I haven't heard anyone mention anything lately about Spiro Agnew. IIRC his father wasn't a citizen, which , if the two citizen parents crap were true, should at least be commented on by one of the birfers. I've read way too many lies from people who absolutely, positively, definitely KNOW that they 'learned' this 'fact' in school (before the libruls took over and rewrote all the textbooks). Aside from the fact that Agnew was white, why wouldn't this be an issue for them? Is Obama's skin color really the only difference?

Spiro never made center stage so people didn't care. And yes, Spiro was "just like the rest of us" so most really didn't look any deeper.

Spiro Agnew's situation has been discussed on a thread or two here and on other blogs. It is unclear whether his father, Theodore Anagnnost, had naturalized or not when Agnew was born. I think the census data is unclear on that. Leo Donofrio was obsessed with trying to prove that the ebil Obots who were saying Agnew's father had not naturalized when Spiro was born in 1918 were wrong. The point is that his fathers citizenship was not even an issue in 1968 because Agnew was born in Baltimore, MD.

I realize that nobody thought to question Agnew when he was running. Nobody thought to question ANY candidate before the scary black man. What I'm trying to understand is why no one's talking about Agnew now, even though they all KNOW what they 'learned'. Apparently my initial feeling, which is the same as Zeke's is correct.

As RC pointed out, Leo Donofrio claims to have found evidence that both of Spiro Agnew's parents were citizens when he was born. I don't know if he is correct, and it doesn't matter anyway, but birfers believe Leo's findings, so Agnew fits their definition of natural born citizen.

Donofrio's article on Agnew is here

Here's a better one than Agnew:

The very first nominee of the Republican Party, in the election of 1856, was John Charles Frémont. His father was a French immigrant who never became a US citizen. Everyone knew his father was a Frenchman (Frémont was famous as "The Pathfinder" for exploring the Southwest U.S.), but no one argued that he was ineligible, and no state refused to put him on the ballot.

His opponent in the Republican primary was John McLean, who was a justice of the Supreme Court. He also didn't claim that Frémont was ineligible because his father was not a U.S. citizen.

Just 60 years after the Constitution was ratified, and even before the 14th Amendment was passed, all Americans, including Supreme Court justices, knew that your parents' citizenship is irrelevant to whether you are a "natural born citizen".

But the amazing thing is that, to the birther way of thinking, the question of whether they naturalized the day before or the day after he was born is determinative of whether he had disqualifying divided loyalties.

Wait and never mind. ex animo david farrar has just informed me on Tea Tard Nation that Frémont was eligible because his parents weren't married.

So now it takes two things to be ineligible: A foreign father, AND the foreign father was married to the mother.

Hard to keep up with ol' animo.

But wait ... Barack Sr. was a bigamist ... his marriage to Ann was null and void ... Obama's an NBC!

Yay!

See how easy that was to figure out? All I had to do was ask the right question to start this thread. Now who's gonna tell Orly about this?

Way too logical.

Barack isn't eligible because he tyrannically oppressed all the peoples of Russia and conducted brutal pogroms against ethnic groups made all of Europe a target of conquest and concocted a final solution for the 'Jewish problem' led terror cells of Muslim extremists in sophisticated plots to slaughter innocent Americans tried to help the poorest of Chicago's inner city residents learn how to petition City Hall for basic needs like clean water and police protection.

FIFY

And if you rearrange the letters* of "spiro agnew", you get "grow a..."?

* yeah, it's an an an anagram.

But birthers have also tried to claim that Obama's parents weren't legally married as Obama's father had another wife in kenya

Just a cautionary tale to anyone thinking of using Spiro Agnew in an argument.

I recently looked up Ed Muskie's father in the 1940 census and it showed him as "filed first papers" meaning he'd only declared his intention to become a citizen but hadn't completed the process. However after further research I turned up his full naturalization a few years before Ed Muskie's birth. Unfortunately the citizenship data in the census is not 100% reliable (if you can even read it).

BTW the reason I was researching Muskie was he was the last Governor of Maine to elected while it was required that the Governor be a NBC.- He took office in Jan 1955 and the requirement was dropped in the Fall of the same year.

Call me crazy, but the fact that there aren't good records indicating the two parent citizeness of candidates that are supposed to be NBC might indicate something...

In fact, taking Donofrio's research at face value (not necessarily a smart thing to do with birfer-generated information), the 1920 census is wrong regarding the citizenship status of Agnew's father. It lists him as an alien. Donofrio claims to have uncovered his draft registration card from September, 1918 in which he states he is a citizen. (Spiro was born on November 9, 1918.) If Leo is correct, then the 1920 census is wrong.

Leo also found that Spiro Agnew's dad went by at least three last names and his name was misspelled in at least one official record. I don't imagine birfers would accept these kinds of discrepancies in the records for any of Obama's ancestors.

FWIW a year or two back I was able to establish the Spiro's parents' ages were inconsistent over the 1910, 1920, 1930 censuses - each 10 years they aged less that 10 years - I put it down to vanity.

Excellent. Not seen that one before. Will now unashamedly thieve it and use in my next sword fight elsewhere. For curiosity, when and how did this one come to light?

One of our genius researchers, I can't remember who, dug that up.

Also, there was a disputed presidential election in 1876. Tilden won the popular vote; Hayes won the electoral vote, after a Congressional commission gave him 20 electoral votes.

The details are vague in my poor memory, but there was a suggestion that the election should be decided by a court, and they even, IIRC, tried to pass a bill giving federal courts jurisdiction to decide who had won the election.

Which showed that in 1868, Congress thought - just as we think today - that the courts had no jurisdiction to rule on the legitimacy of a President.

They actually passed an act to establish an Electoral Commission to resolve the dispute with a commission of Senators, Representatives, and Supreme Court Justices. Based on this, it's clear that they believed the courts had no central role to the process.

Yessir, and they also tried, two years later, to give the Supreme Court jurisdiction to decide a contested election.

One of our scholars, nbc, gave this report on it.

Spiro's mother was born in Virginia, a US citizen. But, under the law at that time, she lost her U. S. citizenship when she married a foreign national. This was changed in 1923, I believe.

I believe you are referring to the Cable Act of 1922 and you are correct that Mrs. Agenw would have lost her citizenship when she married a foreigner. Now the question is did she regain it when her husband naturalized?