Hamilton did have presidential ambitions. He was Washington’s right hand man and had hoped to succeed him as President. He eventually dropped out because of the Maria Reynolds affair.
As far as I know, no issue was made of his West Indian background. But that could be because his campaign never got serious enough to matter.
Another citizenship issue was about the southern secession. I don’t recall his name but there was a politician who had presidential ambitions in the 1930’s. The issue was raised that he had been born in a Confederate state that had declared its independence at the time of his birth. The counterargument was that the United States government had never recognized the secession so anyone born in a Confederate state was still a natural born American citizen.
Quoth Fubaya:
Right, and the only reason nobody ever raised a stink about it is that nobody really cares what the citizenship status of a presidential candidate is. All they care about is that they seem American. It’s left as an exercise for the student why, to some folks, McCain seems American but Obama doesn’t.
Neither would children born to members* of hostile armed forces occuping US soil. That issue hasn’t come up in quite some time.
*Presumably if one of the parents was an American citizen/resident (like a “comfort woman”) the child would be a US citizen.
I don’t think there is any requirement to renounce a foreign citizenship. The foreign citizenship is between you and the foreign government - it would be unfair if they provided no clear path for renunciation to hold this against you. It would be funny if North Korea could veto the results of an American presidential election simply by declaring the winner an North Korean citizen!
If Obama had been born in Kenya, then the argument goes that the age of his mother would have precluded her from passing on her citizenship; not because she was under the age of majority per se, but because she wasn’t old enough to have lived in the US for 5 years after her 14th birthday (even though she had lived her whole life there). Of course, the issue is moot since Obama was born in the US.
flodnak: I’m aware of the residency in the US requirement; however, my post was addressing the bit about “being born on base.”
Jus soli means “law of land,” and jus sanguinis means “law of blood” in Latin. Tmyk!
e: or “right” of land/blood. Oops.
There really isn’t any dispute about this at all, not a shred, other than in the imagination of some very persistent folks with delusions about reality.
1st - his mother never gave up her citizenship her Husband was Indonesian
2nd - if a family moves here and the parents become naturalized this does not automatically make their children citizens. They have to go through the process them selves. I would assume that this works the other way around. A child born in the USA is a citizen I would think that they would have to renounce it on their own.
Does this mean that an inhabitant of somewhere that becomes a State (or whatever) is eligible to become President to this day? Or are there restrictions? For instance, let’s suppose Vladimir Putin wants to become POTUS. Could he become a citizen of Elbonia, then when Elbonia becomes the 51st State run for President?
No, that was a onetime offer. It said that anyone who was living in the United States in 1789 was eligible to be elected President. Alexander Hamilton, who was born and raised in the West Indies, or Albert Gallatin, who was born and raised in Switzerland, would be examples of somebody covered by this.
I just wanted to point out a logical flaw in the OP:
The debate is not about whether Obama was born in the country or not. The debate is why a group of crazy people refuse to believe the legally acceptable evidence that he was.
If the debate is stated as above, then the answer is that it is impossible to provide any evidence that will satisfy these people, ever. In fact, if they applied their standard of proof to themselves, they wouldn’t be Americans either.
The burden of proof is not on the people who think Obama was not born in the US. It is their burden of proof to prove that he wasn’t. Simply discounting the existing evidence does not create even the semblance of a reasonable argument.
Exactly. Who in their right mind believes that a white woman seven or eight months pregnant would embark on a flight halfway around the world - odds are in 1960 half that travel might be on propellor planes and taken more than twice as long as a similar flight today. All this to give birth in a foreign third-world country with limited medical care? Then rather than crow to the world about having given birth in the father’s country, she covers it up to the extent of managing to plant false birth announcements in Hawaii and even manage to get a birth certificate from there?
Too bad this is GQ and snarky comments about political beliefs and intelligence correlations are not allowed!
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Why would a presidential candidate want to renounce a foreign citizenship? Well consider that in 1960 JFK had to defend himself from accusations that a catholic could not be president - since catholics “have to do what the pope orders”. While someone with an accidental citizenship a la McCain-Panama might not feel the flack, someone with a serious heritage probably will; let’s say, a child of immigrants with frequent visits to the alternative motherland, or maybe the son of a non-citizen father. If delusional accusations of disloyalty can change the vote even 1% that might be sufficient to change some key states and that chance will inspire the deluded and the mercenary.
Consider the case of Michael Ignatieff, who taught two decades or so at Harvard (why is Harvard always in politics??) before returning to Canada to take a run at the prime minstership as Liberal leader. The Conservatives ran ads against him suggesting that he was planning to quit and go back to his “real country” once he lost the next election (still here 6 years later).
