Obama Conspiracy Theories

Charles Gordon was General Counsel of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center in 1968, when he wrote a very influential paper titled: Who Can Be President Of The United States: The Unresolved Enigma,  28 MD L. Rev. 1,1 (1968). I say influential because one journal repository noted it’s citing 23 times in other law journals, including the recent article by Gabriel Chin in the Michigan Law Review.

The paper is available on the Internet, but it is a large file and a slow download (you might want to right click that link and select “Save as” rather than trying to view it in browser).  First, let me give the brief citation that qualifies Professor Gordon as an Obot:

Under the presidential qualification clause of the Constitution, only “natural-born” citizens are qualified for this highest office. It is clear enough that native-born citizens are eligible and that naturalized citizens are not.

Gordon does not waste his  32-pags in what is “clear enough” but rather discusses the question of whether those born citizens outside the United States are natural born citizens in the wake of George Romney’s (born in Mexico) candidacy for president. This is a well-researched article (244 footnotes!) and well worth reading. I’m not going to attempt to summarize it except to mention a few things that struck me among much material that is familiar. (more…)

William Gaston

William J. Gaston (for whom Gaston County, North Carolina was named) was a distinguished jurist, state legislator and US Congressman from North Carolina. Gaston served on the Supreme Court of North Carolina from 1883 until his death in 1884.

In the decision of the NC Supreme Court in State v. Manuel, 4 Devereaux & Battle 25-26 (N.C., 1838), Gaston concluded that free blacks were citizens saying:

All free persons born within the state are citizens of the state….

The term “citizen” as understood in our law, is precisely analogous to the term subject in common law, and the change of phrase has entirely resulted from the change of government. The sovereignty has been transferred from one man to the collective body of the people–and he who before was a “subject of the king” is now “a citizen of the state.”

This is important both in the invocation of the common law in the decision of a citizenship issue as well as the affirmation of the equivalence of “citizen” and “subject”.

Thus in North Carolina was affirmed the same principle that 6 years later appeared in the decision of Lynch v. Clarke in New York.