The Constitution

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

An interesting point which I brought up two days ago. So here is the complete sentence.

In modern grammatical usage, "at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution" applies to both "a Citizen of the United States" and "a natural born Citizen". So technically, in order to be President someone had to be alive and a U.S. citizen at the time the Constitution was adopted.

Even ignoring the amount of political bickering because the founding fathers did not define "natural born citizen," but merely allowed it to be assumed as something everyone understood, this reading poses an interesting problem. If we delete the part of the statement that is self-negating because it is an impossible requirement, we get:

No person shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

I am pretty sure the meant to say:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

But the comma means that is not what the did say.

Very interesting.