Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 1,041
Me from a prior thread on Obama:
"All of that said, on the legal question, Art. II of the Consititution refers to a "natural-born" citizen being elegible for the presidency. The Fourteenth Amendment does not use "natural-born" -- it just says folks born here are "citizens" and refers to the fact that you can get citizenship by birth or by naturalization. It's not like I'm a scholar in this area of the law, but it seems more reasonable to interpret the founders' "natural-born" as meaning "a citizen all of your life" rather than "a citizen all of your life because you were born in the U.S. proper." The founders may have wanted someone who himself did not carpet-bag his way to the U.S.; hard to believe that they were concerned about someone whose parents carpet-bagged to the U.S., since that was virtually everyone back in 1780. I have never heard a cogent argument that suggests either that the founders meant to distinguish between "a citizen all of your life" and "a citizen all of your life because you were born in the U.S. proper." Or that, regardless of founders' intent, such a distinction would make any sense.
