The “Natural Born” Question: Will it be Answered?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 8, 2023) — Late Monday afternoon, Twitter user @MAPennell tweeted The Post & Email’s latest article featuring his/her tweets about the presidential requirement of “natural born Citizen” stemming from the account’s challenge to 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to release his parents’ citizenship documentation to prove his eligibility for the office.

The tweet was directed to Ramaswamy and fellow Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley; RNC Research, a branch of the Republican National Committee; the Committee itself and its recently-re-elected chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel.

Some, including the late attorney and constitutional scholar Mario Apuzzo, and particularly many in The Post & Email’s audience, believe “natural born Citizen” to mean, “born in the country to citizen parents.”

While Ramaswamy and Haley were indisputably born in the United States, there is a lack of evidence that either set of parents naturalized as U.S. citizens prior to the candidate’s birth on U.S. soil. Both candidates’ parents happen to hail from India.

On February 21, Ramaswamy declared his candidacy on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” while Haley made her declaration in mid-February after pledging not to run if Donald J. Trump, for whom she served as United Nations ambassador for roughly two years, entered the race.

Trump announced his intention to seek re-election to the Oval Office on November 15, 2022.

After Barack Obama declared his presidential candidacy in February 2007, controversy arose given that his claimed father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was for his entire life a foreign citizen, first of Great Britain via his birth in the then-British colony of Kenya in 1934, and later, of Kenya after it achieved independence in late 1963. Although varying narratives of the younger Obama’s life story abound, it has been consistently reported, and Obama II has never denied, that his father never became a U.S. citizen, having been forced to leave the country after Harvard refused to allow him to finish his studies, according to government documents.

The Post & Email’s most recent article on the “natural born” subject was issued to correct the record on its having mistaken MAPennell’s invocation of an 1879 judicial opinion, the third of three in a screenshot touching on the meaning of “natural born Citizen,” for an unrelated one issued the same year though with a similar name.

MAPennell’s initial tweet to us referenced Ex Parte Reynolds involving a male American Indian and his claim of U.S. citizenship and voting rights prior to the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.

Notably, the court’s opinion quoted Swiss jurist and philosopher Emmerich de Vattel, whose 1758 treatise, The Law of Nations, is considered by many historians and scholars to have been a strong influence on the Framers of the U.S. Constitution.

“Vattel,” the opinion states on page 11, “in his Law of Nations (page 101), says: ‘As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, these children naturally follow the condition of their fathers and succeed to their rights. * * * The country of the father is, therefore, that of the children, and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent,” [sic]…By the law of nature alone, children follow the condition of their fathers and enter into all their rights.”

In Section 212 of The Law of Nations, Vattel wrote:

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.

The Twitter conversation, copied to several other parties, on Tuesday generated MAPennell’s response and reiteration by recipient @lgstarr: “Usurpation of the American presidency, borne at best of ignorance and at worst of indifference, greed, malice, or a Faustian bargain.”

The statement is followed by a quote attributed to the late scientist and Cornell University professor of astronomy Carl Sagan taken from a book he co-wrote in 1996, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.”

The above quotation appears to be missing the word “you” in its final paragraph, which is on page 241 of the book.

Google Books describes Sagan’s work as, “A prescient warning of a future we now inhabit, where fake news stories and Internet conspiracy theories play to a disaffected American populace.” Published the year of his death, it “argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.”