Born in the USA!!!

Hi Readers!

I've been thinking recently about what short memories some people have. It wasn't that long ago, that the many people-most of them on the right-were flirting with a constitutional amendment to make it so naturalized citizens as well as native born US citizens could, run for President. Nor was it any secret that the push for this amendment was primarily inspired by those who wanted to see a certain Austrian born naturalized US citizen run for President. Never mind that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a serial misogynist and the son of a Nazi party member, had admitted to much more drug use than that which brought much scrutiny on Clinton and Gore, or simply that the career trajectory of going from actor to Governor of California to President has an ill-omened ring to it-I can't think why!!

But now it seems that the right has become very concerned about whether or not Barack Obama was born in the USA, despite ample evidence that he is. Not only has his birth certificate been checked, and there was an announcement of his birth in a newspaper in Hawaii. Nor did it seem to matter to them that John McCain was despite having American parents (while Obama had an American mother) was born in Panama and not on US soil. Now how much of this is attributable to racism and who much is simply shameless partisanship, I'm sure I don't know.

What not everyone seems aware of is that the first ten Presidents of the United States were either born as British Subjects (such as George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson), or were born after the Revolution but before the Constitution of The United States was adopted (Martin Van Buren). Indeed John Tyler was the first President to be born when it was possible to be US citizen.

Yes that is a technicality. Because there is a grandfather provision that allowed for anyone who was a citizen when the Constitution was adopted to run for President. But you can be sure that the birthers don't know that. Having probably never read the US Constitution, except perhaps for the Second Amendment, I'm confident that they would have no answer to the fact that George Washington was by birth British and Martin Van Buren was born a Continental citizen, as they used to say. More importantly, I doubt that most of them actually care.

Nor would they care that such rumors of Presidents and candidates are nothing new. Chester Arthur the 21st President was widely rumored to have been born in Canada and Republican nominee Barry Goldwater was rumored to have been born in Arizona before it became a state.

However, there is no big mystery about why that rule was written into the Constitution in the first place. Basically the new nation had recently broken away from the mighty British Empire, and become a highly radical social experiment (far more than the Soviet Union at the time of its inception), and since many of the wealthier colonials were highly loyal to Britain and had left to other parts of Empire, leaving it a nation of farmers with little money.
When the Constitution was written, there was much concern that some Aristocrat from Britain or any European country could move to the U.S with their money, become a citizen, and swamp the election system with their wealth. And possibly that such a person could open to the door to recolonization by Britain or some other country. And strangely the right tends to reject any such worry about multinational corporations.
Also the fear that either Britain would want her colonies back or that some other European country would get ambitious, was a major reason why the right to own guns, and local militias are so heavily written into the Constitution. The poor new country had limited money to raise a formal army, and many of the Founders were suspicious of large standing armies because at the time memory of the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell in Britain was still fairly sharp.

But that's another example of the disconnects when people back a concept out of either tradition or blind partisanship, with no sense of the reasons why it was put in place. Nor would most right-winged self-identified "Constitutionalists" own up to the fact that corporate personhood is a relatively recent construct in the history of our Republic.

I'll be honest and say that I don't know what exactly motivates the birthers. But one thing is clear:That they are NOT simply the Constitutional purists that they bill themselves as. And above all they don't want to believe that Obama was born in the USA, because they don't want him to be President.