In his daily Best of the Web collection, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto takes our Tuesday editorial to task for sowing confusion about, rather than clarifying, the question of President Obama’s U.S. citizenship. James has a point. I’m not sure the editorial was trying to make the claim he deduces, but that very uncertainty is an indication that we confused matters.

James writes:

Compounding the confusion, some rebuttals of the birthers’ claims have been based in part on misinformation. National Review, for example, asserts that it would not matter if the president had been born in a foreign country: “His mother was a native of Kansas, whose residents have been citizens of the United States for a very long time, and whose children are citizens of the United States as well.”

I must confess that when I read the quoted passage, I thought it was an irrelevant but harmless attempt at humor (the business about Kansas residents having been American citizens for a long time). Quite apart from James’s complaint, which I’ll get to in a second, the assertion was inaccurate on its face: Obviously, not all residents of Kansas are U.S. citizens — many of them are aliens. (Technically, a resident is just one who resides in a place and is not necessarily a citizen thereof.) But this was an editorial, not a legal document, so no point getting hyper-technical.

Yet, it was an editorial about a legal matter, so some technicalities do matter. Under the law applicable at the time, it was utterly irrelevant whether Obama’s mother was a U.S. citizen or, like Obama’s father, a non-American. As far as Obama’s eligibility to be president is concerned, it is Hawaii or the highway: If he was not physically born in the U.S., he cannot qualify as a “natural born” citizen. I assumed that was pretty common knowledge, even if the legal reasons why it is so are not well understood. (Obama’s mother was too young and hadn’t fulfilled — indeed, could not at that age fulfill – the necessary conditions to pass U.S. citizenship to her child derivatively.)

Anyhow, I read the editorial as essentially saying: Obama was so clearly born in Hawaii that it’s not even worth addressing any other possibilities. Rereading the passage James has highlighted, though, readers could certainly have taken us to be saying that, regardless of whether he was born in the U.S., Obama would still be a citizen because he is the son of a Kansan — which isn’t so.

Knowing how we operate around here, had it been our intention to make a derivative citizenship argument, I think you can rest assured that we would not have done it en passant. We’d have teed it up and then supported it with facts and law. But the passage is confusing, and since I’m supposed to be the hot-shot lawyer in this crowd, I plead guilty to being asleep at the switch.