Mark Johnson: Natural born US Citizen?
Friday, August 7, 2009 at 7:26AM So, can I become President, as I was told I could from my youth?
The recent “birther” controversy about President Obama’s status vis-à-vis his citizenship’s nature (link) and manner of acquisition coincided with rediscovering the records of my own birth and US citizenship as I rummaged through our family’s portable safe, where we keep everything from our respective birth, baptism, and marriage certificates to some absolutely essential photographs and other documents.
You see, I’ve never been quite clear about this “natural born citizen” rule for eligibility for President, and evidently, the whole issue is a bit unclear. The US Constitution, in Article 2, section 1, clause 5, says:
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 (link).
Now I was born at a US Army Hospital in then-West Germany in 1961, and for a while thought that my citizenship came to me because I was born on functional-US soil. That was wrong, it turns out; US military bases don’t count as US soil. But both my parents were themselves natural born citizens by any measure, having both been born in the USA—Cleveland (mother) and West Point, NY (father)—to US citizens and neither took citizenship from another nation. But then I read the following in the relevant State Department document:
It has never been determined definitively by a court whether a person who acquired U.S. citizenship by birth abroad to U.S. citizens is a natural born citizen within the meaning of Article II of the Constitution and, therefore, eligible for the Presidency (7 FAM 1131.6-2 a.)
Come again? You mean that I might not meet the necessary criteria to be elected President? I need to get this figured out, and quick; I was planning to form my exploratory committee next week!
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