I didn’t know I had to look up some Swiss philosopher to understand what the constitution tells me. Are you insane? You can’t assume something like that. The Constitution was written by well educated men who were well versed in English common law. If they had followed Vattel they would have used his words, not the words used by English common law. I’m sure you are familiar with the two words to which I refer. The whole universe KNOWS that the United States is Jus Soli. Jus Sanguine pertains to Americans born abroad.
You have absolutely NO PROOF that NBC requires citizen parents. It just ain’t there or anywhere to be found. What IS there are numerous court decisions that rule AGAINST you.
I have been following the threads regarding this issue and have yet to find convincing proof of your assertion that NBC requires two citizen parents. THE ONLY requirement for two citizen parents is if their child is born overseas and that is what confuses you people.
Tell me this. Suppose YOU want to run for president. How would you prove your parents are citizens? All you have is your birth certificate and I don’t know of many who can get hold of their parents bc’s. There is absolutely NO precedent for that neither. How would you know if you weren’t adopted? Some states (such as NJ) will never tell you that information. How do you know what someone put down on your BC represents the truth? Suppose the mother was not sure of the father. There is only ONE thing that your BC proves....and that is if you were born in the U.S. What if a baby was dropped off at the hospital, does that mean he could not run for the office of president? That is absurd to say the least.
This NBC issue pertains to less than 100 people throughout our history. It is of small significance when compared to the larger issue which is proving Obama was born in Kenya which would prove he is not NBC since his mother was of insufficent age to pass on citizenship.
Ah, we have here a wordy liberal poppinjay, I see.
The answer to your question is so very simple. If I wanted to prove that I am a natural born citizen (born of two American citizens) - I have no doubt that the vetting (sic) media would subject me to a Joe the Plumber style inspection going back over at least 100 years. See, I wouldn’t need to prove it because the media would do it for us. Get it?
My life and the lives of my parents are an open book. We have nothing to fear from an honest inspection going back to 1638 when my fathers ancestors came here and 1541 when my mothers ancestors came here with Cortez. Nothing to hide. All my school records, traffic fines, divorce, military service - an open book - publicly available information.
For reasons unknown ( but not for long) the same cannot be said for Mr. Soetoro or whatever his name really is. Why is this?
Why is this?
There you'll learn that Vattel was the primary reference for "The Law of Nations" used by the members of the Constitutional Convention.
Also, as James Madison once said "the Common Law of England is not the Common Law of the United States."
The dispute over this was one of the reasons for the War of 1812!
In Minor vs. Happersett, the court held that the 14th Amendment granted no one at all any right to vote, regardless of sex, age or citizenship. Previous cases had already held that there was no Federal right to vote. The second principal holding in Minor, as well as the holdings in previous cases, are the reason that the 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments were later proposed and adopted, the language of which forbids the denial of the privilege of voting based on race, previous condition of servitude, sex or age (for those 18-years of age or older.) The 19th Amendment, for example, requires that if one sex is granted the privilege to vote, the other sex must be granted that same privilege equally.
But the court in Minor determined that before it could decide the issue of whether the petitioner (who was an adult White woman) had any Federal right to vote based on the 14th Amendment, it first had to decide whether or not she was a citizen, and if so on what basis? Understanding why the court approached the issue that way is crucial: Firstly, if women as a class be not US citizens, then the second sentence of the 14th Amendment that forbids States from denying citizens any privileges of US citizens would not apply to them, since it only applies to those who are US citizens. Secondly, the court was concerned with whether or not the citizenship of women as a class depended on the 14th Amendment. In other words, the question was whether or not, in the absence of the 14th Amendment, would any women at all be citizens? That second issue mattered for two reasons:
1. The legal principle known as judicial restraint:
If women as a class were not citizens before the adoption of the 14th Amendment, then the Court would have to decide whether the first sentence of the 14th Amendment granted women “born in the US and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” US citizenship. But if the woman who was the petitioner in the case at hand could be held to be a US citizen even without applying the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, then the principle of judicial restraint would behoove the Court to avoid deciding whether or not the 14th Amendment grants any women US citizenship. Judicial restraint requires that courts not make precedent-setting holdings when the issues in a case do not require it.
