OOPs,I missed the year on that one.
But you must not have looked very hard if you didn’t find it discussed before 11/08.
Here’s some from the Big Thread:
To: Mike Darancette
The issue is not citizenship, the issue is whether he is a natural-born citizen. From the number of such comments here, it seems that there are a lot of people don’t know that there is a difference between citizen and natural-born citizen. Having only one parent a citizen makes it possible that “natural-born” does not apply.
997 posted on Friday, July 04, 2008 6:44:39 PM by safisoft
To: Mike Darancette
If he was born in Hawaii he has the same right to be president as any anchor baby born in Calixco.
Ah. But that is the point. The “anchor baby” has no right to become President if at the time of his birth his parents were not U.S. citizens. The “anchor baby” may be a citizen, but does not qualify as “natural-born.”
The reason that the issue is important regarding Nobama is because his father was not a citizen, and his mother may/or may not qualify to be the sole parent of a “natural born” citizen.
1,226 posted on Saturday, July 05, 2008 7:25:27 AM by safisoft
To: antiRepublicrat; Lady Heron
wasn’t there talk about McCain not being eligible for this very reason?
The Canal issue is irrelevant, as McCain was born of two US citizens and thus was born a citizen of the US. Somewhere there is probably a consular report of birth abroad for him, which is the equivalent of an American birth certificate for legal purposes. The problem with Obama is that we’re not sure he was actually born in Hawaii. If he wasn’t, and mommy was in Kenya at the time, then she as the lone US citizen wasn’t enough to get him automatic citizenship upon birth due to her specific circumstances.
That is correct as to Obama but not exactly correct as to McCain.
A reference to an article published Saturday night which includes McCain’s birth document is posted on this thread. The Birth Document confirms that he was born in a hospital off the US Base and not subject even to the fiction that he was born in the territorial United States.
Thus his two citizen parents make him a citizen; but in my opinion, there is a good Constitutional argument that he does not meet the Natural Born Constitutional test under Article II, Sec. 1, par. 4.
2,111 posted on Monday, July 07, 2008 10:50:21 AM by David (...)
To: null and void
Merely being a citizen is not a sufficient qualification to hold the office of the President.
Of course not, but Obama and McCain are old both enough and have been residents long enough. McCain is clearly natural-born, Obama not so sure.
2,124 posted on Monday, July 07, 2008 12:07:52 PM by antiRepublicrat
To: null and void; David; Raycpa
It’s an unsettled area of Constitutional understanding. But only if one unties words and phrasing from their intended purpose! Which is what the courts have been fond of doing, even the originalists.
What was the purpose? I think as Washington said in related matters — “To avoid foreign entanglements.”
The “natural born” clause is there ONLY because Washington wanted it there. He was a great man.
It is something exactly like the Obama’s Dad situation he wanted to avoid. Why? He did not want to have a US President who was a Prince or a son of similar potent family.
Obama, himself, is the marker of the kind of entanglement Washington (and John Jay) wanted to avoid. How is that? When Obama went back to Kenya and campaigned for his cousin!
2,173 posted on Monday, July 07, 2008 4:42:50 PM by bvw
To: David
Have you noticed that many here can’t agree on what natural-born means? Is it born here? Is it born here to American parents? Is it born anywhere to American parents? In any case, we know what they meant because of their first immigration law passed in 1790.
2,191 posted on Monday, July 07, 2008 6:00:13 PM by antiRepublicrat
To: WOSG
A citizen? Yes, whether he was born in Africa or Akron.
Natural-born? Maybe, the lawyers are arguing the finer points of that right now. I’m inclined towards the side that says natural-born means born on US soil.
Part of what I’m saying isn’t the law, it’s what Stanley Ann thought was the law. That is what drove her actions.
It is very reasonable to believe that she thought out of country illegitimate birth (there’s a phrase loaded with bias!) with a foreign national father would deny her baby citizenship, or at least complicate getting it asserted.
It is very reasonable to expect a new mommy - even a commie mommy - to want the best for her son, and to take steps to insure it.
You keep saying he was born in Honolulu, as if that were a given.
It’s not a given. It might well be true, but smart people of good will are debating that, each side has good evidence supporting their views.
Game over. Barack’s eligible to be President, with 100% certainty, no matter WHERE he is born.
It’s halftime. A bit early to declare victory.
