User:Arne Eickenberg/Chester Arthur

Ineligibility claims
During Chester Arthur's Vice-Presidential campagin alongside James A. Garfield attorney, Arthur P. Hinman, who had apparently been hired by the members of the Democratic party to explore rumors of Arthur's foreign birth, accused Arthur of being ineligible due to his birth in Ireland. When Hinman's initial claims failed to gain traction, he maintained that Arthur was born in Canada and lobbied the press for support while searching for Arthur's birth records. When Arthur had become President due to Garfield's assassination, Hinman published a pamphlet aimed to cast doubt on Arthur's presidential eligibility.

Hinman's unfounded allegations regarding Chester Arthur's place of birth however obscured the fact that Arthur was a natural-born subject of the British crown, because his British-Irish father William Arthur did not naturalize as a U.S. citizen until August 1843, fourteen years after Chester Arthur's birth in Vermont.

Neither the law nor any federal court ruling in the United States has ever determined whether a natural-born British subject like Chester Arthur can also be a natural born citizen of the United States, which is one of the constitutional requirements for the offices of President and Vice-President. It is equally unclear whether Arthur was even a U.S. citizen at birth, because until the Civil Rights Act of 1866 there had been no federal U.S. citizenship rule. He may have been a citizen of Vermont under the common law of the state, but the Fourteenth Amendment, which introduced U.S. ius soli into the United States Constitution, was ratified and adopted almost forty years after Arthur's birth. Even if applied retroactively, the 14th Amendment at the time only covered born and naturalized citizens under complete U.S. jurisdiction, while Arthur's status at birth was (at least in part) governed by British common law.

In 1882 Chester Arthur nominated Horace Gray as U.S. Supreme Court Justice, whose seminal decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark extended the right of 14th Amendment citizenship to children born on U.S. territory of foreign parents, who have permanent residence and domicile in the United States. If Arthur ever intended to sanitize his own problematic citizenship status at birth, he failed, because the court only ruled that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen, while Justice Gray himself explicitly indicated that Wong Kim Ark was not natural born.

However, Arthur actively thwarted/lied etc.