Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, left, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have been targeted by a certain strain of birthers who contend that neither man is constitutionally eligible to serve as president or vice president
WASHINGTON — Birtherism is back in the headlines, thanks to Donald Trump. In the course of a week in which the businessman and reality TV star raised money for the Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the voluble Trump redoubled his accusation that President Barack Obama, notwithstanding the release of his long-form birth certificate, wasn’t really born in the United States.
But, as Romney may learn as he winnows the field of candidates to serve as his running-mate, two of the individuals most often named as being under consideration — Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — have been targeted by a certain strain of birthers who contend that neither man is constitutionally eligible to serve as president or vice president because, while they were both born in the United States, their parents were not U.S. citizens at the time their sons were born.
The claim is based on a tendentious and distinctly minority interpretation of what the Founding Fathers meant by “natural born,” when they wrote, in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution, “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 …”
The ordinary reading of “natural born,” is that it means the same as “native born” — and would count someone born in the United States as a citizen regardless of the parents’ citizenship status.
For their part, spokesman for both Jindal and Rubio dismissed questions about their constitutional qualifications to serve.
“I don’t really have much to add to that story, other than that we don’t pay any attention to that talk,” said Rubio spokesman Alex Conant. “There’s no reason Senator Rubio couldn’t serve in higher office sometime in the future. ”
“That’s just a silly question,” said Jindal spokesman Kyle Plotkin. “The governor is obviously a natural-born citizen.”
Plotkin first confronted the question a year ago, when the governor released his birth certificate.
“Gov. Bobby Jindal arrived in the United States in utero, his mother about five months pregnant,” wrote The Times-Picayune on the occasion of the governor releasing the document, noting of Jindal’s Indian immigrant parents: “They arrived Feb 1, 1971, and a bit over four months later, on June 10, 1971, Piyush Jindal was born at Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, a natural-born U.S. citizen, who like every other child born in America, could, constitutionally, grow up to be president.”
But some commenters and bloggers took exception to that interpretation.
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/06/move_over_obama_jindal_and_rub.html#incart_river
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