We agree that he is a citizen, regardless of the location of his birth.
Even given the unquestionable facts of his meeting the age and residence requirements, citizenship, by itself, is not sufficient to hold office.
He has to be a “natural born” citizen. What exactly that phrase means has been the subject of a rather lively debate. I suspect that will be clarified a bit more during this election cycle.
Regardless of the outcome of that particular debate, politically this is a dead issue. If intelligent articulate conservatives can’t present the issue clearly to each other what hope does it have for being clear in the minds of the average government school mal-educated voter?
2,350 posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 10:26:20 AM by null and void (every Muslim, the minute he can differentiate, carries hate of Americans, Jews & Christians - OBL)
To: WOSG
Hmmm. You are correct. I misread paragraph (g).
I agree that regardless of the location of his birth, he is a US citizen by virtue of the 1952 law and being born to an American parent.
A few things are still in play.
Is this sufficient to meet the “natural born” requirement? Not according to what I had always been taught. (But so what? I was also taught the Moon was up there “to protect us from meteors”)!
More to the point, there is still a lively debate in legal circles as to what constitutes “natural born” I don’t expect they will be done splitting finer and finer hairs until some time after the sun burns out.
The two other things still in play are what actually happened? Given eye witness accounts of his birth in Kenya, what if he really was born there? Why would Stanley Ann bother to rush back to Hawai’i to claim he was born there?
I think that it is simply because she feared he wouldn’t be granted US citizenship, since he was born off shore, and Barak Sr. had one too many wives for US laws. Her simplest solution was to board a plane as soon as they’d let her, and get their little butts back to Hawai’i before his cord fell off and she could plausibly assert he was born there at home.
She acted based on what she knew and feared, even if it wasn’t accurate.
The other alternative is also quite simple. She didn’t go on a honeymoon, she didn’t meet his parents, and Barak really was born in Honolulu.
If that is the case, it would have been a trivial exercise to get an unquestionably authentic birth certificate. Soooooo...
WHY DID HIS CAMPAIGN POST A CLUMSY COPY???
2,431 posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 5:01:53 PM by null and void (every Muslim, the minute he can differentiate, carries hate of Americans, Jews & Christians - OBL)
________________________________________
To: WOSG
By that Blackstone then, Obama would not be a natural born (1) because his dad was not citizen and (arguably) (2) because his mom’s later life took her into a gray-area regarding her loyalties — into citizenship abroad. That last may sound post-facto, but it gets to the heart of WHY the natural born requirement is in there. To insure that there is a foundation of love of country. His dad did not have it or he would have stayed and become a citizen, and his mom was in the process of losing it when she was raising him.
2,532 posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 9:39:40 PM by bvw
But two posters here do suggest a two-citizen-parent requirement. Namely, safisoft in the first two posts, and bvw in the last one.
Now bvw's is interesting because less than two weeks earlier, on June 26, 2008, he'd specifically defined 'natural born citizen' in a post, and made no hint whatsoever about such a parental-citizenship requirement:
"The issue for me is not Obama's birth. His mother was born and has remained a US citizen, as I understand that makes Obama a natural born citizen, no matter where she might have birthed him."I found one post inbetween those dates that I think was likely misinterpreted to prompt this change. I'll see if I can find it again.
In any case, what both safisoft's and bvw's posts have in common is that nobody else backed them up on these interpretations. The 'two-citizen-parent' claim was either ignored or rebutted. Other posters didn't adopt the view because other posters, at the time, recognized that the argument was wrong.
And like I said before, I was open to the possibility that lone individuals might have tossed out the argument prior to November. You've demonstrated that that was indeed the case, and I thank you for it. If anything, it shows that Donofrio didn't necessarily make the argument up out of thin air, and maybe copied it from someone online.* But at the same time, the universal negative-to-silent response to it also bolsters the main thrust of my hypothesis: that the 'two-citizen-parent' argument simply was not taken seriously before Donofrio employed it.
(*I think I mentioned before that Berg stole most of the claims in his complaint from comments online. And in several instances, Berg's use of those claims is what caused them to gain popularity among Birthers. For instance, you will find very few references to 'Mombasa' as a supposed place of birth prior to Berg's filing date in August 2008. A couple of sites mentioned it, having seen the same source Berg eventually used, but it was Berg that cemented Mombasa in the birther mythos.)