This reply was originally attempted on Ms. Sharon Rondeau's The Post & Email on April 20, 2022. It was a rebuttal to Joseph DeMaio's "The Unanswered Question."
According to Ms. Rondeau "it's rather disrespectful and violates our rule against personal attacks. It also uses language we don't allow."
I suspect the offending "language" is bastard, which throughout the history of the English langage has always meant a child born to unmarried parents. Is there another word?
If criticizing one's reasoning in support of a claim is a personal attack, then we've come to a very sad place. Ms. Rondeau should compare this to the arguments and rebuttals for local measures being voted on at the June 7th Primary Election in California.
Fourteen years later, some people are still heavily invested in a narrative that supports their contempt for Barack Obama.
=== My Blocked Reply ===
Mr. DeMaio,
Your Howe hypothesis is a straw man argument. It cannot prove anything.
Your basic argument (that the Jay "hint" and Vattel rules) is that it's the only thing that makes "sense." That's lame.
The eligibility for president has four components, natural born citizen, grandfather clause, being 35 years old, and a resident "within" the United States for 14 years. The only "or" is the grandfather clause. So, eligibility requires three components.
"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; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."
Why 14 years? The First Continental Congress (1774)? The Declaration of 1776? Articles of Confederation submitted for ratification (1777)? Articles of Confederation adopted (1781)? Election of John Hanson (1781)? Treaty of Paris (1783)?
Was George Washington a "Resident within the United States" for 14 years at the time of the election of 1788? In 1788, anyone (although most likely only males) who were 35 years old and resided in any of the several States (not just those that had ratified it by 1788) was eligible to be president.
"United States" is also not defined in the Constitution. Until the Articles of Confederation were ratified, there was no official "United States." There were, since the Declaration of 1776, however, 13 independent States (nations).
What you conveniently omit is what each of the several States did between the Declaration of 1776 and the convention of 1787.
Each of the several States had a legislature and a governor -- the chief executive. Surely, those states were concerned about foreign influence in both branches of the state governments. (They were at war, remember?) Each of the several States were also "foreign" to each other, as they are today. (Every State treats incorporations in a different State as "foreign" corporations.)
Although inconvenient, here is the language use by New York, the most populous and diverse state at the time, in Article XLII (42) of the New York State constitution of 1777.
"XLII. And this convention doth further, in the name and by the authority of the good people of this State, ordain, determine, and declare that it shall be in the discretion of the legislature to naturalize all such persons, and in such manner, as they shall think proper:
Provided, All such of the persons so to be by them naturalized, as being born in parts beyond sea, and out of the United States of America, shall come to settle in and become subjects of this State, shall take an oath of allegiance to this State, and abjure and renounce all allegiance and subjection to all and every foreign king, prince, potentate, and State in all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil."
[I note that the 1777 language above uses "United States of America" as opposed to the "United States" in the 1787 general constitution. So are we going to argue about inanities like that?]
The governor and senators were required to be freeholders and voted into office by only freeholders. The assembly had broader eligibility and franchise members, including all male inhabitants and freemen of Albany and New York.
Clearly, in 1777, New York, along with the other several States, had already established that the English common law (jus soli) citizenship was the rule in the United States.
The word "citizen" does not even appear anywhere in the body of New York's first constitution except by the allusion to non-citizens "as being born in parts beyond sea, and out of the United States of America." Reading Article XLII, New York didn't even make a distinction among those born in other States. Those "born" anywhere in any of the several States were already natural born citizens for the purposes of New York.
Alexander Hamilton ("being born in parts beyond sea") would have had to have been naturalized. Could he have been president under the grandfather language in the Eligibility Clause? Hamilton was also a bastard and later an orphan. Under Vattel's rules, his citizenship would follow his mother's. Still, unless you say it doesn't make "sense," he was eligible to be president.
What if Howe had a bastard son with a woman from New York while he was a general there?
How much "sense" does it make that the delegates to the 1787 convention would sneak in a provision on eligibility that was contrary to what was already the law regarding citizenship in all of the several States? And no one, not even the anti-federalists, called them out on it. Those Framers were some tricky bastards!
Give it up.
There is no unanswered question.
