I’m not sure what you mean by this. The vice president is the only person in the line of succession who doesn’t have his own job to do, necessarily. The Speaker is a member of Congress and has to organize her party members, but the VP is mainly waiting for the President to become incapacitated. It’s far more likely that the Veep will step in than that the Speaker will, especially given our history; no Speaker has ever become President, but IIRC 8 VPs have become President between elections.
John Tyler (William Henry Harrison), Chester Arthur (Garfield), Millard Fillmore (Taylor), Andrew Johnson (Lincoln), Theodore Roosevelt (McKinley), Harry Truman (FDR), Lyndon Johnson (Kennedy), Gerald Ford (Nixon).
TFD is correct that there is no case law on the meaning of natural born when it comes to the president or vice president, because it’s never come up.
That doesn’t mean that the words have no definition.
The usual definition is covered from a 1790 law. And this question has of course come up with McCain many times, and has normally been dismissed as a non-issue.
Given the long travel times to get even to Europe in the founding fathers’ day, and their experience that diplomats, soldiers, or merchants might spend years in another country, it’s not possible to believe that they intended that the son of the Ambassador to France would be disqualified for the Presidency because his father was in service to his country. It’s been a standing proposition ever since.
Congress can put exceptions on cases in which both parents are not citizens and has. This Wikipedia page gives case law on that situation.
But McCain is the child of U.S. citizens on duty for their country. There is just no question about his being a natural born citizen.
There was legislation covering the subject. The situation regarding citizenship and the Canal Zone was complex. I haven’t been able to find anything on line about it. However, IIRC, people born in the Canal Zone were citizens if at least one parent was a US citizen and an employee of the Panama Canal Company or Panama Railroad (or I think the US government in general). The citizen parent, however, had no requirement to have ever lived in the US. In other cases, a citizen parent has to have lived in the US for a certain period of time in order to be able to transmit citizenship. In the Canal Zone, there were families that had lived there for generations without ever visiting the US whose children were still born as citizens.
No, the Speaker of the House only has to be eligible to be a Congressman. If the Speaker isn’t eligible to be president and either executive office is vacated, the office in line after SOTH would become VP.
Madeline Albright isn’t a natural born citizen. When she was Secretary of State, she was not in the line of succession to be president. This meant she could always be at the same public function as President Clinton. (For events like the State of the Union, one of the president’s cabinet stays away from the Capitol just in case there’s a major attack and most of the Executive Branch is killed.)
It’s not strictly true that no speaker has become president. No one has ever moved directly from being Speaker to being President, true, but James K. Polk was speaker from 1835-1839, then governor of Tennessee from 1839-1841. He was president from 1845-1849.
That’s not so. If the office of VP becomes vacant, the President appoints a Vice-President, subject to confirmation by both houses of Congress. Prior to the passage of whatever amendment it was that enabled this, the office simply remained vacant.
And since we’re talking about the requirements for various offices being related to their succession to the Presidency, bringing up somebody who occupied both offices non-consecutively is really irrelevant.
Actually, I don’t know that that’s true. All the Constitution says is that the House of Representatives shall choose its own speaker and other offices. It doesn’t say that the speaker has to be a member of the House.
Not quite true, you don’t need BOTH parents one will do. My mother is Australian and my father was in the US Navy, they met but never married. I am an American because my father was. It makes no difference if it’s one or both. When my mother immigrated to the United States when I was 8. She got priority because I was in fact an American, and they didn’t want to seperate us. So she got to stay.
The 14th amendment says that anyone BORN in the United States is a citizen.
Section 1. All 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.
This is quite common in New York City, lots of children of illegal immigrants are born in New York City. They are citizens and their parents are not.
Some people have argued that that’s not necessarily true.
In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that children born to non-citizen parents who were legally residing in the United States were natural citizens of the United States. So it explicitly recognized that the legal status of the parents was an issue.
In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled, in Plyler v. Doe, on the issue of public education for the children of illegal immigrants. The ruling stated “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment “jurisdiction” can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful”. While the court was issuing a ruling on the subject of education, the decison has been broadly interpreted to say that the children of illegal aliens also have the same citizenship rights as the children of legal aliens. But the subject of citizenship was not explicitly mentioned in the ruling and some people have argued that the ruling was not intended to address that issue.
Constitutionally?! What Article or Amendment would that be . . . especially as there was quite a spell when the SOTH and PPTOTS were not in the line of succession. In fact (as I mentioned before), there are Constitutional grounds that the members of the legislature CANNOT succeed to the office of the Presidency as they are not “officers” under Article II, Section 1.
As long as we’re talking hypotheticals, what happens if the Speaker of the House is 34 years old when the President and Vice President die. He’s passed over because he’s too young to assume the Presidency and the President pro tempore of the Senate becomes President. Then the Speaker has his 35th birthday - does he now become President?
No. The Speaker only assumes the office if it is vacant. Since the PPT would have already been sworn in as President, the office would not be vacant, and the Speeker would have no claim on it.
… so, if someone moved to, say, Spain, married a local, they had a child, the children chose US citizenship over Spanish… the next generation wouldn’t be able to choose US citizenship unless daddy had spent enough time in the US?
