SaveOurRights

Congressional power to withhold citizenship from children of U.S. citizens is not hypothetical; for decades, it was law, and to some extent still is. The Tribe-Olson Opinion proposes that “[i]t goes without saying that the Framers did not intend to exclude a person from the office of the President simply because he or she was born to U.S. citizens serving in the U.S. military outside of the continental United States . . . .” However, the Seventh Congress, which included Framers Gouverneur Morris and Abraham Baldwin among others, did precisely that. In 1961 in Montana v. Kennedy, the Supreme Court construed an 1802 statute to mean that “[f]oreign-born children of persons who became American citizens between April 14, 1802 and 1854, were aliens . . . .” Thus, children of members of the armed forces serving overseas, and diplomats and civil servants in foreign posts, were not only not natural born citizens eligible to be president, they were not citizens at all.