Background

As you can imagine, we’re getting lots of emails on the ‘birther’ question this morning. But I thought I would add one point to the issue of what ‘natural born’ means. Most of the people discussing this are lawyers. And overwhelmingly they seem to come down against the predominantly racist ‘birther’ contingent. But lawyers aren’t the only ones who have some professional claim to the question. As a trained historian whose expertise is in this period of our history (yes, I was trained for something beside being a blogger), the debate strikes me as nonsense. I have seen no evidence that John Jay’s phrasing ‘natural born’ is anything but his way of distinguishing citizens by birth from citizens by naturalization, which fits the logic of the constitutional provision. So the analytical question of the ‘meaning’ of the phrase is a bunch of over-determined nonsense. It doesn’t ‘mean’ anything but that. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, please let me know.