The court has always interpreted the principle of judicial restraint as sufficient reason to use the original (unamended) text of the Constitution before relying on the text of any subsequent Amendments, if such is possible. That’s especially true in the absence of any prior precedents based on a particular clause of the Constitution. They seek to avoid making a “first instance” interpretation of any clause when there are other precedents that can be used instead (where it can be shown that no reasonable meaning of the unused clause could possibly change the outcome.) In this case, since the 14th Amendment definitely did not deprive anyone of citizenship, there was no reason to rely on its first sentence to determine citizenship, if it could be determined that the petitioner was a citizen based on the original text of the Constitution.
2. The court reasoned that, if women can be citizens without applying the 14th Amendment, then the 14th Amendment cannot fairly be interpreted as granting them any rights or privileges of citizenship that they have not always possessed, even before the ratification of that Amendment. In fact, this is the crucial point the court relied on in order to reach its second principal holding (that the 14th Amendment did not grant anyone the right to vote)! In the words of the court in Minor:
It is clear, therefore, we think, that the Constitution has not added the right of suffrage to the privileges and immunities of citizenship as they existed at the time it was adopted. This makes it proper to inquire whether suffrage was coextensive with the citizenship of the States at the time of its adoption. If it was, then it may with force be argued that suffrage was one of the rights which belonged to citizenship, and in the enjoyment of which every citizen must be protected. But if it was not, the contrary may with propriety be assumed. [pp. 171, 172]
The Court in Minor held that the petitioner was in fact a US citizen, and had been such from birth, before the ratification of the 14th Amendment. The reasoning the Court used to reach that holding is actually central to the question of the Supreme Court’s definition of “natural born citizen,” and so that reasoning (and the Court’s definition of “natural born citizen”) needs to be examined in more detail.
But before we do, let us first consider another issue: Is what is asserted to be a holding in Minor—that the petitioner was a US citizen based on the original (unamended) text of the Constitution (and in fact had been such since birth, before the ratification of the 14th Amendment)—actually a precedent-setting holding? Or was it, as has been claimed elsewhere, merely dictum, and therefore not binding US Supreme Court precedent?
To answer that question, we first refer to the most recent Supreme Court precedent regarding the principles to be used to distinguish between dicta and holdings that establish binding precedents, which can be found in a case decided in 1996 known as Ogilvie Et Al., Minors v. United States, 519 U.S. 79 (1996). Justice Breyer’s majority opinion in that case stated that when the Court discusses a certain “…reason as an ‘independent’ ground in support of our decision”, then that reasoning is not simply dictum:
“Although we gave other reasons for our holding in Schleier as well, we explicitly labeled this reason an ‘independent’ ground in support of our decision, id., at 334. We cannot accept petitioners’ claim that it was simply a dictum.”
The syllabus of the Minor case lists the following as one of the holdings:
2. In that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution as since.
The fact that that decision is listed in the syllabus of the case is evidence that the Court considered its decision on the citizenship question to be a precedent-setting holding, and not dicta.
The fact that the Minor court used the fact that the petitioner was a US citizen without recourse to the first sentence of the 14th Amendment as one of the independent grounds for their other principal holding regarding the right to vote makes that decision a precedent-setting holding, according the principles established in Ogilvie.
Therefore, the citizenship holding in Minor is binding US Supreme Court precedent. Although the second principal holding regarding the right to vote was later mooted by the 19th Amendment, the first principal holding regarding the basis for establishing US citizenship without any reliance on the 14th Amendment still stands as binding Supreme Court precedent which has never been overturned nor obviated by subsequent Amendments to the Constitution.
The reason this is so important is because in the Minor decision, the Supreme Court didn’t just decide that a woman was a citizen, it made that decision by providing its official interpretation of the phrase “natural born citizen,” specifically referencing the qualifications to be US President from Article II section 1, and then applying the definition of “natural born citizen” to the petitioner and coming to the conclusion that she satisfies all the conditions to be a “natural born citizen.” Here’s the text:
Additions might always be made to the citizenship of the United States in two ways: first, by birth, and second, by naturalization. This is apparent from the Constitution itself, for it provides [n6] that “no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President,” [n7] and that Congress shall have power “to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” Thus new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.
