Natural Born Citizen?

On April 27, 2011 the White House released President Obama's long form birth certificate documenting the fact that he was born in the United States. However, this will not end the controversy over whether the President is a “natural born citizen” within the meaning of the Constitution and is therefore eligible to be president. The issue has been consciously or subconsciously driven by racism, an inability of many to accept the fact that the Unites States elected an African-American president.

Nobody seemed to care that John McCain was born in 1936 in the Republic of Panama. True he was born in what was then considered the United States Panama Canal Zone, but the territory was never sovereign territory of the United States. The 1903 treaty between the US and the Republic of Panama creating the Panama Canal Zone did not cede territory to the US, it only granted certain perpetual rights under what was basically a lease. The 1936 General Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed by President Franklin Roosevelt relinquished some of those US rights a mere six months before McCain's birth. Clearly not all individuals born in United States territories are automatically US citizens, just ask the millions of people who were born in the Philippines while it was a US territory. They can't all run for President, can they?

The Fourteen Amendment which states "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." There is no mention of territories. People born in territories are not citizens at birth, they must be naturalized at some point after birth. Right? Should the media have looked into this? But even if people born in US territories are born US citizen, what about people born abroad. Shouldn't the media have researched candidates who were born abroad?

When Mitt Romney’s father George Romney ran for President in 1968, nobody seemed to care that he was born in Galeana, Chihuahua, Mexico. The media just assumed that because his parents were allegedly US citizens he was too. The media never really questioned the possibility that Romney’s ancestors, who voluntarily left the Utah territory for Mexico before Utah became a state in 1896, may not have been citizens within the meaning of the Fourteen Amendment. They, like many other Mormoms, may have left because they opposed the conditions forced on Utah to become a state, like the elimination of polygamy. They, like many other Mormons who were in Utah during the so-called Utah War, may never have accepted the authority of the United States over the Utah territory. Many Mormon settlers tried and failed to set up a theocracy called Deseret. In other words, the Romneys may not have been "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States such that they were born citizens under the Fourteen Amendment.

And even if they were citizens at one point, they may have relinquished their citizenship rights when they left the country. Many Native-Americans and Hispanics also left the Utah Territory for Mexico before it became a state. If those individuals or their decedents attempted to return to the United States like the Romney family did in July 1912 would they be citizens capable of running for President? In March 1907, a few months before George Romney was born Congress passed and the President signed a law that expatriated US citizens living abroad who became naturalized citizens of or swore an allegiance to a foreign country. Has anyone other than the person who maintains this website bothered to research whether George Romney's father (Gaskell) or his grandfather (Miles) done either of these things such that George Romney was not born to a father with US citizenship? Miles was even prosecuted in 1885 under the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act (for polygamy). This act allowed certain citizenship rights to be stripped of those convicted. Shortly after that he left for Mexico, taking his family with him. What impact did this have on his citizenship and that of his decedants born in Mexico?

Had the media done its job then and now, perhaps they would have concluded that Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, was the only major presidential candidate in recent history who was not a “natural born citizen” with the meaning the Constitution. He was quilied to be Governor of Michigan, not President. But researching the Romney family that would require the media to spend a few minutes at this site.

Instead many in the media unwittingly promulgated America’s sad history of denying or limiting the citizenship rights of African-Americans by quoting circus clowns like Oily Titz, from Moldova in the former Soviet Union. She was born a communist, yet the media look to her for information on what it means to be born a US citizen. Nobody born in the Soviet Union would have been allowed to question George Romney's citizenship.

From the founding of our country until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of April 9, 1866, African-Americans were not considered citizens under federal, state or common law. The Fourteen Amendment enshrined portions of this act in the Constitution to ensure that no future Congress could strip citizenship from freed-slaves. The Fourteen Amendment was also meant to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford which had legitimized America’s racist citizenship practices. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, states, starting with those in the former confederacy, began to systematically strip away the rights of former slaves through a system referred to as Jim Crow. African-Americans were citizens in name only while rights afforded other Americans (like the right to vote, to own property, to work, to attend public schools, to marry, to a have fair trial conducted with a jury of peers, etc.) were systematically restricted or eliminated. Many of these rights were not restored until as late as 1967 when the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia struck down Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, ending all race based restrictions on marriage in the United States.

So why are we treating Barack Obama as something other than a “natural born citizen” in 2012? Have we entered into an era of new Jim Crow? If the media would do its job perhaps they and others would realize that beginning around the time of the Loving decision, when other Civil Rights Laws were being enacted (like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968) Barry Goldwater initiated the Law and Order strategy to appeal to conservatives. A few years later Richard Nixon initiated the so-called southern strategy to appeal to white voters in the South. These two strategies have culminated in a new Jim Crow that once again attempts to demonize African-Americans and strip away citizenship rights by selective interpretation and enforcement of the law. But we would not want members of the media to have to read an entire book on this subject, such as The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander.