Natural born citizens

By E.G. | AUSTIN

ALL these years I've felt a splinter of doubt in my soul that Chester Arthur was not who I thought he was, and now, thanks to the efforts of attorney/scholar Leo Donofrio, I see that I was right:

Chester Arthur's true eligibility defect doesn't appear to have been mentioned in any historical record until December 2008 when it was exposed at my blog. Clearly, Chester Arthur's deception cannot serve to validate anyone's presidential eligibility. He got away with it, but that doesn't make it right.

The "defect" in question is that Arthur, the 21st president of the United States (1881-1885), who was born in Vermont, had a British father who didn't become naturalised until Arthur was a teenager—meaning that Arthur wasn't, Mr Donofrio argues, a "natural-born citizen" of the United States, and therefore wasn't eligible to be president.

This appears to be the new front of birtherism, now that Barack Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, which confirms, as if any further confirmation was necessary, that he was born in the United States. But it also indicates that Barack Obama Sr was a British citizen, and so some are arguing that even if Mr Obama is a citizen, he does not meet the separate criterion of being "naturally born" as such; and as Joe Kovacs points out (h/t Sullivan), the same complaint could be raised about Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, and Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida. Mr Jindal, incidentally, released his birth certificate earlier this month, after David Vitter, a senator from Louisiana, introduced legislation that would limit birthright citizenship to people with at least one parent who is an American citizen, green-card holder, or active-duty member of the armed forces. (Mr Jindal had also pledged to sign state legislation mandating that candidates for federal office should file a copy of their birth certificate.)

This is, of course, silly—and should, from the birthers' own perspective, be troubling. It suggests that the debate over eligibility has moved from whether someone is an American citizen to whether they can be construed as having or being eligible for any additional nationality. And that's something that is outside the authority of the United States or any individual American. There are a number of countries that give automatic citizenship to children of citizens, even if those children are born abroad. There are also countries with generous eligibility standards; if you have a grandparent born in Ireland, for example—and in some cases even a great-grandparent—you too can be an Irish citizen. And what's to stop any other country from asserting that people subject to certain criteria are now to be considered nationals of their country, too? If Mr Rubio and Mr Jindal and Mr Obama aren't natural-born citizens, almost any other American could be retroactively excluded as well. That would give other countries a direct way to intervene in American presidential elections. Far-fetched, perhaps—but if we can't believe in the Americanness of Chester A. Arthur's mutton chops, what can we believe in?