Claim: Barack Obama does not
qualify as a natural-born citizen of the U.S. because his mother was too
young.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, June
2008]
CAN OBAMA BE
PRESIDENT?
It seems that Barack Obama is not qualified to be
president after all for the following reason:
Barack Obama
is not legally a U.S. natural-born citizen according to the law on
the books at the time of his birth, which falls between
"December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986."
Presidential office requires a natural-born citizen if the child was
not born to two U.S. citizen parents, which of course is what
exempts John McCain though he was born in the Panama Canal. US Law
very clearly stipulates: "If only one parent was a U.S. citizen at
the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United
States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be
after the age of 16." Barack Obama's father was not a U.S. citizen
and Obama's mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means
though she had been a U.S. citizen for 10 years, (or
citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the mother
fails the test for being so for at least 5 years
**prior to** Barack Obama's birth, but *after* age 16. It doesn't
matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her
son for automatic U.S. citizenship. At most, there were only 2
years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of
Barack Obama's birth when she was 18 in Hawaii. His mother would
have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the
time of Barack Obama's birth for him to have been a natural-born
citizen. As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the
time and was not. Barack Obama was already 3 years old
at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him
as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been
naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from
holding the office.
*** Naturalized citizens are ineligible
to hold the office of President.
*** Though Barack Obama was
sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter
because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. citizen
for 10 years prior to his birth on August
4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further,
Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to
protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in
Indonesia. Now you can see why Obama's aides stopped his speech
about how we technically have more than 50 states,
because it would have led to this discovery. This is very clear cut
and a blaring violation of U.S. election law. I think the Gov. of
California would be very interested in knowing this if Obama were
elected President without being a natural-born U.S. citizen, and it
would set precedence. Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect
some of this information will be leaking through over the next
several days.
Origins: The minimum qualifications for
the presidency of the United States specified in Article II
of the Constitution are few and seemingly straightforward: In order to be
President, a person must be a natural-born citizen of the United States,
must be at least thirty-five years old, and must have been a
resident of the United States for fourteen years.
These
qualifications aren't quite so straightforward as they might seem,
however. For example, what does the phrase "fourteen years a resident
within the United States" mean? Can those fourteen years be cumulative, or
do they have to be consecutive? Do the fourteen years of U.S.
residency have to
immediately
precede the presidential election, or can they have occurred at any period
in a candidate's life? These were issues that confronted Herbert Hoover,
who, because of his work (first for a British mining firm, and later for
the U.S. government during World War I), had
spent a good deal of time abroad and returned to the U.S. less than
fourteen years prior to his election to the presidency in 1928.
Likewise, the "natural-born citizen" requirement is not so
straightforward either, because the Constitution didn't define what a
natural-born citizen was. (The definition of "natural-born citizen" was
left up to individual states to decide until the adoption of the
Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, but even that amendment has been subject to
further interpretation.) What qualifies a person for natural-born
citizenship status under U.S. law can be quite complicated,
depending on factors such as where the person was born, when he was born,
where he and his parents lived, and the nationalities of his parents.
Some of these factors might seemingly come into play in the case
of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Although his mother was
herself a natural-born U.S. citizen, his father was a Kenyan national, and
his parents may or may not have been legally married in the eyes of
U.S. law. Moreover, his parents split up when he was but a
toddler, and his mother soon afterwards married another foreign national
and moved with Barack to Indonesia.
The item quoted above posits
that Barack Obama does not qualify as a natural-born citizen of the U.S.
because the law in effect at the time he was born specified that "If only
one parent was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must
have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of
which had to be after the age of 16." Since Barack Obama only had one U.S.
citizen parent (his mother), and his mother had not been residing in the
U.S. for at least five years after the age of 16 when Barack was
born (because she herself was only 18 at the time), then he's not a
natural-born citizen.
A few facets of this claim immediately jump
out as being far-fetched: first, that a sitting U.S. Senator
who has already spent a good deal of time and money securing his party's
nomination for the presidency would suddenly be discovered as ineligible
due to an obscure provision of U.S. law; and second, that U.S. law would
essentially penalize someone who would otherwise qualify for natural-born
citizenship status simply because his mother was too young. The fact is,
the qualifications listed in the example quoted above are moot because
they refer to someone who was born outside the United States. Since
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, they do not apply to him.
The
Fourteenth Amendment states that "all persons born or naturalized in the
United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
the United States." Since Hawaii is part of the United States, even if
Barack Obama's parents were both non-U.S. citizens who hadn't even set
foot in the country until just before he was born, he'd still qualify as a
natural-born citizen.
Some have claimed that Barack Obama's
Hawaiian birthplace doesn't qualify him as a natural-born citizen because
Hawaii was not yet a state when he was born. This claim is wrong: Hawaii
was admitted as the 50th state almost two years before Barack
Obama's birth there (21 August 1959 for statehood
vs.4 August 1961 for Obama's birthdate).
Some
outdated versions of this item conclude by stating that "It should be
demanded that Obama produce his 1961 Hawaiian birth certificate," but in
fact his campaign made an image of that document available on the Internet back in
mid-2008.
In August 2008, Philadelphia attorney
Philip Berg filed suit in U.S. District Court
challenging Barack Obama's eligibility for the presidency on the grounds
that Obama was actually born in Kenya (not Hawaii) and/or subsequently
gave up his U.S. citizenship and thus does not qualify as a
native-born citizen of the U.S. Lawsuits over candidates' eligibility are
not uncommon: similar lawsuits (none of them successful), for example,
have been filed challenging the citizenship status of John
McCain (who was born in the Panama Canal Zone), challenging the
Wyoming residency status of Dick Cheney (who was born in Wyoming but moved to
Texas), and challenging the citizenship status of 1964 Republican
presidential nominee Barry Goldwater (who was born in Arizona before that
territory was admitted as a state).