The successful cases are those like IIRC 2 old iron curtain european countries where having lived in the USA for decades was seen as a plus not a minus, or the singer supposedly running for president of Haiti who is “untainted by the endemic corruption” of regular politics.
And there’s the occasional suggestion the rules hould be changed so Mr. Shriver-Schwarznegger can run for higher office.
A related issue came up when Barry Goldwater was running for president. He was born in Phoenix when Arizona was still a territory. Note that he was actually born there, and wasn’t just an inhabitant, and it was already a territory of the US.
Until the 14th amendment, there was no standard for U.S. citizenship. If you were a citizen of the state or territory, you were a U.S. citizen. It was up to the states to define their own terms for citizenship.
The 14th amendment gave anyone who was born in the U.S. automatic U.S. citizenship and a citizen of whatever state they happen to reside in. The idea was to prevent the Southern states from defining state citizenship in such a term that the recently freed slaves would not be citizens.
Until the late 19th century, the U.S. had no real immigration policy. If you could come here and get a job, you could. No one was really stopping you. It wasn’t until 1875 when the U.S setup an immigration service and strict quotas weren’t put in until the 1920s.
The term “natural born citizen” in the Constitution has no real legal definition, but it is assumed to mean native born. At the time the Constitution was written, there was no clear definition of U.S. citizenship, and the writers of the Constitution didn’t feel that it was all that important.
Quoth Little Nemo:
Actually, I think Quartz might be onto something there. If Elbonia becomes a US state in 2020, then they will, at that time, adopt the US Constitution. The clause in the Constitution may have been intended to just apply to the first generation of politicians while we were getting the country set up to begin with, but that’s not what it says. And you can make the same arguments that an Elbonian ought to become President that you could for someone like Hamilton.
I guess that if the US annexes another territory and this territory becomes a state, at some point in the process a law will be passed making all residents of the territory US citizens, and “natural-born citizens” for the purpose of running for President. But you’re right, the question is: is such a special law even required to ensure that the citizens of this territory be natural-born citizens, or is it implicitely there in the Constitution?
I think not. In the context, the “adoption” of the constitution clearly refers to the adoption of the constitution by the United States, not by any particular (original or new) state.
Article 3 deals with the admission of new states, and doesn’t refer to to them “adopting” the Constitution. I don’t think (though I could be corrected) that new states have “adopted” the Constitution as part of the formalities of admission, if only because most of them were territories immediately before admission, and so already subject to the U.S. Constitution.
Note also that the original 13 states did not “adopt” the Constitution; they ratified it.
A couple of points:
It is, amusingly, possible for someone to become a “natural born citizen”, and some people in fact have, though the mechanism is a bit odd. In the summer of 1952, Congress passed and President Truman signed into law a measure granting citizenship to nationals of Puerto Rico – retroactive to January 1941. This meant that any kid born in Puerto Rico between 1941 and the first half of 1952, inclusive, had previously been, from the time of their birth, U.S. nationals, but as of the effective date of that law, they became U.S. citizens from the time of their birth. Certainly if the Bahamas decided to become a U.S. state, and in the negotiations for statehood, they induce Congress to adopt a measure granting American citizenship retroactively to citizens of the Bahamas retroactively to their birth, the same would be true for Bahamanians.
By the self-effectuating clause in Article VII, the U.S. Constitution became “adopted” on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it, and the government established under it began effective operations the following March. That is the “time of adoption of this Constitution” referenced in Article II’s Presidential eligibility requirements.
While a part of the motivation behind defining U.S. citizenship in Amendment XIV was indeed a desire to keep the defeated Confederate states from setting a citizenship standards that would exclude the recently-freed former slaves, there was a second motivation not often recognized 150 years later. Remember that for patriotic men like Robert E. Lee and Philander Knox, their loyalty was to their state. They were Americans because they were Virginians, Louisianans, Georgians, etc. When their state, in their perspective, withdrew its membership in the Union, they were relieved of any loyalty to the national government. Amendment XIV substituted for that view the sense that there was an American citizenship which each person was inidividually entitled to – the modern perspective. Aside from a few lunatic-fringe Teabaggers, no one today looks on patriotism as predominantly to one’s state but rather to America, the 50-state Union. We miss entirely the point that good and decent men prior to the Civil War might see it in the opposite sense – that their loyalty was to Pennsylvania or Kentucky, not to the greater nation.