“Any kid who took civics classes in 1960s grade school (like me) knew he wasn’t eligible. And exactly what good did that knowledge do us? We’re dismissed for even bringing it up.”
Late republic Rome, late republic US.
All about personalities, alliances and power; nothing about law and propriety.
Yes Psalm 144, From Cicero through Leibniz through Vattel and to Ben Franklin, John Jay, Washington, Jefferson and Chief Justice Marshall. A natural born citizen is born on our soil to citizen parents. Citizen parents insure parents who have allegiance. It is law, but who in the public knew? While the law is clear, it is easy to lie to people who have not read the Constitution, our law, or relevant cases. The claim, “...it was never defined in the Constitution” is usually enough to create doubt. If more knew that the Constitution did not contain definitions. Our framers knew common sense, common language, and common law was the only way to preserve the meaning, since since words change over time. Definitions come from the common language and common law at the time of the framers, words you will find in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, the case which made the common law into settled law.
Would our framers have been so foolish as to write a constraint on who can be president, and permit the child of a Royalist, the child of a parent with allegiance to King George, to be president? Framers required that the first rounds of presidential candidates not only have been citizens at the ratification, but were resident three years before The Declaration of Indpendence. That explains the 14 year residency requirement. That way presidential candidates had risked their lives, seen friends and family die, and committed to the new Republic before there was any certainty that the revolution would succeed. That was called the grandfather clause. After that, natural born citizens would be the children of those who fought, because our founders were all British subjects.
Birth to citizens was the more important of the two qualities of a natural born citizen, the second being birth on our sovereign soil. Washington almost admitted the foreign born children of citizens as ‘reputed” natural born citizens, in the 1790 Nationality Act, but retracted that allowance in 1795. That is why Obama and Claire McCaskill tried to pass Senate Bill 2678 in February 2008. Had the bill passed, it might have been proposed as a Constitutional Amendment, making McCain eligible, but it didn't pass, and there was no time with the primary campaigns in full flight to attempt another amendment (twenty six attempts to amend Article II had failed).
McCain was born to citizen parents. Every Senator signed the April 2008 Senate Resolution, SR 511, confirming the requirement that a president must have citizen parents, but because McCain was running, they dared not raise the eligibility issue, because McCain was born on unincorporated territory, an unfortunate technicality, but the law. Hillary had been strong-armed out of the contest, but would surely be the candidate if Republicans had been honest, and Hillary could probably have defeated any last minute replacement for McCain.
Rex lex rather than Lex rex.