http://www.blogtext.org/naturalborncitizen/
Don’t be distracted by the birth certificate and Indonesia issues. They are irrelevant to Senator Obama’s ineligibility to be President. Since Barack Obama’s father was a Citizen of Kenya and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of Senator Obama’s birth, then Senator Obama was a British Citizen “at birth”, just like the Framers of the Constitution, and therefore, even if he were to produce an original birth certificate proving he were born on US soil, he still wouldn’t be eligible to be President.
The Framers of the Constitution, at the time of their birth, were also British Citizens and that’s why the Framers declared that, while they were Citizens of the United States, they themselves were not “natural born Citizens”. Hence their inclusion of the grandfather clause in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution shall be eligible to the Office of President;
That’s it right there. (Emphasis added.)
The Framers wanted to make themselves eligible to be President, but they didn’t want future generations to be Governed by a Commander In Chief who had split loyalty to another Country. The Framers were comfortable making an exception for themselves. They did, after all, create the Constitution. But they were not comfortable with the possibility of future generations of Presidents being born under the jurisdiction of Foreign Powers, especially Great Britain and its monarchy, who the Framers and Colonists fought so hard in the American Revolution to be free of.
The Framers declared themselves not eligible to be President as “natural born Citizens”, so they wrote the grandfather clause in for the limited exception of allowing themselves to be eligible to the Presidency in the early formative years of our infant nation.
But nobody alive today can claim eligibility to be President under the grandfather clause since nobody alive today was a citizen of the US at the time the Constitution was adopted.
The Framers distinguished between “natural born Citizens” and all other “Citizens”. And that’s why it’s important to note the 14th Amendment only confers the title of “Citizen”, not “natural born Citizen”. The Framers were Citizens, but they weren’t natural born Citizens. They put the stigma of not being natural born Citizens on themselves in the Constitution and they are the ones who wrote the Document.
Since the the Framers didn’t consider themselves to have been “natural born Citizens” due to their having been subject to British jurisdiction at their birth, then Senator Obama, having also been subject to British jurisdiction at the time of his birth, also cannot be considered a “natural born Citizen” of the United States.
The framers didn't consider themselves natural born citizens of the United States because when they were born there was no United States. That's why they included the extra language, otherwise *nobody* could have been president.
The language does not exclude anyone that has British citizenship. It only requires that a president be someone that is a citizen by birth.
Something in the way tommy777 worded his statement jiggled a thought in my mind and made me wonder, "Why didn't the founders think themselves to be natural born?" This is now purely "thinking out loud" on my part (too much Christmas stuff going on, too much family crammed into the house, too little time to think clearly and research accurately...), but here it is, anyway:
I have seen in several threads the list of President's and their places of birth and parents information (sorry to whoever provided that - I can't find it right now, but would love to see it again), which indicated that all of our Presidents were born in the America, even those that were born prior to the Constitution and "grandfathered" in. If they were born here, why did they not consider themselves natural born?
The only thing different between them and those born later was their "allegiance" (and that of their parents) to Britain. I think the key to understanding the intention and application of "NBC" can be be found in discovering why they did not confer NBC status on themselves. Just being born in America was not enough for them; why should just being born in America be enough for us?
(Fire away: I'm probably not going to be around for the debate, but I'll be interested to check later to see if any new avenues are found for exploring this whole NBC thing...)
Merry Christmas!!