Many Freepers say one parent has to be a citizen, but I have never been able to determine the Constitution actually says that.
It worked for Obama... so use the left’s own ‘rules’ against them.
Something about being hoisted on their own petard...
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S1-C5-1/ALDE_00013692/
In theory, this seems to indicate two citizen parents, but we know that Obama was NOT born of two US citizens, so that seems to make it just one of the parents as a US citizen.
The Framers appear to have adopted the requirement that citizens be natural born citizens to ensure that the President’s loyalties would lie strictly with the United States. By barring naturalized citizens from the presidency, the requirement of being a natural born citizen, as Justice Story explained, protects the United States from ambitious foreigners, who might otherwise be intriguing for the office; and interposes a barrier against those corrupt interferences of foreign governments in executive elections, which have inflicted the most serious evils upon the elected monarchies of Europe.6 Article II, however, provided an exception for foreign-born persons who had immigrated to the colonies prior to the adoption of the Constitution.7 Justice Story explained that this was done out of respect to those distinguished revolutionary patriots, who were born in a foreign land, and yet had entitled themselves to high honors in their adopted country.8
While the Constitution does not define natural born Citizen, commentators have opined that the Framers would have understood the term to mean someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time.9 British statutes from 1709 and 1731 expressly described children of British subjects who were born outside of Great Britain as natural born citizens and provided that they enjoyed the same rights to inheritance as children born in Great Britain.10 In addition, in the Naturalization Act of 1790, the First Congress provided that children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond the sea, . . . shall be considered as natural born citizens . . . .11 Consequently, under the principle that British common law and enactments of the First Congress are two particularly useful sources in understanding constitutional terms,12 it would appear likely that the Framers would have understood natural born citizen to encompass the children of United States citizens born overseas.13 Such an interpretation is further supported by the presidential candidacies of Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone; Governor George Romney of Michigan, who was born in Mexico, and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was born in Arizona before it became a state.14