Posted on 12/28/2012 9:07:56 PM PST by NKP_Vet
Now I understand! For years, many veterans and active military have been alarmed about the idiocy of the changes in battlefield aeromedical evacuation known as Dust Off. For reasons having nothing to do with patient care, Dust Off has been removed from the control of the professionals, the medics, and put under the control of amateurs, aviation staff officers, or ASOs. This is the first such change since the Civil War.
I document the unparalleled excellence of Dust Off, and the effects of the changes, in my book, “Dead Men Flying.” Needless to say, it was the most outstanding battlefield operating system of that war – some one million souls saved and unprecedented survival rates. No warrior of Vietnam is more revered than the Dust Off crews.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
McCain’s Father was an American naval officer, as well as being an American citizen and had an American Mother. If you insist that he was therefore, becquse of his birth in Panama where his father was stationed, insist on saying his is not a natural-born American, you offer a reduction ad Absurdum to the other side. For the purpose of using the word was to debar a foreign prince from assuming this novel office. This was to avoid any suggestion of monarchy, and to rule out any non-American alternatives, such as Prince Henry of Prussia.
You referenced the Resolution, not testimony in committee.
As has been pointed out many times, there are two and only two ways of acquiring American citizenship: by birth and by naturalization. Those who acquire it by birth are natural born as citizens.
I realize you disagree, but imo you are wrong.
Ahh Sherman, I thought Obots had abandoned ship, but vaguely recall your name from the past. Your assertion, as has been pointed out dozens of times at FR, and twice in the Congressional Record by the principal author of the 14th Amendment, Ohio Congressman John Bingham, in which the Constitutional definition of a “native-born citizen of the US” was defined, is nonsense. Were it true, Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco, after the 14th Amendment, would have been a natural born citizen. The Supreme Court, citing Minor v. Happersett, in which “born on the soil to citizen parents” became postitive law, not just common-law, determined that Wong Kim was a citizen. There was no doubt, no weazelling, though the author of the decision probably knew his appointer, Chester Arthur, was ineligible, and spent many paragraphs of the Wong Kim decision writing a treatise on British Common Law, it had no bearing. He decided that Wong Kim was, like Obama, a “native-born citizen of the U.S.”, and not a natural born citizen. He quoted Minor so there could be no doubt.
You, of course, will say that was not true, so here are Bingham’s words from “The World”, the archives of the Congressional Record from 1866:
I find no fault with the introductory clause [S 61 Bill], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen….
I wonder why you bother? Is the Anita Dunn group still operating? Were you one of those paid to confuse the natives? If we had verifiable elections it still seems unlikely that enough citizens would be well enough informed to know or care about the Constitution. They accept what they are told, and that is probably true for more than just the 47 million on food stamps. Alinsky was certainly a brilliant propogandists. Why do you still worry about confusing people about our former foundation of laws? The courts are obviously so corrupt, and the legislature simply a minor irritant, with any congressperson who steps out of line removed from the more lucrative “pay-to-play” committees where what little power they have is diminished, and their compaign funds curtailed to force them out of office. Obama’s ineligibility is hardly an issue. He is a milquetoast Ortega being driven by banking interests and the Saudi Royal Family, masquerading between golf games as a socialist, but was never a Constitutional president.
And here I thought it was because the MOH was most often awarded posthumously.
Regards,
GtG
I believe that McCain's circumstance deserves an amendment. Many, at least twenty five, amendments have been tried and all failed to amend Article II Section 1, Cl 5. In fact in the first Congress there was a bill, signed by George Washington, making the children, born overseas, to US citizens into natural born citizens. But Washington signed the retraction of that law in 1795 and no bill has yet been created to change that. Some argue that the Supreme Court could change it, and wonder why they haven't acted. There is precedent, Minor v. Happersett, but I've been told that there is nothing to prevent a court from rejecting precedent and establishing a new interpretation. But thus far, they have not.
Washington's difficulty was probably one of separation of powers mixed with Article V governing amendments. Only the Supreme Court may interpret provisions of the Constitution, though I know of no case before 1790 in which that provision had been tested. Thus far, the court has used the common-law definition quoted by Chief Justice John Marshall, who cites Vattel’s Law of Nations as the most concise source.
