On Being a Natural-Born Citizen

Please note that there are two types of US citizenship. Basic citizenship (a 'citizen') can be acquired by birth or naturalization. Natural-born citizenship (a 'natural born citizen') is the condition where a citizen is born to two parents who are also citizens and has no foreign-citizenship granted at birth by another country. This distinction is made to insure that a natural-born citizen president will have no split allegiance to a former homeland or those of the parents. There are no laws or amendments to the Constitution (including the 14th) that have changed this distinction that the Founding Fathers made.

If you are born to parents where one is a US citizen and the other is a foreign national, you may have US citizenship and/or foreign citizenship (a 'citizen'), but you will never be a 'natural-born citizen'.

If you are born in the US, you are a 'citizen' and a 'native-born citizen', but are only a 'natural-born citizen' based on the citizenship status of your parents at the time of your birth.

If what Obama has stated is true, then Obama's birth certificate is a red herring. His father was Kenyan, not a US citizen. Therefore, Obama is not a 'natural-born citizen'. He is a 'citizen' by virtue of his birth in Hawaii, but he is ineligible to hold the office of POTUS.

On the other hand, if his birth certificate shows he has a different father who was a US citizen at the time of Obama's birth, then he is a 'natural-born citizen' unless he was born in a foreign country. In that case, he is a 'citizen' but may not be a 'naturally-born citizen', if he acquired foreign citizenship at birth.

The law around this is something that I will cover in detail in a later post, but briefly.

Article II of the Constitution requires that the POTUS be a 'naturally-born citizen' (NBC) OR a citizen at the time of the Constitution's adoption (1789?). The Founding Fathers used the Law of Nations by Vattel for much of their work on the Constitution. Vattel defines NBC as a citizen born without multiple allegiences (I'll quote in a later post).

An early immigration act (1791?) specifically granted 'natural-born citizenship' to a certain class but this law was repealed and/or replaced (1795?) and the new wording deleted 'natural-born' and granted only 'citizenship'.

The XIV Amendment grants 'citizenship' to a certain group, but never utilizes the term 'natural-born citizen', and does not remove the NBC requirement for POTUS.