Iffinegan. When are you going to get around to the part where you explain that the fact of Chet Arthur’s father lacking U.S. citizenship at Chet’s birth was not uncovered until after the 2008 election. The public was clearly deliberately kept completely ignorant of this essential fact, and was treated at the time instead to a circus high-wire act of a spectacle in which the question of the country of his birth was (duplicitously) raised and kept artificially active for decades despite there never having been any basis for it in fact or even well-founded rumor.
Iffinegan. When are you going to get around to the part where you explain that the fact of Chet Arthur’s father lacking U.S. citizenship at Chet’s birth was not uncovered until after the 2008 election. The public was clearly deliberately kept completely ignorant of this essential fact, and was treated at the time instead to a circus high-wire act of a spectacle in which the question of the country of his birth was (duplicitously) raised and kept artificially active for decades despite there never having been any basis for it in fact or even well-founded rumor.
I don't think it was a secret and was in three public records that I know of. Chester Arthur became President in 1881.
William Arthur (or MacArthur) was from County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland. He and his wife were married in Canada. He was naturalized on August 31, 1843. He is on the 1850 and 1860 census listed as birthplace Ireland.
His 1843 naturalization certificate, a public court record, may be viewed here.
Obama's eligibility was challenged in Wrotnowski v. Bysiewica, 958 A.2d 709; 289 Conn 522 (3 Nov 2008) citing the case of Chester Arthur. A requested stay was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court on December 15, 2008; 555 U.S. 1083. Nobody that matters has ever attached any significance to the information that natural born citizen Chester Arthur had an Irish father.
http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2008/081210/FrntPgObama.html
Donofrio petition denied, Wrotnowski v. Bysiewicz set for conferenceBy Linda Bentley | December 10, 2008
[excerpt]
In the interim, Donofrio has been assisting Cort Wrotnowski with his application for a stay of the election to the U.S. Supreme Court.
555 U.S. 1083
December 15, 2008 . . .Miscellaneous Orders
No. 08A469. Wrotnowski v. Bysiewicz, Secretary of State of Connecticut. Sup. Ct. Conn. Application for stay and/or injunction, addressed to Justice Scalia and referred to the Court, denied.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/12/chester-arthur-redeemed-014805
Chester Arthur redeemedBy BEN SMITH
12/15/2008 11:35 AM EST
[excerpt]
Wrotnowski argued that Obama was a British subject at birth and therefore cannot meet the requirement for becoming president.
The notion that people with one foreign parent couldn't be president would, as I noted, take out as collateral damage the legitimacy of Chester Arthur.
The Supreme Court dismissed the request for a stay of Obama's election without comment, as expected.
Edward D. Mazo, Rethinking Presidential Eligibility, 85 Fordham Law Review, 1056-57 (2016)
A. Historical Challenges from the 1880s to 1970sThe twenty-first President of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, was born to an Irish father who immigrated to Canada and met his wife in Quebec.58 Arthur’s mother was born in Vermont and was a U.S. citizen, although her family had immigrated to Quebec when she was a child.59 Arthur’s biography asserts that he was born in North Fairfield, Vermont, south of the Canadian border.60 By the time of his birth, Arthur’s parents had moved back to Vermont, and he always claimed Vermont as his home state.61 However, it was not until 1843, fifteen years after his birth, that his father also became a naturalized U.S. citizen.62
When Arthur received the Republican Party’s nomination for the vice presidency in 1880, the Democrats hired a New York attorney named Arthur P. Hinman to investigate whether Arthur may have been born abroad.63 Hinman initially claimed publicly that Arthur was born in Ireland and brought to the United States as a teenager, thus making him ineligible for the vice presidency.64 When that theory was disproven, Hinman claimed that Arthur was born in Canada.65 Legal historian J. Gordon Hylton explains the relevant history as follows:
The controversy over Arthur’s citizenship status centers around the place of Arthur’s actual birth. By one account he was born in his family’s home in Franklin County, Vermont. If this was true, then he was clearly a natural born citizen. On the other hand, the competing account has it that he was born during his pregnant mother’s visit to her family’s home in Canada.
If the latter story is true, then Arthur was technically foreign-born, and in 1829, citizenship in such cases passed to the child only if the father was a United States citizen, and, of course, at this point Arthur’s father was still a citizen of the British Empire.66