Vattel did proffer his opinion that the foreign born children of military/government officials should be deemed natural born, but many of Vattel’s principles based upon The Enlightenment and natural law were not adopted by our framers, so there is no assumption that everything the Vattel said was assumed to be the intent of our framers.
Thinking about why there might hesitation about foreign born children of military citizens it isn't hard to see why our framers, very concerned with usurpation by someone with hidden allegiance for any other nation might have left out the Vattel extension to military families. Let us assume the military family had relatives in Britain, as almost everyone in the Colonies did. The mother may have died in childbirth and the child left to be raised by the grandparents in England. When the child is 18 he returns to live in the US and attends school. After 17 years in the US he is eligible to become President. Will he have the firmness of allegiance to the US to guide a fragile nation, which may face another war with England at any time? The Constitution was created to protect the sovereignty of individuals. There were many, some say almost half the population of The Colonies before 1776, who firmly believed in the need for a king.
I'm sure you can think of circumstances today where an Army Major, a Muslim and a psychiatrist, takes his Muslim wife on assignment to the Middle East. They have a child there and the child is left to be raised in Saudi Arabia for 15 or so years, returning to the US a “natural born citizen?” Would you trust the intentions of someone exposed to Islamic indoctrination for 15 years?
The law is what it is, even when political parties find it expedient to pretend Article II Section 1 has no relevance today. The current resident of the White House had his college education funded by the Saudi Family, and attended Mosques in Indonesia. We should have honored our Constitution, which, by the way, does not contain definitions by design, depending brilliantly upon the common-law and language familiar to its framers. That common law was repeated in about 40 supreme court cases, right up through 1939. There is no doubt.
That 1939 case made it clear that a young girl, Marie Elg, born in New York to naturalized citizen parents, taken to be raised in Scandinavia by her parents who repudiated their US citizenship, could not lose her natural born citizenship, and did return to live in the US after reaching majority, and could have run for the presidency. Natural born citizenship, the court opined, was granted by nature/God, and could not be denied by a congress of men.
The thought that went into defining citizenship was essential to the foundation of a nation based upon ideas, where leadership was not determined by blood lines. Thomas Paine observed that difference between England and the US, noting that in England the King must have been born to one parent who was an alien, and our President needed both to be citizens. Curiously, only natural born subjects of the British Commonwealth are eligible to be members of Parliament, where naturalized citizens can hold any office in the US Government besides the Presidency, with differing residency and age requirements for different jobs.
I think it boils down to the simply fact that the term is ambiguous. We have the law of the blood and the law of the land, all wrapped up in a Gordian knot.
RobbyS, how a term recited in over forty Supreme Court Cases, and used as precedent in Minor v. Happersett can be called ambiguous raises the question, “what does ambiguous mean?”
There was never any other definition. Only recently have individuals found the long accepted definition inconvenient. When the author of the naturalization amendment, the 14th, confirmed the Vattel definition, and the most important test case, Wong Kim Ark repeated the Vattel/Minor definition to make Wong Kim, like Obama, a naturalized citizen, naturalized at birth, but naturalized, how can there be ambiguity?
I say it is ambiguous because it was employed at first to fit a particular political situation and, I may add, as part of designing a wholly new office office to fit a particular man, Washington. Like much of the Constitution, it was intended as a negative. The United States would NOT be a monarchy but a republic, Congress would NOT be a Parliament, and the Senate and House would NOT be another House of Lord and Commons. There would be NO national Church. The head of state would NOT be a sacred figure and also head of a royal dynasty. This fit Washington like a glove, and no European prince at all. To fasten on “Natural” is a bit like fastening on 35, which had a basis is numerology AND, actually meant maturity in an age when men were old physically at fifty, even though many of them at age sixty were physically tougher than a man like GEORGE Romney.
Now that said, I take your point about worrying about foreign born Americans in an age when so many millions of Americans are born abroad. But having lived a Little America in germany for many, many years, and having associated with so many American military persons, I must say that there is no group more intensely patriotic, more republican than they. For them it is bone deep. I worry more about someone like our President with his detached, cosmopolitan attitude and his shallow connection. His is the attitude of an immigrant without the gratitude. Furthermore, it is attitude of our supposed “Meritocracy,” with whom he shared his school experience, so often scions of wealthy fathers —like another president I could name—who could NOT have made it on their own except through connections.
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