4 ms·
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 o
by rprasad 14y ago
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 [of the President] who shall not have attained to:
- the Age of thirty five Years, and
- been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
There, fixed it for you. It's not that difficult to understand when you know how legal parsing works. In this case, the use of two subordinate clauses at the end of the first sentence indicates that the first subordinate clause is subordinate to the phrase before it, while the second subordinate clause is subordinate to the ("super") clause preceding the third clause. The super clause consists of the first and second clauses, because they are joined by a coordinating conjunction.
- im3w1l 14y agoWhat about this parsing of your text? 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.
- praptak 14y agoThe canons of statutory interpretation forbid absurd, unreasonable or unjust interpretations. I believe that ultimately this is what lets the courts discard the odd parse trees.