Don't BOTH parents have to be USA citizens??
What I gather is that parentage doesn't matter.
If so, is that how it works world=wide? I can't
believe that one becomes a citizen of the country
where born.
Not in most countries. In Germany for example, there are a couple of generations, at least, of people born in Germany, but not of German citizen parents, who are not German citizens. Many of them are Turks.
But according to the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, it does work that way, *for citizenship" in the US. However that isn't necessariily the same for Natural Born citizen status.
That question is what is being addressed by Leo Denofrio. He insists that Obama can’t be a “natural born citizen” regardless of where he was born because he was born the citizen and subject of another country, even if dual with America. Any other position in the US doesn’t make a difference with this issue, except the one Obama wants to be, President. His theory is definitely plausible I think, but subject to Constitutional interpretation since it wasn’t very specific.
However some say that his birth here makes a difference because if he wasn’t born in America, he wouldn’t even be a citizen, which is true. His mother was not old enough to be eligible to transfer citizenship if born outside the US and his father wasn’t a US citizen. If both parents were citizens, it wouldn’t matter.
So you have one argument that can be interpreted legally (Denofrio) and you have one that’s a slam dunk. That’s why the birth certificate has become so important. Anyone knows that a scanned document is not EVIDENCE. I can’t go into a court room and present “evidence” by handing over a URL of a scanned document to the judge. It would be laughed out of the courtroom. But somehow we are supposed to accept a scanned document as proof to the guy who is holding our nuke codes. If he was born outside the US, there is no doubt that he is ineligible.
Everyone wants to make this about race, or having a funny name... but it’s not. It’s about his father. Like it or not, his father wasn’t a citizen and his mother was only 18. That is why it is so important for HIM. No other President in recent memory had this issue.
I personally think he was born in Canada. There wasn’t Medicaid at the time, his mother and grandparents lived in Seattle before moving to Hawaii and were quite aware of the Canadian healthcare system and how it is “free”. It would be the perfect place for a broke college student to send his 18 year old wife to give birth. Also, Obama Jr was just a few weeks old when she brought him to her friend’s house in Seattle. She interviewed that when Obama was Senator. So why was she in Seattle after giving birth to a NEWBORN Obama? I think she was on her way back home.
And as far the birth announcement in the paper... my parents had moved to Atlanta when I was born, but my grandmother placed a birth announcement for me in her local paper for all my mom’s friends to see. Birth announcement in the grandparents home town doesn’t mean much.
I hope I made sense in my post. Sorry I rambled.
For many cases, that is the law; for example, Canada. If you're born on Canadian soil - whether or not your parents are even in the country legally - you are a Canadian citizen. Same with the US, after the passage of the 14th Amendment.
English Common Law is the same, going back 400+ years. The soil on which you were born usually grants citizenship.
Now, about KSM, I'm not at all worried about Kemp's flight of fancy about Obama's birth certificate! What will happen is that KSM will be found not guilty. The confessions will not be admissible because they were coerced before he had his full legal rights. All he has to do is have his lawyers challenge all findings/discovery before he received his legal civil rights, and there goes the Government's case. Good luck proving it as all his co-conspirators are dead.
KSM will most likely walk free of the trial, and we will become the absolute laughing stock of the world.
Don't BOTH parents have to be USA citizens??
There is a lively debate on that very subject. The Founding Fathers though that the meaning of Natural Born was so obvious that they failed to explicitly define it.
They relied on Vattel and Blackstone to cover it. Both say a Natural Born Citizen is a child of citizen parents, born within the territory of the country.
I've even had people argue that parents isn't plural!