With Trump calling himself a stable genius, I present to you - H.R.3736 - STABLE GENIUS Act
🔍 VOTABLE!
Introduced in House (07/12/2019)
Standardizing Testing and Accountability Before Large Elections Giving Electors Necessary Information for Unobstructed Selection Act or the STABLE GENIUS Act
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/3736?r=40&s=1
Sponsor: Rep. Boyle, Brendan F. [D-PA-2]
The first thing that needs to be done is define the term "Natural Born Citizen" in the context of today's language. People on this forum have different ideas of what that means.
There are 2 types of American citizens today: citizen by birth, and citizen through the naturalization process. Natural Born Citizen would seem to most closely correlate with citizen by birth.
But some people want a more restrictive definition than that, such as citizen by birth AND both parents are US citizens AND the birth happened within the borders of the United States. None of this is spelled out in the Constitution. It is very open to interpretation.
The Constitution means what the framers intended it to mean.
Therefore, we have to understand what they understood at the time when they wrote the words and signed their names to it.
Natural born citizen was (a) born on US soil (b) to 2 citizen parents. That came from Vattel's "Law of Nations." It is why they had an exception to this rule for anyone already living at the time the Constitution was written, because none of them could qualify when the new government had not yet been established. But starting with new children being born, this was the requirement.