I’m glad President Obama is an American citizen. Otherwise, we would have had a major constitutional confrontation on our hands. There would have been a multitude of voices declaring that the provision in the Constitution that requires the president to be a natural-born citizen is discriminatory and should be ignored. The saddest part is that they might have won with that argument, given our national ambivalence toward fidelity to our Founding documents.
So Obama has met the minimum requirements for being president: he was born here and he is old enough. There are a lot of us in that category. Might I suggest further requirements? How about the following:
- Dedication to the Founding principle of limited government
- Competence
- Genuine willingness to work with those who disagree with him rather than rhetoric that demonizes them
- Distancing himself from radical revolutionaries who seek to overturn Biblical morality and our system of government
Those would be a good start.
I hasten to add here that I never adhered to the “birther” thesis. You will search in vain through my blog posts to find any comment promoting the idea that he was born in Kenya. However, the constitutional provision that requires natural birth as a condition to holding the presidential office is real, and it needs to be upheld. That’s called the rule of law.