By H. N. Burdett
War, it has been said, is God's way of teaching Americans geography and most certainly there are more of us able to locate Iraq and Afghanistan on the map than a decade ago. Similarly, obsession with President Obama's country of origin might logically point to a closer examination of Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
Clearly, in accordance with the above citation, had Barack Obama been born in Hawaii two years earlier than he was, 17 days before the Paradise of the Pacific became the 50th state of the United States, he would not have been eligible for the presidency.
That provision has been denounced by legal scholars as the worst provision in the Constitution and as "blatantly discriminatory" and the "flaw" embedded in that revered document by former Nixon speechwriter William Safire in a 1987 essay in The New York Times.
Two legal scholars, Robert Post and Randall Kennedy, independently reached the conclusion that the birth requirement as a condition for eligibility for the president is the stupidest provision contained within the instrument that organized the U.S. government.
In the February, 2006 issue of the Chicago-Kent Law Review, attorney Sarah Herlihy presumed that the Founding Fathers "feared" that someone "born abroad, in a foreign culture and with foreign influence, would come to America, become president and take over the country."
Herlihy posited, however, that "discriminating against naturalized citizens based solely on the fact that they were not born in the United Statees is not justified because globalization has lessened the differences between natural born and foreign-born citizens.
She cited the "increase in trade, the growth of international economic markets and the increase in the number of people who are multi-lingual contributing to making people more similar."
"Globalization is breaking down the differences amongst cultures because people throughout the world now have access to the same information, buy and sell the same products, and frequently travel or move out of their 'home' countries, during their lifetime. Accordingly, the natural born citizen requirement no longer serves the same purpose that it did in 1789 when travel was extremely limited and foreign cultures were, in many cases, very different than the cultures in America."
Herlihy's most compelling argument against the birth requirement was that many would agree that "a naturalized citizen who is born abroad and adopted by American parents at the age of three months and goes to American schools would have been better qualified to be president than a person who is born in the United States but moves to France at the age of three months, attends French schools, moves back to the United States at 40, enters politics, and runs for president at the age of 54." (The Constitution further requires that a person be a resident of the United States for 14 years in order to be eligible for president.)
Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, even went so far as to attempt to expunge the birthplace requirement, introducing a Constitutional amendment to allow citizens who had been naturalized for 20 years to be eligible for the presidency. In October 2004, a hearing was held on Hatch's proposal but no action was taken.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, offered a similar amendment in the House of Representatives, but one requiring the naturalized citizen to live in the United States for at least 35 years to be eligible for the presidency.
Under Article II, the list of Americans ineligible to be elected president includes two relatively recent Secretaries of State, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, born in Czechoslovakia and Germany, respectively, as well as Austria-born former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who moved to the United States from her native Canada when she was four years old.
"It will never be known how many potentially great presidents have never even aspired to the office (of president) because of the Constitutional prohibition," wrote John Dean, legal counsel to President Richard M. Nixon. "Show me a person who believes that the natural born citizen qualification should remain in the Constitution and I will show you a bigot, pure and simple."
Thomas Jefferson was in France serving as the United States Ambassador when the Constitution was being written in Philadelphia. It would be interesting to know what the author of the Declaration of Independence who was to become the nation's third president might have thought about the natural born citizen requirement.
We do know what Jefferson thought of bigotry, which he called "the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds. . . free and buoyant education and free discussion are the antidotes to both."
Perhaps the controversy over the birthplace of President Obama, a natural born U.S. citizen, will lead to the "free discussion" that will lead to the long overdue repeal of the discrimination against naturalized citizens contained within the U.S. Constitution.
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