One confusing aspect of the continuing nonissue of Obama's eligibility to be President is the exact meaning and purpose of "at the time of Adoption in Article II.
Article II states:
"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."
If "or a Citizen of the United States" is a subordinate clause, then without it this clause reads:
"No person except a natural born Citizen at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution , shall be eligible to the Office of President..."
So does this mean that 'natural born' only applies to those alive at the time of the Adoption of 'this Constitution' and that for all others they only need be a citizen of the United States. More importantly, does this mean that only natural born citizens alive at the time of Adoption of this Constitution can be President? That is seemingly a null set.
More below
I have searched for any comment on an interpretation of "... at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution". So far without success, which I take to mean that it is noncontroversial. There is no further definition of Natural Born elsewhere in the constitution (not even in the 14th amendment which sets out conditions for naturalization). So why is "at the time" in this clause and what does it mean?
In relation to this issue there is this from the US Supreme court decision ROGERS v. BELLEI, 401 U.S. 815 (1971) in which the issue of citizenship was ajudicated.
The majority opinion in an extensive review of the meaning of citizenship, naturalized citizen, but not 'natural born' writes:
The historical reviews in the Afroyim opinions provide an intimation that the Constitution's lack of definitional specificity may well have been attributable in part to the desire to avoid entanglement in the then-existing controversy between concepts of state and national citizenship and with the difficult question of the status of Negro slaves.
In any event, although one might have expected a definition of citizenship in constitutional terms, none was embraced in the original document or, indeed, in any of the amendments adopted prior to the War Between the States.
- Apart from the passing reference to the "natural born Citizen" in the Constitution's Art. II, 1, cl. 5, we have, in the Civil Rights Act of April 9, 1866, 14 Stat. 27, the first statutory recognition and concomitant formal definition of the citizenship status of the native born: "[A]ll persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States . . . ." This, of course, found immediate expression in the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, with expansion to "[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . ." As has been noted above, the amendment's "undeniable purpose" was "to make citizenship of Negroes permanent and secure" and not subject to change by mere statute. Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S., at 263 . See H. Flack, Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment 88-94 (1908).
I find it ironic that the definition of Citizen was initially designed to prevent slaves from becoming citizens and later defined so that the emancipated slaves would be citizens. Now, there are those who would like to raise that question again.
Still, does anyone know why the "at the time ..." phrase is in seciton II and what it means?