The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. …
The Court concluded that, since the term “natural born citizen” was used in the Constitution as one of the qualifications to be President, that anyone who qualified as a “natural born citizen” necessarily was defined by the Constitution as a citizen. So the Court proceeded to research the meaning of “natural born citizen” to see whether it could rule the petitioner to be a citizen based on the definition of that term. Pursuant to its research, it then defined “natural born citizens” as “all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens.”
Note that the Court states that “natural born citizens” are distinct from “aliens or foreigners.” That’s actually a very important semantic distinction. To see why, it is necessary to understand the 18th-century common law meanings of the words alien and foreigner:
According to Black’s Law Dictionary, the word “foreigner” can be used in a municipal context and in an international context. In a municipal context, anyone who is not a member of a community is a “foreigner” in that community. In an international context, anyone owing allegiance to a foreign state or sovereign is a “foreigner”:
FOREIGNER. In old English law, this term, when used with reference to a particular city, designated any person who was not an inhabitant of that city. According to later usage, it denotes a person who is not a citizen or subject of the state or country of which mention is made, or any one owing allegiance to a foreign state or sovereign. (Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law, First Edition, 1891, p.506)
In 2009, the Berkeley Journal of International Law published a comprehensive historical analysis of the words “foreigner” and “alien”, as used in English and American legal writings during the late eighteenth century. Research by Anderson Berry found that the word “foreigner”, when used in an international context, has a general meaning and a specific meaning. In the general sense, anyone who was born in a foreign country or is a citizen or subject of a foreign country is a “foreigner”. But in the specific sense, “foreigner” is used in contradistinction to “alien”.
...the overwhelming majority of sources available to the drafters of the judicial bill [of 1789] define an “alien” as an individual who: 1) is foreign-born, and 2) resides in a sovereign’s territory other than the one where he was born. A “foreigner” is defined as an individual who: 1) is foreign-born, or more specifically, is a foreign citizen or subject, or 2) is a foreign-born individual residing extraterritorially [outside the sovereign’s territory]. (Berry, pp.337-8)
“Aliens” are persons who relocate permanently to one country, while they are still citizens or subjects of some other country. Presumably, aliens intend to renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and become naturalized citizens of the country of their new permanent residence. In contrast, “foreigners” are temporary visitors who retain citizenship and permanent residence in their home country and intend to someday return to their home country [32].
In the general sense, the eighteenth-century meaning of “foreigner” was not limited to persons born in a foreign country. If you are a citizen or subject of a foreign country, you are a “foreigner,” regardless of your residence or place of birth.
So someone who is a citizen of the United States could be also an alien, if he or she retains or acquires foreign citizenship, and could also be a foreigner if he or she was born outside the United States—even if the person no longer had any foreign citizenship. Note also that a US citizen born in the US could become an alien simply by acquiring foreign citizenship. So the fact that the Supreme Court has defined “natural born citizens” as distinct from “aliens or foreigners” excludes anyone who either has foreign citizenship or was not born in the United States from qualifying as a “natural born citizen.”
Starting with the very next sentence following the first quote from the case given above, the Court then continues to discuss the fact that yet other persons could be citizens who don’t qualify as “natural born citizens.” To understand the message the Court intends to convey, it is important to remember that the issue on which the court was focusing was whether or nor the petitioner was a citizen regardless of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. The definition of “natural born citizen” was relevant solely because a) Article II, section 1 establishes “natural born citizen” as the strictest class of citizenship, and b) anyone who qualifies as a “natural born citizen” necessarily qualifies as a citizen:
… Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts [regarding citizenship, but not regarding “natural born citizenship”], but never as to the first [because anyone who qualifies as a “natural born citizen” is a citizen beyond dispute]. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words “all children” are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as “all persons,” and if females are included in the last they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.
