I was wrong! Hamilton edition

[beatrice_otter]

I love Hamilton, but there's one thing that annoyed me: the repeated statement that, after the Reynolds pamphlet, Hamilton was "never goin' be President now."

Because, as Hamilton points out A LOT, Hamilton was an immigrant. And immigrants can't be President! You have to be a natural-born citizen!* It says so right in the constitution!

But then I decided to double-check, and there was a curlicue I didn't know about (because it hasn't applied in 200 years). Clause Five of Article Two reads:

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.

And there it goes. Hamilton was an immigrant, but he was a citizen of the United States when the Constitution was adopted, so he would indeed have been eligible to be president if he hadn't been such an idiot.

*Which is why the "birther" idiots kept trying to "prove" that Obama's birth certificate was fake, and he was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii, and thus not a US Citizen--which is stupid because even if it were true, Obama would still be a natural-born citizen because his mother was a citizen.

Comments

[melannen]

It was a very minor bit in one of the epic-length Stargate crossovers, IIRC (and it wasn't about running for president, sadly, it was about security clearances.)

I don't think I ever saw that Enterprise episode but I did spend a lot of time thinking about it as regards the TOS novel where there were some Vulcans stranded on Earth in the early 21st century... (Especially since, IIRC, Spock gave them contact info for some of his ancestors before he went back to the future.)

[beatrice_otter]

Strangers from the Sky? I don't remember the contact info bit, but it's been years since I read it.