacked your account.
In my opinion, this would be a bomb thrown into the headquarters of the Democratic Party. The GOP would surge in popularity and gain control of both houses of Congress and in 2020, the presidency. The Democratic Party would have a very hard time recovering from such a blow and might well disintegrate. Inevitably, a new balance of power would emerge, but the players on the side of Progressivism would be considerably different from the ‘traitors who let a secret alien become President of the United States’.
And then one of the Kardashians would do something noteworthy and life would continue on much as it has in the past few years.
To answer the OP’s question, my guess would be the legal ramifications would be non-existent. It’s like the question people asked about the 2000 election - “what if they discovered that Gore really had won the election?” It wouldn’t make a difference. Once a person has been President, it’s a done deal. They can be impeached and removed from office but you can’t retroactively declare their Presidency invalid. And in the case you described where it would be Obama’s last day in office, impeachment would be a moot point.
We have no mechanism for declaring a presidency “invalid” after the fact, so there would be no ramifications as far as Obama’s presidency would be concerned.
However, going forward there would probably be some serious tinkering with state’s election laws wrt the determination of the qualifications of future candidates.
I remember reading an article early during Obama’s first term that said the same thing – once a president is sworn in, there’s no legal way to undo that. He could resign or be removed from office, but his time as president would still count.
I would say that the right thing to do would be to render anything he signed into law as null and void, and then have the next sitting President reauthorize things or not. So, if another Dem was in office, there would be little change. With a Rep, it ould be a mess, but I can’t see how his “official signature” would still be deemed to have been the required official signature required by the Constitution.
“Someone” would have to declare it all null and void though, yes?
It would have to go to the Supreme Court for a decision? Who would be able to file a case? Biden, maybe?
It wasn’t because the family had moved around, but because she wouldn’t have been old enough to pass on her citizenship if her child had been born outside the US. At the time, the requirements were that in the case of one non-citizen and one citizen parent, the citizen parent had to have lived 10 years in the US, five of which had to be after the age of 14. Since Obama’s mother was only 18 at the time of his birth, she couldn’t meet the latter requirement. The law has since been changed.
Of course all this is moot since Obama was born in the US.
This particular supposition, to the best of my knowledge, has never been tested in a court of law anyway - and if it were, I think the court would find that it was not the intent of Congress to deprive the children of teenage mothers of citizenship, and rule the child to be a citizen anyway.
Why would they do that? The law specifically mentioned the age of 14, so to think that Congress didn’t realize it would apply to teenagers is absurd. Rather, they would uphold the law as written and instruct Congress to change it if the intent was to not include teenage mothers.
As I said, the law has since been changed. In fact, this change would arguably make someone born in that circumstance qualify as a “natural born” citizen, even if they did not qualify for citizenship at the time of their birth.
This is exactly what happened in McCain’s case. According to the law prevailing at the time McCain was born, he did not qualify as a citizen. (The law referred to births to US citizens “outside the territory and jurisdiction” of the US. The US Canal Zone was outside US territory, but not outside US jurisdiction, so the law did not apply to McCain.) The law was changed shortly after his birth to eliminate this loophole.