Thanks Blade. You are correct. I thought my comments were too long as it was, but this point, as DiogenesLamp pointed out, is worth clarifying:
Charles Evans Hughes was born to British Citizens. He had an illustrious law career and was appointed to the Supreme Court. He was previously governor of New York. As you say, he resigned from the court to run against Woodrow Wilson.
As much as we might have preferred an alternative Wilson, Hughes was challenged by a Missouri Attorney, Breckenridge Long, who later became Sec of State and an Ambassador for FDR. Long was an excellent attorney as well, and exposed Hughes ineligibility for failing to have two citizen parents in a legal brief, “Is Mr. Charles Evans Hughes a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ within the Meaning of the Constitution?” published in the largest legal newspaper in the country, “Chicago Legal News,” Vol. 146, p. 220 in 1916,”
Sharon Rondeau of Post and Email wrote an excellent article about Hughes and Long which you can find at her site. The Long brief can be found on Scribd.com - search for Breckenridge Long.
One of the remarkable aspects of this is that Hughes thought he could get away with it. He was warned by Long, who was clearly prepared to demand legislative and legal action had Hughes won the election. This is rather like Professor Chin's analysis of McCain's ineligibility. Presumably (who knows these days) an officer of the court, which most legislators are, has a responsibility to initiate legal action if they know a crime has been committed.
Hughes later served as Harding's Sec of State and was appointed Chief Justice where he cited Minor v. Happersett in Perkins v. Elg, in which Marie Elg could, having been born in NY of two naturalized parents, even though she returned to Sweden with her mother at an early age, was declared eligible, should she chose, and satisfied the residency and age clauses, run for the presidency. Hughes tried to suppress the Constitution, but later confirmed the clause which would certainly have generated a challenge had he prevailed in the election.
Interesting to ask if Obama's legal defense team studied both the Long and Chester Arthur cases to see how best to conceal his ineligibility. There are many similarities between Arthur's and Obama's concealment campaigns. Arthur had an associate in the press who even wrote a book questioning Arthur's jus soli eligibility. Arthur concealed, and later burned what constituted his birth records - he was born in Vermont in 1829. But Arthur did hold office where Hughes never did. Could Hughes have been prosecuted for accepting campaign donations knowing he was not constitutionally eligible. One certainly hopes that Obama will be, though the entire Democratic party is complicit, as are the Republicans, who knew all along.
Thanks for the question Blade, and thanks again to Sharon Rondeau for her excellent research and writing.
Spaulding wrote: “Is Mr. Charles Evans Hughes a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ within the Meaning of the Constitution?” published in the largest legal newspaper in the country, “Chicago Legal News,” Vol. 146, p. 220 in 1916,”
In which Breckenridge Long argued:
“Mr. Hughes was born before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, so the status of his citizenship must be considered as under the laws existing prior to the time of the adoption of that Amendment.”
The 14’th Amendment and the case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark settled the issue as far as the native-born. Breck Long was writing 18 years after the WKA decision, but considering a birth prior to the 14’th Amendment.
After Long’s 1916 essay, the two-citizen-parent theory went silent. In our time, no one advanced it, until 2008 when some people felt the need to deny that Barack Obama can be president. The first to dig up the long-dead theory seems to be Leo Donofrio, and it was October or November of 2008 when he started pitching it. If I’m wrong on that, please cite.
So the situation is that for all of Barack Obama’s life and quite some years before, all the standard sources on American law said that native-born citizens were natural-born citizens, potentially eligible for the presidency, and no one — including the participants here — was saying otherwise. Then when Obama runs and gets elected, some people start telling the rules different.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can cite something you put out on principle, before the issue was Barack Obama. Perhaps you blogged about how /Black’s Law Dictionary/ had the definition of “natural-born citizen” wrong. Perhaps you posted an open letter to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) disagreeing with his 05 Oct 2004 statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “What is a natural born citizen? Clearly, someone born within the United States or one of its territories is a natural born citizen.” If so, just cite it, and if it checks out I will admit that you are a respectable contrarian, rather than the kind of cheater who tells the rules different when he doesn’t like who is winning.