Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement
The standing qualifications to be President of the United States are set out in the Constitution, at Article II, Section 1, clause 5, and state three specific requirements: one must be at least 35 years old, a resident “within the United States” for 14 years, and a “natural born Citizen.” The constitutional provision states as follows:
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.
Questions from time-to-time have arisen concerning whether one who is a U.S. citizen “at birth” because of the operation of federal law, is also a “natural born” citizen for purposes of the presidential eligibility clause. Such questions often concern persons born abroad to parents who are U.S. citizens, or persons born abroad when only one parent is a U.S. citizen who had resided in the United States.[1] Although such individuals born abroad may clearly be U.S. citizens “at birth” by statute, would such persons also be “natural born Citizens,” or is eligibility to the Presidency limited only to “native born” citizens?[2] Additionally, questions have been recently raised by some as to whether one born “in” the United States of one or more alien parents, and who is thus clearly a U.S. citizen “at birth” by the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as by federal law and common law, was intended to be considered a “natural born” citizen for purposes of the presidential eligibility clause.
The Constitution does not define the term “natural born Citizen,” nor are the notes from the debates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 instructive as to any specific collective intent of the framers concerning the meaning of the term. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has never needed to address this particular issue within the specific context of a challenge to the eligibility of a candidate under Article II, Section 1, clause 5, the only place in the entire Constitution that the phrase appears, although federal courts have discussed the concept extensively with respect to other issues of citizenship. Consequently, although there are numerous Supreme Court cases, as well as other federal and state case law, discussing the phrase and its meaning from which conclusions may be drawn, there has still been certain speculation on the scope of the language.
According to the Supreme Court, words and phrases used, but not defined, within the Constitution, should “be read in light of British common law,” since the U.S. Constitution is “framed in the language of the English common law.”[3] Although the English common law is not “binding” on federal courts in interpreting the meaning of words or phrases within the Constitution, nor is it necessarily to be considered the “law” of the United States (as it is for the individual states specifically incorporating it), it can be employed to shed light on the concepts and precepts within the document that are not defined there, but which are reflected in the corpus of British law and jurisprudence of the time. As noted by Chief Justice (and former President) Taft, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, the framers of the U.S. Constitution “were born
- ↑ See 8 U.S.C. §1401, for categories of persons who are deemed to be U.S. citizens “at birth.”
- ↑ See, e.g., Means, Is Presidency Barred to Americans Born Abroad? U.S. News and World Report, Vol. 39, No. 26, December 23, 1955, at 26–30; Is Gov. George Romney Eligible to be President? The New York Law Journal, October 16 and 17, 1967, p. 1; McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out, N.Y. Times, February 28, 2008.
- ↑ Smith v. Alabama, 124 U.S. 465, 478 (1888). See also, more recently, Carmel v. Texas, 529 U.S. 513, 521 (2000), where the Supreme Court noted that the meaning of an undefined term in the Constitution “necessarily requires some explanation,” and that “the necessary explanation is derived from English common law well known to the Framers.”
