“It is more honorable to repair a wrong
than to persist in it.” — Thomas Jefferson
The Constitution of the United States of America, Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5.
“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.”
Central to the current controversy over our de facto president’s eligibility is the fact that the Founding Fathers correctly deemed it unnecessary to define a “natural born citizen” in the Constitution. Some, incorrectly claim this is cause to assert that we can not know what a natural born citizen means. However our Founding Fathers truly had no need to include a separate, well known and redundant definition of a natural born citizen. The very framework of the Constitution precludes any possible meaning for a natural born citizen other than those born in the U.S. of citizen parents.
The Founding Fathers added the phrase “or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution” to Article 2, Section 1, in order to exempt many proven patriots of the time including themselves, as it was common then to have been born to foreign parents, from the requirement of being a natural born citizen. This was done so that each patriot might continue serving their country honorably in every way possible. This exemption was truly fortuitous, as it enabled both Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, each born of a foreign parent and therefore not a “natural born citizen” to be eligible to serve as president.
“Permit me to hint, whether it would not be wise & seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in chief of the American army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.”
—John Jay, Founding Father, President of the Continental Congress from 1778 to 1779, and the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, in a letter to George Washington, an attendee of the Constitutional Convention, July 25, 1787.
The Founding Fathers wisely chose to require the highest form of citizenship possible, that being both soil and blood, to assure the loyalty of the president and commander in chief of the armed forces, to only the United States as best they could. It stands to reason that if just citizenship was all that they intended, irrespective of parentage (as is the case in English common law for natural born subjects), there would have been no need for them to have included the exemption.
Therefore, the fact that they did add the exempting phrase “or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution” serves as self evident conclusive proof that a “natural born citizen” means those born in the U.S. of citizen parents (plural)!
Submitted in support and defense of the United States Constitution.
Duty, Honor, Country.
Respectfully,
A U.S. vet
Copyright 2009 by anaturalborncitizen. All rights reserved.
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