I also know that there are many legal opinions that agree that a NBC is someone born on US soil or otherwise into the allegiance of the US.
I agree that a NBC can not be produced by an act of naturalization created by congress and, if you agree with that as well, than you must agree that congress has no authority to define the term Natural Born Citizen in the first place.
“I also know that there are many legal opinions that agree that a NBC is someone born on US soil or otherwise into the allegiance of the US.”
Yes, there are a lot of such opinions going back for centuries, but those opinions were invalidated by the opinions of other legal scholars, historical scholars, case law, and sheer logic. When you study this issue for as long as I have and taken it apart so many different ways, you come to the realization of how and why the errors exist and have for so long appeared to be so inconsistent and contradictory. Chester Arthur is a prime example.
What generally goes unsaid is how Chester Arthur got himself into his lies and the cover up of his lack of U.S. citizenship. It likely began innocently with a very understandable mistake. Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856) the states were responsible for establishing their own separate and non-uniform policies for immigration and naturalization. Many, not all, of the states granted naturalized state citizenship to a child born within the state with alien parents. It was generally assumed in most but not all instances that such a child also acquired U.S. citizenship along with the state citizenship. It is highly likely William Arthur and Chester Arthur made the same assumption that Chester Arthur acquired state citizenship and U.S. citizenship when he was born. Unfortunately for Chester Arthur and countless other people, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to the contrary by saying an alien or child of alien parents born in a state and naturalized at birth as a state citizen is not a citizen for purposes of the Constitution of the U.S. Government.
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We proceed to examine the case as presented by the pleadings.
The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the Government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the ‘sovereign people,’ and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate [60 U.S. 393, 405] and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.
It is not the province of the court to decide upon the justice or injustice, the policy or impolicy, of these laws. The decision of that question belonged to the political or law-making power; to those who formed the sovereignty and framed the Constitution. The duty of the court is, to interpret the instrument they have framed, with the best lights we can obtain on the subject, and to administer it as we find it, according to its true intent and meaning when it was adopted.
In discussing this question, we must not confound the rights of citizenship which a State may confer within its own limits, and the rights of citizenship as a member of the Union. It does not by any means follow, because he has all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a State, that he must be a citizen of the United States. He may have all of the rights and privileges of the citizen of a State, and yet not be entitled to the rights and privileges of a citizen in any other State. For, previous to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, every State had the undoubted right to confer on whomsoever it pleased the character of citizen, and to endow him with all its rights. But this character of course was confined to the boundaries of the State, and gave him no rights or privileges in other States beyond those secured to him by the laws of nations and the comity of States. Nor have the several States surrendered the power of conferring these rights and privileges by adopting the Constitution of the United States. Each State may still confer them upon an alien, or any one it thinks proper, or upon any class or description of persons; yet he would not be a citizen in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution of the United States, nor entitled to sue as such in one of its courts, nor to the privileges and immunities of a citizen in the other States. The rights which he would acquire would be restricted to the State which gave them. The Constitution has conferred on Congress the right to establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and this right is evidently exclusive, and has always been held by this court to be so. Consequently, no State, since the adoption of the Constitution, can by naturalizing an alien invest him with the rights and privileges secured to a citizen of a State under the Federal Government, although, so far as the State alone was concerned, he would undoubtedly be entitled to the rights of a citizen, and clothed with all the [60 U.S. 393, 406] rights and immunities which the Constitution and laws of the State attached to that character.
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As a consequence of this Supreme Court case, Chester Arthur was not a U.S. citizen, and he would have to naturalize to become a U.S. citizen. Doing so, however, after 1856 was going to cause him problems, and he chose to go with a pretense that he was a U.S. citizen and not a British citizen. Rather than come clean and acknowledge he could never become Vice President or President due to his naturalized citizenship, he defrauded the U.S. and the citizens of the U.S.
It wasn’t until the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that birth in the jurisdiction of the United States conferred U.S. citizenship upon a child despite having alien parents.
“I agree that a NBC can not be produced by an act of naturalization created by congress and, if you agree with that as well, than you must agree that congress has no authority to define the term Natural Born Citizen in the first place.”
That is precisely what I have been saying for so many years. Understand, I got into this research of the eligibility issue when I was given an assignment to write a thesis paper on the eligibility of Barry Goldwater during the 1964 Presidential election. I determined Barry Goldwater was in fact an eligible candidate. By the time George Romney was the candidate in the 1968 Presidential election, I was well prepared to argue he was not an eligible candidate.
We already have a problem, and have had it since ‘08.
0 wasn’t born here, his dad wasn’t a citizen, and his mom was too young to convey citizenship.
—that— is what has opened Pandora’s box.