Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement
born” citizen if born to only one citizen-parent or to no citizen-parents, noting specifically that “some authorities” hold so. The Court, however, expressly declined to rule on that subject in this particular case. In dicta, that is, in a discussion not directly relevant to or part of the holding in the case, the Court explained:
The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.[1]
Those issues or “doubts” raised in dicta by the Supreme Court in Happersett in 1875 were, however, answered by the Supreme Court in a later decision in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which clearly repudiated the narrow and exclusive “original-community-of-citizens” reasoning of the Court in Dred Scott based on lineage and parentage, in favor of interpreting the Constitution in light of the language and principles of the British common law from which the concept was derived. The majority opinion of the Court clearly found, by any fair reading of its reasoning, discussion, and holding, that every person born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction (that is, not the child of foreign diplomats or of troops in hostile occupation), regardless of the citizenship of one’s parents, is a “natural born” citizen, and that the Fourteenth Amendment merely affirmed the common law and fundamental rule in this country that one born on the soil of the United States and subject to its jurisdiction is a “natural born” citizen:
The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children born here of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. The Amendment, in clear words and manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States. His allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke, in Calvin’s Case, 7 Rep. 6a, “strong enough to make a natural subject, for if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural born subject;” and his child, as said by Mr. Binney in his essay before quoted, “if born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen, and by operation of the same principle.”[2]
- ↑ Minor v. Happersett, at 167–168. Emphasis added. Any analysis of the distinction between “holding” and dicta is simplified in Minor v. Happersett, as the Supreme Court expressly explained that “For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve” the issue of parental citizenship, thus clearly stating that its discussion was not part of, and the resolution of the issue not necessary to, the underlying holding or ruling of that case.
- ↑ 169 U.S. at 693. The Court also found in this case that those who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States means those who come within the jurisdiction of its laws, such that jurisdiction may be exercised over them, thus
