Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement
eventually reported and recommended after the debates and discussion of congressional eligibility requirements, there were no further discussions of the issue in Convention.[1]
Although there was no discussion concerning the precise meaning or derivation of the term “natural born,” there is in the Documentary History of the Convention a possible clue from where the qualification for President to be a “natural born” citizen may have derived. The history of the Convention indicates that George Washington, the presiding officer, received a letter dated July 25, 1787, from John Jay, which appears to raise for the first time the issue of a requirement to be a “natural born” citizen of the United States as a requisite qualification to be President:
Permit me to hint, whether it would not be wise & seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in chief of the american army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.[2]
There is no specific indication as to the precise role this letter and its “hint” actually played in the adoption by the Convention of the particular qualification of being a “natural born” citizen. However, no other expressions of this particular term are evident in Convention deliberations prior to the receipt of Jay’s letter, and the September 4 draft of the Constitution reported from the Committee of Eleven to the delegates, at a time shortly after John Jay’s letter had been acknowledged by Washington, contained for the first time such a qualification.[3] The timing of Jay’s letter, the acknowledgment of its receipt by Washington on September 2, and the first use of the term in the subsequent report of the Committee of Eleven, on September 4, 1787, may thus indicate more than a mere coincidence. If this were the case, then the concern over “foreigners,” without sufficient allegiance to the United States, serving as President and Commander-in-Chief, would appear to be the initial and principal motivating concern of the framers, in a somewhat similar vein as their concerns over congressional citizenship qualifications.[4]
Such purpose of the “natural born” citizen qualification was expressed by Justice Joseph Story in his historic treatise on the Constitution in 1833:
It is indispensable, too, that the president should be a natural born citizen of the United States… [T]he general propriety of the exclusion of foreigners, in common cases, will scarcely be doubted by any sound statesman. It cuts off all chances for ambitious foreigners, who might otherwise be intriguing for the office; and interposes a barrier against those corrupt
- ↑ Presidential scholar Michael Nelson explains that when the qualifications of electors were not to be regulated or prescribed by the Constitution, then the qualifications of the elected needed to be so prescribed. In the case of the President, however, the Convention at first had intended under the Virginia Plan that the President be chosen by the legislature, and thus it did not focus on the need for express qualifications of the President until later in the Convention. Nelson, Presidential Studies Quarterly, at 392–393.
- ↑ III Farrand, Appendix A, LXVIII, at 61; Documentary History of the Constitution, IV, at 237.
- ↑ A letter from Washington to John Jay on September 2, 1787, references Jay’s “hint” and suggestion to Washington. III Farrand, Appendix A, XCIX, at 76; Documentary History Of the Constitution, IV, 269.
- ↑ The provision was not directed at foreign-born statesmen or politicians in the country at the time of the drafting of the Constitution, such as Alexander Hamilton who was born in the Caribbean, since the eligibility clause expressly “grand-fathered” in those who were citizens at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Hamilton, in any event, supported the idea of limiting the eligibility to be President to a current citizen, or thereafter one who is “born a Citizen of the United States.” III Farrand, at App. F, p. 629.
