Medium.com by Andy Prior
Recently, I was advised by a fellow Texan, who supported an ineligible candidate for POTUS, that:
“In order for your argument to have any merit at all, you must provide evidence that the authors of the Constitution intended that there be some class of persons who are born a citizen but are not natural born citizens. You could do that from their writing or from legal sources at the time, but you must prove that precise point, or you might as well be clucking like a chicken.”
I wish to invite them and all other supporters of ineligible candidates to consider that this entire discussion boils down to linguistics and logic. Fortunately, both my parents were trained in linguistics and passed some of that knowledge on to me by traipsing our family all around the world. I proceeded to add to that by taking a handful of linguistics courses while in college and studying a number of foreign languages over the years, including English.
First, let us begin with the logic which is informed by the linguistics of the English language and review the language in the Constitution that is at the center of this controversy. To have a complete understanding, we need to compare the differences between the requirements for President/Vice President and the requirements for the other Federal offices.
1) Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states that:
“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; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
2) Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution states that:
“No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.”
3) Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution states that:
“No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.”
An interesting point of fact, is that there is nothing in the Constitution regarding the citizenship of our Federal Judges, including those who sit on the Supreme Court. Consequently, we have had a number of Justices on the Supreme Court who were in fact born outside the United States, the most recent being Felix Frankfurter, who was born in Vienna, Austria and served as a Justice from 1939 until 1962.
Returning to the topic of discussion, if the Founding Fathers had meant for there to be only ONE class of citizen, then they would have only ever referred to citizens as such and no other terms would have ever been in use. Under this scenario, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution would have simply read:
No person except a citizen shall be eligible to the office of the President.
In actuality, the Founding Fathers were referring to a fact of birth, not a legal status. As the outstanding researcher, who discovered that President Chester A. Arthur had not been a natural-born citizen, Leo Donofrio, Esq. once said, “it’s the difference between a fact and a legal status.”
Furthermore, if there was only one type of citizen and a natural-born citizen didn’t even exist, then the grandfather clause would have also been unnecessary. This is confirmed by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, which states:
“It cannot be presumed that any clause in the Constitution is intended to be without effect, and therefore such construction is inadmissible unless the words require it.”
All of the Founding Fathers were citizens of the United States by virtue of the Declaration of Independence and having survived the trials and tribulations of the Revolutionary War. Additionally, all of the Founding Fathers had lived on the American continent for quite a while, in some cases 50–60 years, depending upon their age at the time of the Constitution. However, because the Constitution was ratified just 12 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, none of them had even been a “Citizen” for the proposed 14 year requirement to be President, thus the reference is to “resident”.
You will notice the difference between the requirements for the Presidency and those of the Senators and Representatives with regard to length of time as a citizen or resident. In the latter cases, they are required to have been “a Citizen of the United States” for Nine (9) years and Seven (7) years, respectively, while the President is only required to be “a Resident within the United States” for Fourteen (14) years.
If “natural-born citizen” and citizen were completely the same in meaning, then the residency requirement for President would have undermined the effort to make it more difficult to become President in the first place.
Additionally, if in fact they felt that any old citizen could be President, then a British subject stepping off the boat in 1788, could have sought citizenship and run for the Presidency or Vice-Presidency after reaching the age of 35 and having fulfilled the simple requirement of 14 years residency.
By it’s very existence, the grandfather clause illustrates that the Founding Fathers did NOT in fact presume to be anything other than natural-born British subjects themselves, who changed their own citizenship upon signing the Declaration of Independence. The Founding Fathers knew that none of them could be natural-born citizens of the United States and that none of them had even been a Citizen for more than 12 years, thus the 14 year requirement was made of Residency, not Citizenship.
It follows that because of the difference between Citizen and Natural-born Citizen, our nation would need to wait for an entire generation, born after the Declaration of Independence, to grow up to adulthood before we would see our first natural-born citizen elected President. Everyone prior to that point, would only qualify via the Grandfather clause, which specifically states that one must be a citizen, “at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution”.
Logic will not allow us to recognize the Grandfather clause as anything other than a work-around until our nation would finally be old enough to even have natural-born citizens of the appropriate age to run for President.
Here is an excellent reference that gives the status of each of the Presidents who fell under the Grandfather clause:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/48856102/All-U-S-Presidents-Eligibility-Grandfather-Clause-Natural-Born-Citizen-Clause-or-Seated-by-FraudSee also:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/48894388/The-Citizenship-Status-of-Our-44-PresidentsIn his article, Two Minute Warning: Vattel Decoded, Mr. Donofrio, Esq. states:
“Whether you are a natural born citizen is a fact of nature which can’t be waived or renounced, but your actual legal citizenship can be renounced. The difference is subtle, but so very important. “Natural born citizen” is not a different form of “citizenship”. It is a manner of acquiring citizenship. And while natural born citizens may end their legal tie to the country by renouncing citizenship, they will always have been naturally born into that nation as a citizen.”
In addition to Mr. Donofrio’s statement, it should be additionally noted that every government on earth has the authority to revoke a person’s citizenship status for a number of reasons, most especially treason. However, the facts surrounding one’s birth cannot be revoked by any government on earth. Thus a natural-born citizen could find himself in exile and his citizenship and passport revoked, but that will never change the fact that he was born in a country of two citizen parents and had natural-born citizenship status at the time of his birth.
Our Founding Fathers utilized a unique term that only applied to the candidates for the highest offices in the new United States of America, which means that they felt these two offices were so important that they required a special type of citizen. In fact, this special type of citizen wouldn’t need to be required for any other office of our government because the President and Vice President were that important.
Keep in mind, there were some who didn’t even want there to be a single executive in charge of the nation because that would smack of the English royalty and nobility, which the Founding Fathers were desperately trying to avoid.
With this possibility weighing on our Founding Fathers, they chose to utilize a unique term “natural-born citizen” for the Presidency and Vice Presidency that wouldn’t apply to ANY other elected officials in the entire nation. Which leads us to a further use of linguistics, as in what EXACTLY is meant by this term?
To understand this we need to understand which sources throughout history actually used the EXACT term “natural-born citizen”.
To the best of my knowledge only ONE source has ever used this exact turn of phrase, natural-born citizen, and that was Vattel in his “Law of Nations”:
“The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”
There are those who would rather reference Blackstone’s more liberal interpretations but Blackstone’s Commentaries use the term “natural born subject” and there is a tremendous difference linguistically.
More:
https://medium.com/@superman_coach/the-linguistic-and-logical-aspects-of-the-term-natural-born-citizen-3625da140252
