Definition of Natural Born Citizen All About Allegiance

By Douglas V. Gibbs

In a recent email and post about understanding the eligibility issue, I indicate that Natural Born Citizen, as indicated in Section 212 of Vatell's Law of Nations, requires both parents to be citizens at the time of birth of the individual.  Kris and an anonymous commenter have left comments disagreeing with my assertion. In response, I have prepared the following:

The United States had just won their independence from Great Britain. The British considered all of the supporters in the colonies of the independence movement to be traitors. The British did not even see the Americans as victors of the Revolutionary War. Britain had pretty much thrown their hands up, and pulled out of America because of the need to address tensions with France. The British attitude was that the American attempt at self-rule was going to be a dismal failure, and those loyal to the crown, and probably many others, under the weight of the massive failure of the American experiment, were going to be begging for the British to return some time in the future.

The War of 1812 was America's second revolution. Britain had returned to regain control of the petulant children of the colonies. At that point the British had not even recognized the United States as a sovereign nation.  If the British troops, when they burned down the White House, had gotten their hands on President James Madison, they would have executed him for treason against the British Empire, because the British still considered the Americans to be British subjects.

Long before the War of 1812, as the American Revolution wound down, many of the British loyalists, or "tories," fled back to Britain. Some of them remained in The States. During the Revolution only a third of Americans supported the war effort. Another third were non-committed, and were willing to accept the resulting circumstances, no matter how the chips may fall. The final third were loyal to the British Crown, and viewed the American Revolution as an act of treason against King George. Often these people were English born, or the children of British citizens. It was the issue of divided loyalty, such as in the case of those that opposed the war, that the Founding Fathers were concerned about when debating the U.S. Constitution and determining that the executive must be Natural Born.

During the writing of the Constitution the debates in Philadelphia often centered on "allegiance." If this new federal government they were creating was going to work the participants at the highest levels of government needed to have a full allegiance to the United States. This was especially true when it came to the executive, which would be the President of the United States.

British common law in this matter did not properly address these concerns. Section 212 of Vatell's Law of Nations, which had been around since 1658, and had already been largely adopted by the Americans as a fitting definition of Natural Born Citizen, fit nicely with the need to ensure the President had no divided loyalties. Benjamin Franklin felt so strongly about the definitions in Vatell's volumes that he purchased three copies of the book. He bought one for himself, and two for the Constitutional Convention. George Washington checked out Vatell's Law of Nations from the New York Public Library in 1789, and still maintained possession of the book at the time of his death.

With spies from Britain combing the nation, simply being born on American soil was not enough, as far as the founders were concerned. When it came to guarding against the leaders of this nation having divided loyalties, the definition of Natural Born Citizen had to be more stringent than the existing one under British common law. The President needed to be fully American, with American citizens as parents at the time of birth. That was the commonly accepted definition in America at the time of the writing of the Constitution, because it was necessary to protect against the president having a divided allegiance.

Of course many of the members of the courts (a branch of government that was supposed to be the weakest of the three), and the British, disagreed with the definition. They considered themselves superior, and they considered British law superior (and contended that British law was the law the United States was still under). It was this superiority complex the founders most wanted to distance the new nation from. The United States was to be as little like the British as possible.

Under the original intent of the founders, a natural born citizen is one who upon their birth had parents that were both citizens of the United States. . . a claim Barack Obama is unable to make.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary