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With Arthur, the issue was his father. Arthur was a jus soli citizen, born on U.S. soil. His father was a British subject, just like Obama’s father. Arthur’s father naturalized when Arthur was 14. Obama’s father never did.

There is also the remarkable “discovery” that Charles Evans Hughes’ father was always a British citizen. So was his mother. Hughes ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1916. To run he resigned from the supreme court. After losing to Wilson he was appointed to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, probably by Harding. While Chief Justice, in 1936 Hughes wrote the decision in Perkins v. Elg citing Minor v. Happersett, since Elg was born a natural born citizen. Minor v. Happersett is virtually a quote of Vattel and cites Vattel - born in the country of citizen parents. That is fascinating because, while we can’t prove it, it seems unlikely that Hughes didn’t know he was illigitimate when he ran. The St. Louis Attorney who pointed out in 1916 that Hughes was not a natural born citizen, writing in the Chicago Law Record, was Breckenridge Long, AG under FDR. (Thanks to Sharon Rondeau of Post and Email for excellent research)

This points out that McCain and Obama are not the first whose ambition led them to ignore or momentarily forget the qualifications for the presidency - momentarily because McCain had been the subject of at least four Senate hearings, a 2008 law which wasn’t passed and a non-binding Senate Resolution also in 2008 three months later which was signed by every senator, and two law suits charging illigitimacy from the 2000 election. McCain knows very well what a natural born citizen is because the very aspect of natural born citizen ship used to claim McCain was legitimate made Obama illigitmate - two citizen parents. McCain’s problem inolved the jus soli requirement, whether or not McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, the Panama Canal Zone was not, like an Embassy, under the complete jurisdiction of the U.S. (There has been a photocopy of McCain’s birth certificate showing doctors names, hospital and location Colon Hospital; don’t let it distract you because McCain is not the issue, and the Canal Zone was not U.S. territory in 1936).

Arthur became president, lied to redirect suspicions, and may have been aided by a newspaper reporter who kept the focus on Arthur’s Canadian birth, when there was testimony that he was born in the U.S. where his British father was a minister and his natural born mother had always lived. The reporter wrote a book and Arthur lied about birth dates and his parents’ age to assist the case of the book’s author by making facts difficult to confirm, like Obama and the missing passport documents or Illinois Senate records or Fulbright scholarship applications for alien students. There was never a mention in the press of Arthur’s father naturalization.