I do love me some birthers – Ted Cruz birthers, that is. What does that say about the list the authors put before you as “cleared for take off?” Both Jindal and Haley’s parents were Indian citizens and the Indian constitution makes their children citizens of India by BIRTH! See permanent residents are not required …
Gop will eat itselfPost + Comments (98)
Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison at the American Thinker, stomping their little hearts out. Stomp. Stomp. Squish. Watch the mycelium fly!
Can conservatives seriously believe that any of these otherwise qualified American citizens should be barred from running for president? We thought as conservatives we are opposed to assisted suicide. But reading the Constitution in such a strained and absurd way would render us politically dead.
Some people, unfortunately, are maintaining that anyone whose parents were not yet fully naturalized U.S. citizens are ineligible. That’s because, they say, only the children of U.S. citizens can be “natural-born citizens of the United States” under the Constitution’s requirements for being elected president (Art. II, Sec. 1). They say that because of this iron-clad condition, Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, and possibly even South Carolina ‘s Gov. Nikki Haley and Louisiana ‘s Gov. Bobby Jindal may all be ineligible to serve as president.
Marco Rubio was born May 28, 1971 in Miami, Florida. Bobby Jindal was born on June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Nikki Haley was born January 20, 1971 in Bamberg, S.C.
The Fourteenth Amendment says this about being a U.S. citizen: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Last time we checked, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were all part of the United States. And all these bouncing 1970s babies were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
So we think the silly season in presidential politics should be closed down, early. We believe that Cruz, Haley, Jindal, and Rubio are all eligible to serve as president. Now, this is not the same thing as endorsing any one of them. But, it’s a safe bet than any one of these worthies is capable of being a better president than the one we now have.
Greg Conterio at the Western Free Press, whatever the fuck that is… bringin’ out the big guns.
Much of this nonsense is due to the fervent desire of many people on the right to “prove” Obama is not qualified to hold the office of president, and their willingness to twist themselves into knots in pursuit of this belief. The truth of the matter is actually really easy to find if anyone bothers to take a few minutes to do a quick Internet search, and then read what they find.
There are a couple of common arguments cited in support of some of these fanciful definitions of natural born citizen. One such argument is that English Common Law is actually the controlling authority, another is that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the constitution somehow does the trick. Not quite.
While it was the source and inspiration for much of the code law in the United States, English Common Law is not any sort of legal controlling authority, and bears no weight whatsoever in determining what is and is not “legal” in the United States. The 14th Amendment was a part of the flurry of legislation following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and the purpose of section 1 was to prevent the former slave states from denying citizenship to one-time slaves, and to cut the legs out from under the onerous Dred Scott ruling of 1857. Apart from establishing that EVERYONE born on U.S. soil is a natural born citizen, it does not address with any specificity the meaning or definition of the term.
The constitution, in Article II, section 1 lays-out the qualifications required to serve as President thusly:
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.
The illusion of ambiguity created by this lack of a constitutional definition is what leads to so many crack-pot theories as to what exactly a natural born citizen really is, but in reality the matter is not ambiguous at all. The definition can in fact be found in U.S. Code law, specifically Title 8, Subchapter III, section 1401.
Blam! Squish!
And yet, in the corners, little primordia, little buttons, more little mushrooms, sticking their caps up through the bullshit. Nasty things grow on bullshit.
Grow little mushrooms, grow.
[Image: Jan Fyt (1611-1661) – Mushrooms – Oil on wood – Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.] [This post was edited after posting to include the first quote, which is from birthers.org.]