FINDING IN FACT: What is Required to be the President

FINDING IN FACT: What is Required to be the President

In the interests of full disclosure, I performed an internet search to see if any other president had experienced having their eligibility questioned due to uncertainty about their birth certificate. After an hour and a half, I could find not the slightest mention of any precedent for this situation.

However, I did come across some factoids that might prove very interesting to the parties concerned with Mr. Obama’s claim to the White House.

For instance, Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution sets the principal qualifications one must meet to be eligible for election as President.

• Only native-born U.S. citizens (or those born abroad, but only to parents who were both citizens of the U.S.) may be president of the United States. The Constitution originally provided a small loophole to this provision: One needn't have been born in the United States but had to be a citizen at the time the Constitution was adopted. But, since that occurred in 1789, that ship has sailed.
• One must also be at least 35 years of age. John F. KennedyJohn F. Kennedy was the youngest person to be elected president; he was 43 years old when he was inaugurated in 1961. There is no maximum age limit set forth in the Constitution. Ronald ReaganRonald Reagan was the oldest president; 69 when he was sworn in and was nearly 77 at the end of his term in 1988.
• Finally, one must live in the United States for at least 14 years to be president, in addition to being a natural-born citizen. The Constitution is vague on this point. For example, it does not make clear whether those 14 years need to be consecutive or what the precise definition of residency is. To this date, this requirement has never been challenged.

These are the only explicit criteria in the Constitution.

Eight presidents were born British subjects: George WashingtonGeorge Washington, John AdamsJohn Adams, Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson, James MadisonJames Madison, James MonroeJames Monroe, John Quincy AdamsJohn Quincy Adams, Andrew JacksonAndrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison. (http://www.littleknownfactsshow.com/presidents.html).

Although it could be argued that these men were nevertheless born on American soil, that would be incorrect, for the lands of the colonies at the times of their births were the property of the British Crown. And further, there was no American government of any form prior to the Revelution.

As I mentioned in one of my other articles on this site, the Constitution’s articles of impeachment do not explicitly forbid retroaction impeachment. Therefore, if Mr. Obama is not eligible to be the president, then neither were the eight listed above eligible. I submit that, to be completely fair in this situation, these eight should be retroactively impeached and their histories for the times of their having been president expunged from the record.

Jimmy CarterJimmy Carter was the first president to be born in a hospital. (http://www.biography.com/presidents/pres_facts_trivia.jsp)

This implies that all the presidents before him were born in either their families’ homes, or the house of the village mid-wife. Thus if there was any sort of documentation in regards to their births, it would be a declaration signed at the county registrar’s office, weeks or even months after the actual event. These documents would: a) no more look like a modern day birth certificate than an ancient Egyptian papyrus would be mistaken for a page in a modern textbook; b) most likely no longer exist in many cases, meaning that several more than just the eight listed above could not produce proper documentation if asked for by –say- Lou DobbsLou Dobbs or Rush LimbaughRush Limbaugh.

Barack Hussein Obama is the first African American to be elected president of the United States. He was also born in Hawaii, making him the first president not born in the continental United States.

Hawaii has been a state of this union for more than a half century now, that is an intractable legal fact.

The idea that Mr. Obama is in any way ineligible to perform the duties of the office of the President because of a single slip of paper that was drawn up and filed away around the time of his birth is silly at the very least, and is an especially low form of stealth racism at its worse.