Since I baldly asserted that Barack Obama was provably a citizen and provably eligible to be president, several readers have written to ask me how I know this to be true.
Well, his birth certificate is valid, for one thing; it's survived scrutiny and has been sanctioned as valid by the legal authority empowered to sanction such things. A conspiracy to cover this up is -- would be -- preposterous.
A thinner version of the claim holds that Obama is a citizen, but not a natural born or naturalized citizen and this constitutionally ineligible. This claim rests on a fairly tendentious argument about Obama's father and mother. Obama Sr., wasn't a citizen; therefore, his son could not have been born to two U.S. citizens; to be a naturalized citizen, both parents have to be U.S. citizens. Also: the law requires citizen-parents to have spent a certain length of time in the state; Obama's mother was a woman of the world.
But the two-citizen parent rule, which is no longer in effect, applied to people born outside the U.S. Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, a U.S. state since 1959; (had he been born earlier, it wouldn't matter -- U.S. law granted natural born citizenship to every Hawaiian born after 1900.)
Now -- the 14th amendment is fairly clear on the subject:
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
A further objection: to be "natural born," as the constitution requires, is to be born on U.S. soil (check) to two citizen parents (x mark.) Again -- that claim has no basis in federal law, Supreme Court precedent, or English common law.
The conspiracy theories are entertaining, and in a down economy, they keep people employed, so I suppose one cannot entirely dismiss their social utility
| 
