The McClellan/Obama Citizenship Debate and the Natural Born Citizen Clause

Dr. Conspiracy likes to give the appearance of being an unbiased scholar in pursuit of the truth regarding whether putative President Barack Obama is a “natural born Citizen.” He has also created an internet persona of being a champion of civil rights. He has even gone as far as to take the unabashed position that most people who question Obama’s “natural born Citizen” status are racists. To date, he has made no apologies for his outlandish position.

At his blog, http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2012/01/mcclellans-citizenship/ , Dr. Conspiracy has posted a story published in The Boston Globe on November 9, 1903, entitled “McClellan’s Citizenship. Question of Eligibility for Presidency.” The story can be read at http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/McClellan.pdf . The story is about whether George B. McClellan, then newly-elected Mayor of New York City, but who was born in Europe to U.S. citizen parents (his father was Civil War General McClellan), was a “natural born Citizen” and therefore eligible to be President. By looking at his picture posted by Dr. Conspiracy, Colonel McClellan was surely white, but yet American citizens raised the question of whether he was a “natural born Citizen.” Note that Dr. Conspiracy does not tell us that even though McClellan was white (and so was John McCain and George Romney who were also challenged), he was challenged by presumably other whites on his eligibility to be President. So I guess that it is after all possible to challenge a political candidate on his eligibility for a particular office without being motivated by race.

Apuzzo writes:

“Third, most of the lawyers who concluded that McClellan was a “natural born Citizen” said he was so because under the Constitution there are only “natural born Citizens” and naturalized citizens, and since McClellan was not a naturalized citizen, he must necessarily be a “natural born Citizen.” Yet, Dr. Conspiracy makes no mention of the fact that none of those lawyers even cited and quote from let alone addressed United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), which clearly stated just five years earlier that, with citizenship not descending from parents but only given by statute to the children born out of the United States to citizen parents, children born out of the United States to U.S. citizen parents are naturalized “at birth.””

Let me take a devil’s advocate position for a moment. What would you answer to the question of “but what is the difference between ‘natural born’ and ‘naturalized at birth’?” On the face of it, the two phrases sound synonymous. One is made natural the moment one is born.

What would you answer to the question of “but what is the difference between ‘natural born’ and ‘naturalized at birth’?”

One is by statute, the other requires no statute.
That was covered...right before the part you posted...
“Third, most of the lawyers...

2 comes before 3.
Second, because Obama needs either the Fourteenth Amendment or statute to remove the alienage with which he was born by being born to a non-U.S. citizen father, he is in effect at best a naturalized citizen “at birth,” who automatically becomes a “citizen of the United States” and needs no further naturalization after birth.

I have consistently said for the past three years that the causes of the birther movement are complex. I have rejected the view that it is simply racist, talking issue with some of the commenters on my site. Some of it is racist, some is anti-Muslim/pro-Israel, some of it is Christian fundamentalist, some of it is xenophobic, some of it is purely political and some of it simply stems from some fairly-well-known defects in human thinking that apply to conspiracy thinking in general.

Mr. Apuzzo likes to find “one thing” to focus on and generalize from it, while ignoring the context and all the other things that disprove his characterization. There are over 1,700 at Obama Conspiracy Theories, and if you read everything I’ve written on race, you will find that Mr. Apuzzo’s remark is a misrepresentation of my position.

One article that might help understand my thinking on the subject is:

http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2011/07/is-obama-eligibility-denialism-a-conspiracy-theory/

And for the record, I have yet to see Mr. Apuzzo respond to the charges that he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan following his appearance on the Momma E radio show just 4 days after the Klan’s national membership director! (OK, I’m just kidding, but you see how these smears work?)

Mimi3 said:

According to the U.S. Constitution, there are only two different types of citizenship classes recognized by its law: Citizen of the United States, and Natural Born Citizen.

The Constitution is quite clear. Amendment XIV declared those born within the jurisdiction of the U.S. and its territories and those naturalized are one in the same. It was quite intentional.

Amendment XIV did not say that those born in the U.S. were Natural Born Citizens because it would go against its very definition. The best example of this was Dred Scott. He was not considered a citizen at the time of his birth, nor was his father or mother. Therefore, had Amendment XIV been ratified with verbiage stating he was a Natural Born Citizen, it would have set this definition in stone. It did not, because it could not.

One can go a step further and ask "what is a Natural Born Citizen"? By the U.S. Constitution, someone born in the U.S. without citizen parents aren't Natural Born. Dred Scott is the prime example.

At this juncture, the only three remaining options are (1) one born in the U.S. to a citizen father and a citizen mother, (2) one born in the U.S. to a citizen father and a foreign mother, and (3) one born in the U.S. to a foreign father and citizen mother. When the Constitution was ratified, option (3) never occurred, and therefore was never valid as a form of Natural Born Citizenship.

Is this valid now? That is a question for the U.S. Supreme Court. On face value, it is difficult to predict what they would say. However, at least 5 U.S. Supreme Court decisions have paved precidence, all of which state the father as the deciding factor in natural law citizenship.

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