The Natural Born Citizen eligibility clause has never been directly adjudicated by SCOTUS. But it has been obliquely addressed in other cases.
In 1814, the SCOTUS heard a case known as the Venus Merchantman case. Among other issues, it concerned itself with the impressment of US merchant sailors by the British Royal Navy into their service on the high seas. That SCOTUS, ALL of whom being members of the founding generation defined what a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN was by quoting the entire 212th paragraph of Emmerich De Vatel’s Law of Nations, which was considered to be THE treatise on international law and was referred to regularly by statesmen at the time. That definition, which was incorporated into the majority opinion authored by Justice Livingston follows:
Quote of section 212, Chapter 19, Book 1, Law of Nations, by Vattel, written in 1758:
Ҥ 212 - Citizens and Natives. The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to
this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its
advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents
who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the
children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and
succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what
it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen,
on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The
country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens
merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of
discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they
were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of
a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of
his birth, and not his country. “
Note that the above reference was made in 1814, 54 years before the adoption of the 14th amendment, which makes no reference to, nor does it modify Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the constitution, no matter what the original intent might have been. The framers of the constitution were patriarchs, who believed that the citizenship status of the children followed that of the father. It is clear that they were concerned with undue foreign influence upon the office of the presidency, PARTICULARLY from a father owing allegiance to a foreign sovereignty.
To believe that the framers would have accepted that a person born a British subject, (as Obama himself admitted to being owing to his FATHER) when they had to exempt themselves with the grandfather exemption in clause 5 of Section 2 in order to be POTUS eligible, beggars belief and logic. Subsequent rulings of the SCOTUS in Minor vs Happersett, and Wong Kim Ark vs US serve only bolster this conclusion.
I believe that the court is reluctant to examine this issue, given the ghastly implications for the actuality of an illegitimate POTUS having made executive decisions for 2 terms, and the reality of an ineligible VP casting votes as the President of the Senate. How would all of their actions be unraveled? It would be a God awful mess of the worst sort...
“How would all of their actions be unraveled? It would be a God awful mess of the worst sort...”
They can’t be. They won’t be. The best we could hope for is that a precedent would be set to avoid a similar situation in the future. After all, even if the Supreme Court now rules that Obama would have been unqualified, he still was sworn in as President, so he held the office. Closing the barn door now can’t change that.
They put their own personal social status above their concern for the law.
They were terrified of being responsible for declaring a black candidate ineligible, and they just weren't going to do it, the law be damned.