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To: joseph20; MamaTexan

You can even argue that the rule they adopted no longer adequately meets the purpose they adopted it for.

You can say that their purpose was to protect the United States from any and all foreign influence. For that reason, they said the President had to be a natural born citizen.

And they thought that rule would protect us from foreign influence, and for a long time, it did.

But now anybody can travel anywhere in the world within hours.

So (you could argue) if we want to fulfill the purpose they adopted the rule for, we ought to update the rule by requiring that people be not only born US citizens in order to be eligible to be President, we ought to require that they be both born on US soil and have US citizen parents at the time of their birth.

You can make that argument.

It’s not a superbly strong argument, given the fact that the first Congress immediately clarified that those who were born overseas to US citizens and got their entire education in a place like France were also eligible to be elected President.

And it’s not a superbly strong argument, given the fact that the Framers of the Constitution specifically provided that one only had to live 14 years in the United States, total, before becoming President.

So even in the Framers’ day it was perfectly possible for someone to be born a natural born US citizen (by whatever measure you want to use), spend the next 21 years and their entire formative years in some place like France, sail to the United States, enter politics, and be elected President at age 35.

That was perfectly possible.

And they MEANT for it to be that way.

So while they WERE concerned, to some degree, about “foreign influence” (mostly about adult royalty swooping over here and buying up the Presidency), they don’t seem to have been NEARLY as concerned about it as you make them out to be.

For all those reasons, that argument is not a superbly strong one. But really, it’s the best argument you could make.


237 posted on 03/18/2013 10:32:23 AM PDT by Jeff Winston
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To: Jeff Winston
You can make that argument.

Putting words in someones mouth is not a rebuttal.

It's an exercise in intellectual masturbation.

239 posted on 03/18/2013 10:38:30 AM PDT by MamaTexan (To follow Original Constitutional Intent, one MUST acknowledge the Right of Secession)
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