…Here’s my question to you: John McCain was born outside the U.S. Should that affect his ability to be president?
Very hard-hitting, Murrow-newsman-ish from Mr Cafferty. A shame it’s not on an actually difficult topic. Although, we are told, it appears to be one according to those who don’t know very much certain astute observers:
…There’s been lots of internet buzz about the topic in recent months…
For “internet buzz” definitely means a question is wholesale relevant, apparently. Interestingly, there has also been lots of “internet buzz” about the likes of 9/11 being an “inside job”, and the Holocaust never having happened. Curiously, CNN tends not to address those other trenchant “questions”.
However, since we are informed this must be addressed (because it is a question Mr Cafferty picked up from the New York Times), okay, fine. No one who actually knows anything, seriously believes the Constitution bars the presidency to the born “abroad” offspring of serving overseas U.S. citizen military personnel. Still, Mr Cafferty, and many others, appear to need a quick U.S. citizenship lesson.
The use of the term “abroad” in quotes is deliberate. That’s because U.S. government work station location does not trump U.S. citizenship. Government employees (not just active duty military service personnel) are considered inside “the U.S.”, regardless of where their work happens to take them.
Therefore, U.S. citizen military personnel and their U.S. citizen families based outside of the physical U.S. are technically considered present in the U.S. (Which is how the IRS also sees things.) They are not expatriate. So their children born outside of the geographical boundaries of the U.S. (such as Sen McCain) are therefore considered “born in the U.S.”.
However, even being offspring of a U.S. citizen[s] residing abroad for reasons other than U.S. governmental employment (meaning, a true expatriate) does not rule one out. A child is also a “natural born” U.S. citizen by virtue of even one parent being a U.S. citizen, and the parent[s] also not claiming foreign citizenship for the child. But that expatriate offspring must subsequently meet a 14 year U.S. residency test — meaning return to the physical U.S. for at least 14 years. (Two British prime minsters — Churchill and Macmillan — had “natural born” U.S. citizen mothers. Had their parents chosen U.S. citizenship for them, and moved to the U.S., both constitutionally would have been eligible to have gotten to the White House. Churchill famously made light of how fate had decreed he had not carved out a career instead in U.S. politics.)
So the U.S. presidency is constitutionally denied only to those people under the age of 35 (no one questions Sen McCain on that score), “natural born” citizens who have not been resident in the U.S. for at least 14 years (which doesn’t apply to him either), and those who required naturalization to become a U.S. citizen:
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.
What “natural born” means has been a point of contention, but it is perhaps best characterized by what it is not: one is a “natural born” U.S. citizen if one does NOT require naturalization. Thus, as a naturalized U.S. citizen, Governor Schwarzenegger is the best known current example of someone who is barred from seeking the presidency. That bar does NOT apply, however, to the offspring born “abroad” of U.S. citizen military personnel, for they are considered as much “natural born” U.S. citizens under Article 2, Section 1, as is, say, Sen Obama.
And speaking of Sen Obama, the above contrived “controversy” is typical of media coverage of this campaign. It is decreed as somehow uncouth, divisive and even a “fear bomb”, to bring up anything much regarding Sen Obama’s parentage. Ah, but Sen McCain’s parentage and rather routine military birth? Well, that clearly needs the very most microscopic of media scrutiny, of course.
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March 3, 2008 at 12:25 am
Consul-At-Arms
Two points:
1. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but in the main you get the gist of it; U.S. citizens can in many cases transmit their American citizenship to their children. There are different criteria depending upon whether one or both parents are U.S. citizens, whether the birth outside of wedlock, and if so whether the U.S. parent is the mother or father. It’s citizenship from birth, but it may not be documented for many years later.
2. The rules about a 14 year U.S. residency test are no longer part of the law. It’s a lot harder than that to lose American citizenship than that, once one actually qualifies for it. The critical issue nowadays usually involves the children of a U.S. citizen parent who was themselves born abroad and so documented who marry a foreign national and did not themselves spend sufficient time resident in the U.S. for them to qualify to transmit citizenship.
A lot of people seem to fall into this same logical trap. They assume there is only a binary set of answers to this question; that someone can only be either a “natural born citizen” or a “naturized citizen.
There are in fact at least two classes of naturalized citizens, those who naturalize individually and those who are naturalized as a class, usually as the consequence of a law passed by Congress or a treaty (or combination of the two).
It’s not too great an intellectual leap that of the set of non-naturalized citizens, there can be those who are “natural born citizens” in the traditional meaning, and those who are entitled to U.S. citizenship by birth abroad to U.S. citizen parent (or parents).
As it happens, I think the two sets of non-naturalized citizens should not be differentiated in terms of presidential eligibility, but then I’m a U.S. citizen born abroad, and so was my mother; both of us as a consequence of the military service of our respective fathers.
I’ve quoted you and linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2008/03/re-where-its-legions-camp-there-is.html