May a Dual Citizen be a "Natural Born Citizen"?

Once again we confront a challenge to Barack Obama's eligibility to hold the presidency. Since Larry Johnson tends to cycle articles rapidly, you may have missed a fascinating two-parter (here and here) which appeared on No Quarter. The author is historian Judah Benjamin.

His primary argument has nothing to do with the birth certificate or the physical location of the Glorious One's nativity. Benjamin stipulates that -- contrary to popular belief -- one can be a Natural Born Citizen even if born overseas. Rather, he argues at length (in the first half of his analysis) that the mysterious constitutional phrase "Natural Born Citizen" refers to the concept of divided loyalty: One can never become president of the United States if one has, at any time, pledged loyalty to another government.

(For obvious reasons, the Constitution makes an exception for those born before the Revolutionary War. This means that John McCain should have no problem.)

Thus, sayeth Benjamin, anyone who has ever held Dual Citizenship is disqualified. The second half of his piece is devoted to the presenting of evidence that Obama may have been a citizen of both Kenya and Indonesia.

This snippet particularly intrigued me:

The purpose behind the exclusion of Naturalized Citizens is that the President must never even have had such an Allegiance in the past (FYI, I have severe doubts about Chester A Arthur on this count. He may have been Canadian by birth and may have held Dual Citizenship with the UK.)

(My emphasis.) The Arthur precedent may mean that the Supreme Court would side with Obama, should a formal eligibility challenge ever arise.

The "born in Canada" bit was a rumor current during the election of 1880. The rumor, never backed by hard evidence, derived from the fact that Arthur's father was an immigrant from that country. I don't know the basis of the claim for dual citizenship with the UK, and therefore I must humbly seek the aid of more experienced Arthurologists.

When I was a boy, we were taught that the Constitution makes no provision for Dual Citizenship. Everyone now recognizes that this position is simplistic and impractical. But is it really true that no-one holding Dual Citizenship may become president?

Anti-Semites might construe such an argument to exclude all Jews from the presidency, since the Israeli Law of Return confers automatic citizenship rights on all Jews, even on those who have never thought about applying for Israeli citizenship. Fortunately, no-one (except, perhaps, Xymphora) would interpret the law in that fashion.

At least one United States citizen -- former EPA official Valdas Adamkus -- has become the president of a foreign nation (Lithuania). But that, of course, is a very different matter.

For those of you itching to denigrate Benjamin, heed these words of warning (which pertain directly to the Indonesian question, but which apply to his argument as a whole):

It is possible that what I have managed to puzzle out is wrong. Feel free to prove me wrong but please DO NOT simply quote Wikipedia, or some site that specializes in “the debunking of urban legends”, or even the newspaper articles I quote, go and read every text you can find on Indonesian Law, or ask an Indonesian in their sixties, or seventies, what they think. I have well over a hundred pages of notes and in excess of seventy journalistic articles on the subject, I have bothered to acquire texts on Indonesian Law and I didn’t do all of that because Wikipedia or Snopes.com got it right, I did it because they didn’t.

An ornery scholar. I like that. While I'm not hopeful that Benjamin's argument will affect history in any way, the discussion is interesting.