So I wanted to see what the actual argument against Nikki Haley being eligible was. Unfortunately, the article doesn't do anything other than link to Trump's Truth Social post rather than the thing Trump was citing. Now, Trump's actual Truth Social post is just a picture of a post by The Gateway Pundit (conservative site) that claims the constitutional interpretation of someone named Paul Ingrassia asserted that she didn't qualify. Rather annoyingly, neither Trump nor the picture he shows offers any link to the article in question. For reference, it is
here.
This one, however, is largely just discussing
the article of someone else on
another conservative site called American Greatness.
Before the article, let's discuss the author, which The Gateway Pundit claims is a "legal scholar". In the article, the about the author says "Paul Ingrassia is a Law Clerk, a two-time Claremont Fellow, and served on President Trump’s National Economic Council." It's not exactly clear what it means by law clerk--a law clerk is someone (often but not always a lawyer) who aids a lawyer or judge in researching things or helping write or draft legal opinions. But it doesn't say he
is a lawyer or anything, just a law clerk, and it doesn't say who he's clerking for; if they were a lawyer I'd think they'd specify that rather than just using "law clerk". But even accepting the generous interpretation that he is a lawyer and is clerking for a notable judge, it seems a stretch to turn that into "legal scholar" as The Gateway Pundit claims him to be.
But let's set aside the author and look at the actual argument. The argument, essentially, is that even if Nikki Haley was a citizen at birth, her parents weren't, and therefore she isn't a natural born citizen. That is, she might have birthright citizenship due to being born in the US, but it asserts that's a separate thing from being a natural born citizen, which is required for the presidency.
While the author writes a bunch on the topic, rather surprisingly their actual
argument for the term natural born citizen excluding Haley is quite short, consisting of only one paragraph--heck, it really only consists of part of that paragraph. The rest is either concerning irrelevant issues (e.g. it mentions Jon Eastman's argument that Kamala Harris was ineligible, but Eastman's arguments against Harris--which I find very weak--do not apply to Nikki Haley) or is just them assuming the claim is already proven. One would think that one confidently declaring "The Constitution Absolutely Prohibits Nikki Haley From Being President Or Vice President" as its title (note the usage of "absolutely") would do more. Still, here's its argument:
A central concern for the architects of the nascent American republic was that only the most qualified statesmen be eligible for the country’s highest office. In his Commentaries, Joseph Story elaborated that “t is indispensable… that the president should be a natural born citizen of the United States… [T]he general propriety of the exclusion of foreigners, in common cases, will scarcely be doubted by any sound statesman.” Joseph Story, who enjoyed over a thirty-year reign as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, famously elaborated the principles of the republicanism of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall well into the mid-nineteenth century. His Commentaries specifically distinguished between natural born and naturalized citizens, the latter of whom were ineligible to run for president, despite qualifying for the privileges of citizenship. This view is supported by the best legal commentary of the day, Emmerich de Vattel’s Law of Nature and of Nations, a contemporaneous authority for the Founding Fathers on questions of citizenship. de Vattel’s work states that “[t]he natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” The question of natural born citizenship is ergo fundamentally distinct from the ongoing issue of birthright citizenship, raised in the Fourteenth Amendment, which confers citizenship to “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States.” The key word here is citizenship, not eligibility for the presidential office, which, as noted earlier, demands a much higher threshold for qualification.
The first half or so is irrelevant for our purposes; yes, John Marshall distinguishes between natural born and naturalized citizens, but a naturalized citizen is someone who gains it later in life. So ultimately the only argument it offers is the quote from Emmerich de Vattel's Law of Nations. I should note that the article is inaccurate with the title; the name isn't "Law of Nature and of Nations", but rather "The Law of Nations: Or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns". For brevity, it is usually just called "The Law of Nations." Neither the short nor the long version fits the supposed title of "Law of Nature and of Nations". Also, the article doesn't bother to tell you where in the work this quote is found; it's Book 1, Chapter 19, § 212.
The sloppiness of the article aside in regards to its citation, I've seen this quote before. Indeed, this quote is practically the go-to source to quote from for the argument that being born in the country, even with birthright citizenship, doesn't qualify you to be a natural born citizen; you need to also have a citizen as a parent. But this quote is actually quite weak support in the end.
See, Vattel's work was originally in French, not English (the original French title is Le Droit des gens : Principes de la loi naturelle, appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des Nations et des Souverains). And the sentence in French reads,
as seen on page 333 of the 1758 printing (back then the s's looked like f's!):
"Les Naturels ou Indigenes sont ceux qui sont nes dans le pays, de parens citoyens."
So the French term that got rendered into "Natural Born Citizens" is "Naturels", a word that (according to dictionaries) simply means "natural" in French. It takes some stretching to turn that into "natural born citizens". But wait, you might say. Regardless of whether it's an accurate translation, the people in the US could've read it in English, where the phrase "Natural born citizen" was used, and gone with that interpretation of the term. But that's where the problem occurs: That doesn't work unless they had access to time travel, because the translation that rendered it as "natural born citizens"
wasn't published until 1797 (depending on how one counts it, the US Constitution was either ratified in 1788 or 1790). The English translation that was available at the time the Constitution was being put together (
see this 1787 printing) didn't use "natural born citizen" at all, but instead rendered the sentence as "The natives, or indigenes, are those born in the country of parents who are citizens."
Thus this quote, which is really the only real argument the article offers, is virtually useless unless one is going to argue time travel was involved. I guess it does show that some British translator understood the term to be natural born citizen, but since we don't know who they were, that doesn't offer much. An anonymous British translator does not strike me as a good source for American constituitonal interpretation. And yet that is ultimately the only argument offered. Note further the article doesn't mention any of the above; it gives the reader the impression that Vallet actually used the term "natural born citizen" when, as noted, he definitely did not.
Incidentally, it claims Vallet's work was "the best legal commentary of the day." I suppose such things are debatable, but it's questionable to me that Americans would be relying more on a French legal commentary than Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which were already in English and would have been more familiar to them. And what does this legal commentary say on the subject?
It tells us (spelling corrected by me, the link's text is from a scanned source so it messes up some letters): "The children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such. In which the conftitution of France differs from curs; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien". While it uses "subject" instead of "citizen", it seems to me that if the Constitution's framers were relying on legal commentaries for terms, Blackstone's Commentary would make a lot more sense than Vattel's.
I don't know whether Trump actually looked at the article arguing it or if he just saw the headline and shared it based on that without any idea about what the rationale was, but it seems a very weak argument to me.
