Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have admitted that he is not a natural-born citizen and therefore not constitutionally eligible to be elected President. In the following video, the moderator says his age is 38, and slightly later (00:34) Ramaswamy says his parents moved to this country 40 years ago.
Unless his parents were already citizens when they moved here, they were not citizens when he was born. A person has to live in the US for at least 5 years before they can even apply to become a citizen.
They probably were here on a temporary visa. They may have had Vivek to improve their chances of gaining permanent residency and eventually becoming citizens.
The requirement in the Constitution is that a candidate for the presidency be a natural-born citizen. If they had meant just born in the US, the Framers would have simply said that. The Framers of the Constitution were not stupid. They did not use words that had absolutely no meaning.
A natural-born citizen is a term from the philosophy of natural law. It means basically the child of American parents born in the US, who has no claim on the citizenship of another country. Vivek was the child of two Asian Indian parents when he was born and therefore had the right to Indian citizenship when he was born.
Some people, mainly progressives, think that public opinion or the decision of a judge — legislating from the bench — should be enough to change the Constitution. Americans should NOT go along with that.
This is the same way that judges legislating from the bench discovered a non-existent, right to abortion in the Constitution. They made it up on the fly!
Kamala Harris is not eligible for the vice-presidency in the same way and neither is Nikki Haley. To draw an analogy, because a bank has been robbed 3-4 times and the robbers got away with it does not change the law for the future. Americans should just refuse to vote for ineligible candidates. They should also publicly denounce such candidates. It is more than disgusting that two ineligible candidates were on the Republican debate stage, without anyone saying anything about it.
It is extremely dangerous to allow progressives and others of their ilk to just change the Constitution at will. They are also working hard to diminish and erase the 1st and 2nd Amendments. Should those parts of the Constitution also be changed on the fly according to the current public whim?
If any person born here would be eligible to become president, then two illegal aliens or a couple on tourist visas could conceive and give birth to an American president. That would be absurd and certainly not what the Framers of the Constitution intended. The 14th Amendment did not address or change the original, basic presidential eligibility requirement and it was never intended to do so. Yet, the 14th Amendment is often used to claim that anyone born in the U.S. can become president no matter how tenuous the connect of the family is to the US.
Americans should be a part of preserving the original intent of the Constitution, not its destruction. You can do that in this situation by denouncing those shameless candidates who are not eligible and refusing to vote for them.
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Who is a natural-born citizen?