Many would take issue with this statement.
Kamala Harris, former Vice President Joe Biden's running mate, is eligible to serve as U.S. president, contrary to the false claims of viral posts on Facebook. Her mother is from India and her father from Jamaica -- but Harris was born in Oakland, California.
www.factcheck.org
Dobbin
Faithful steed, then my response is simple: Many would be wrong.
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. In defining who can be president, the founders used a very specific and well understood legal term (in bold below):
“No Person except a
natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President...”
There is a CLEAR distinction between a “Natural Born Citizen” and a Citizen in general, one made ONLY for the presidency and no other office elsewhere, ie Article I, Section 2: “No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States…”
Obviously the founders understood that a crucial difference existed. And so we must reference what they would have referenced, which was Emerich de Vattel’s “Law of Nations” (1758), which states “…natural born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” Jus soli citizenship (born on the soil of a nation); Jus sanguinis citizenship (blood inherited citizenship, also called Native Born citizenship);
This helps explain why the founders had a different, stricter requirement for the presidency – to keep a much smaller pool of people for an office that should be filled only by one person every four years, while providing a larger pool for congress (of which many people would be needed). If a “natural born citizen” was the same as a “regular” citizen then the issue would be moot.
Vattel's definition of “natural born citizen” is the purest form of citizenship - which the founders and framers understood and demanded of the president. The president must be a citizen born in the US to parents who were both citizens of the US.