The Court notes in passing that those born in the United States, regardless of the citizenship status of their parents, may nevertheless qualify as citizens. The fact it uses the word “citizens” in that clause instead of using the phrase “natural born citizens” categorically falsifies any claim that the Court intended to convey the idea that anyone born of non-citizen parents might possibly be “natural born citizens.” The doubt the Court was expressing concerned whether or not such persons might even be citizens at all. The Court goes out of its way to ensure we don’t miss this crucial point by referring to those about which there were doubts regarding citizenship as “this class,” thereby explicitly identifying those born in the country to non-citizen parents as a separate and distinctclass, as members of a set disjoint and distinct from the set (class) of “natural born citizens.”
Note also that the Court’s discussion regarding persons born in the US to non-citizen parents is dicta, because it was not used as grounds for any of their holdings in the case. They actually state that such questions have no relevance to the case before them—thereby explicitly labelling their discussion of any hypothetical class of citizens beyond the class “born in the US of citizen parents” as dicta.
The Court then compares the facts of the petitioner’s birth against the definition of “natural born citizen” that it determined to be Constitutionally and historically correct, and concluded that, since the petitioner was born in the US to parents who were US citizens at the time of her birth, she was in fact a “natural born citizen” and so also necessarily a citizen of the United States. That’s why there was no need to consider whether any alternative definitions or theories of citizenship could be used to assign citizenship. The Court saw no need to concern itself with citizenship acquired by naturalization, nor with any other classes or types of citizenship based on any other theories, “natural law” and/or English common law definitions or other Constitutional clauses, such as the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. Therefore, they exercised proper judicial restraint and left those questions undecided.
Remember that, per Ogilvie, if the Court uses any of the quoted conclusions above as “independent grounds” for any of its precedentialholdings, then these conclusions are also precedential holdings—and that that rule is transitive: any conclusion or decision used as “independent grounds” for a later holding is itself a holding, recursively back to ever earlier decisions and conclusions.
The Supreme Court itself held that its definition of “Natural Born Citizen” in Minor was a holding:
LOCKWOOD, EX PARTE, 154 U.S. 116 (1894):
In Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, this court held [So it was not dicta] that the word ‘citizen’ is often used to convey the idea of membership in a nation, and, in that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution as since; but that the right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, and that amendment did not add to these privileges and immunities. Hence, that a provision in a state constitution which confined the right of voting to male citizons of the United States was no violation of the federal constitution.
Note also that, since the citizenship issue in Minor was decided by defining “natural born citizen” based on the text of Article II, section 1, but the citizenship issue in Wong Kim Ark was decided based on the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, the two decisions do not conflict with each other. Therefore, Wong Kim Ark does not supersede Minor.
It is worth noting that, had the petitioner in Wong Kim Ark been a “natural born citizen,” failure to simply use the precedent established in Minor to rule that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen would have been a failure to abide by judicial restraint. The fact that the Wong Kim Ark Court, unlike the Minor Court, decided that it was necessary to decide the citizenship issue using the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, instead of using the “natural born citizen” clause, demonstrates that a person who satisfies the 14th Amendment’s qualifications for citizenship does not necessarily qualify as a “natural born citizen.” The only reason to make a “first instance” interpretation of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment would be because the question could not be settled using any existing precedent, such as the one in Minor.
The settled law of the land is that the US President must be a natural born citizen, and that to be a natural born citizen, you must have been born in the United States to parents both of whom were US citizens when you were born.
You may disagree with the goal of the Constitutional Convention, and/or with the means they chose to achieve it. But it’s not a technicality, not an anachronism no longer relevant in modern times, nor is it racist. Especially in modern times, it enables persons of any race or ethnic heritage to become President. And it’s what the Constitution requires.
You may also disagree with binding precedent regarding the meaning of “natural born citizen” as established in Minor. But in our system, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it, are the “supreme law of the land.” And if one faction gets to disregard the Constitution and/or the Supreme Court because they disagree, then that sets a precedent where all other factions can do the same. And get away with it. Is that really what you want? foreigner,b, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution as since; but that the right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, and that amendment did not add to these privileges and immunities. Hence, that a provision in a state constitution which confined the right of voting to male citizons of the United States was no violation of the federal constitution.