Tuesday Open Comments

Hmmmmmm…..can we narrow down the presidential field a bit?  Not that she stands much of a chance of winning, but it would be instructional to make this point about her eligibility publicly and soon.  I refer to the last paragraph about the whittling away of the Constitution because of the failure to adhere to its rules of governance.  Within the original article is the issue of Kamala Harris – which, if the meat puppet were to be removed, would come up and all heck would break loose.  She should never have been allowed to be VP, if she’s not eligible to be President.  But if the rules are flagrantly ignored, does it matter?

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The Constitution Absolutely Prohibits Nikki Haley

From Being President Or Vice President

The question of presidential eligibility under the Constitution has been a hot button one, especially in recent years with the controversial campaigns of John McCain, Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, and most recently, Kamala Harris. The controversy arises from the text of the Constitution itself. Article II, Section 1, stipulates that “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.” The core issue centers on the meaning of the phrase “natural born citizen.” The Constitution explicitly lays out three requirements to run for president: (i) be at least 35 years old; (ii) have been a resident of the United States for at least 14 years; and (iii) be a natural-born citizen of the United States.

The question of natural born citizenship is crystal clear, though it often gets confused with the more controversial debate surrounding birthright citizenship. From the outset, it should be stressed that the two are entirely different constitutional issues. The question of natural-born citizenship as an eligibility requirement for president is well settled, whereas the issue of birthright citizenship is still up in the air.

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Joseph Story, who enjoyed over a thirty-year reign as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, famously elaborated the principles of the republicanism of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall well into the mid-nineteenth century. His Commentaries specifically distinguished between natural born and naturalized citizens, the latter of whom were ineligible to run for president, despite qualifying for the privileges of citizenship. This view is supported by the best legal commentary of the day, …Emmerich de Vattel’s Law of Nature and of Nations, a contemporaneous authority for the Founding Fathers on questions of citizenship. de Vattel’s work states that “[t]he natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” The question of natural born citizenship is ergo fundamentally distinct from the ongoing issue of birthright citizenship, raised in the Fourteenth Amendment, which confers citizenship to “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States.” The key word here is citizenship, not eligibility for the presidential office, which, as noted earlier, demands a much higher threshold for qualification.

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It makes sense that the constitutional Framers did not license the presidency to anyone born on U.S. soil. The specific requirement of natural-born citizenship, which is absent for both members of Congress and the judiciary, was intended to raise the threshold for presidential officeholders in particular. In Nikki Haley’s case, it is well documented that neither one of her parents were citizens, natural born or naturalized, at the time of her birth in 1972. It has been previously reported that a South Carolina-based newspaper included a quote from the Office of Nikki Haley, stating that “her parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of her birth in 1972 and did not become citizens until 1978 and 2003.” Thus, although the parents may have been lawful residents at the time of her birth on South Carolina soil, which may or may not confer her with the privileges of citizenship, it is important to note that she does not qualify for the Constitution’s higher requirement of natural-born citizenship.

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While numerous equivalences are made between “natural-born” citizens (or “subjects;” the terms are used interchangeably throughout, even though there is a relevant legal distinction) and citizens, the Court notably took pains to distinguish between the two categories, merely analogizing the two for the purposes of ultimately arguing in favor of birthright citizenship. Regardless of the ultimate legitimacy of the decision, which many constitutional scholars have contested over the intervening years, the important takeaway is that even in Wong Kim Ark, the supposed authority in favor of Haley’s eligibility to run for president, the Court never asserted that birthright citizenship would hereinafter absorb and eradicate the distinct category of “natural-born” citizenship.

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The Framers had a robust understanding of natural right. They fiercely upheld the view that duties must be imposed on the body politic in general and certain outstanding statesmen in particular in order to meet the higher demands of elected office that would, in turn, perpetuate the original social contract for posterity. To the extent that model has broken down in modern times, it is because of flagrant violations lawmakers, like Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris, have committed in the subsequent centuries against the Constitution’s intended meaning over the years. This has gradually whittled the Framers’ once robust tapestry down to the bone, producing a crisis whereby persons, with no historical awareness nor reverence for the Constitution’s meaning or purpose, openly defy its conditions willy-nilly, out of personal vanity or even resentment. Nikki Haley’s flagrant defiance of the Constitution’s textual prerogative, if allowed to continue, will further erode what remnants of that original tapestry still survive, thrusting all that remains of the Framers’ now-enervated handiwork into inexorably aimless waters.