No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.Some light is thrown on the meaning of "natural born Citizen" by the citizenship clause of section 1 of the 14th Amendment of nearly a century later.
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.
It certainly appears to be the former class who are "natural born" citizens, and not the latter.
But the text does not say "all and only . . . ", and so the possibility exists there are others, neither born nor naturalized in the US, who are citizens.
Who might they be?
And though not born here are any persons - perhaps some or all of those born outside the US but to US citizens - also natural born citizens?
Ted Cruz, for example?
Ted Cruz was born in Canada, though to an American mother.
And a propos of him I was at first inclined to agree with this view cited in the Guardian.
Most legal experts have interpreted that [a natural born citizen] to be anyone who is a citizen at birth and who did not need to undergo a naturalization process to obtain citizenship – a definition under which Cruz would qualify.
In a Harvard Law Review article, two former solicitor generals, Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, wrote: “Despite the happenstance of a birth across the border, there is no question that Senator Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus a ‘natural born Citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution.”
But then I recalled the birther controversies reaching at least as far back as the campaign of 2008 in which it appears people generally supposed that actual birth in the US is necessary for being a natural born citizen.
Neither Obama's nor McCain's defenders contented themselves, seeking to establish their man's eligibility for office as a natural born citizen, with merely pointing out his American parentage that no one questioned in any case.
Recall the claim that, though born to an American mother, Barack Obama was not a natural born American because he was born in Kenya - a claim refuted by the candidate and his supporters by appeal to his Hawaiian birth certificate.
And recall that people defended the eligibility of John McCain for the presidency by insisting that he was born in the United States in the relevant sense because he was born in the Canal Zone, and so is a natural born US citizen within the meaning of the constitution.
Of course pettifogging lawyers can make anything a mare's nest, but in the present case the mess began with the constitution itself not containing or implying satisfactory clarity or detail.
Mitch McConnell: Ted Cruz is on his own on the whole birther issue
Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories
On the other hand, no doubt much of the muddle is due to our widespread, egregious, and routine dishonesty about the constitution, and in the present case such dishonesty is compounded among people who reject this qualification for the presidency, anyway.
All the same, it's hardly as though anyone was trying to deny any real meaning at all to the expression "natural born citizen," so that just anybody could claim to be that.
Arnie, for example.
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