Posted on 12/03/2008 11:43:31 PM PST by BP2
YES to the the former, and NO to the latter.
You appear to be a person who has a good deal of familiarity with the law, and constitutional rulings. I'll grant that you may hold an advantage over me in that regard. That's ok.
I'm making my comments and expressing my viewpoint based on my admittedly elementary understanding of what case law, and constitutional passages which I've become familiar with.
I'm not a lawyer, but I am a citizen patriot. At the end of the day, I side with our Constitution, and the intent of our Founders, who were brilliant and successful men of great education. They were also men of common sense, deeply religious, and of great vision. Above all, they wrote that common sense and their deeply held beliefs into our Founding Document. That is why the US Constitution outshines every other article of founding on the planet, and why America is the most successful nation in world history.
We can argue the minutiae of law all you want, but my view is that if the law does not comport with the original intent of the Founders, or offends The People's native sense of what is American, then that law should be abolished.
It is wrong to grant a person full US citizenship, when the circumstance of their birth was achieved through illegal means, in an overt attempt by their parents to take what is not rightfully theirs.
I don't care what "the law" has to say about it. That "law" is immoral, it violates the spirit of the Constitution, and none of us should support it.
so then no president born in the USA of immigrant parents could ever have been a citizen.
yes that is a new twist.
I have never heard that one before, all it required was you be born in the USA. Not naturalized.
I am just wondering if Obama was adopted somehow and what we are debating is fictional natural born citizen via an adoption altered (legally) birth certificate.
Where do you get your definition of natural born from? The constitution never defines the term, and SCOTUS has never ruled on it.
Back in 1976, when the “Freedom Train” was wending its way around the country, my wife went aboard to see the exhibits. She was given the opportunity to buy an envelope containing photocopies of 1) The Unanimous Declaration, 2) the Constitution, 3) the Bill of Rights and 4) the original handwriten version of the Gettysburg Address. Each of them is/was handwritten. The first three are meticulously written out in careful script while the last was scrawled out in Lincoln’s typical poor handwriting.
I will not swear that my photocopy of the Constitution has not been tampered with because I cannot know that, but there is a comma right where we are talking about. Was it there when the document was adopted? I don’t know. I do know that (lacking photcopy machines) subsequent copies of the original were themselves carefully written out in longhand by people who were good at such things. I don’t know how many copies were made nor do I know that all copies either did or did not have that damned comma.
Granted, a comma there can have an effect on the meaning of the sentence. For us to know one way or another we’d have to look - not at a copy of a copy of a c.... (you get the idea) but at the original. Someone who lives near the National Archives might be able to decide this but lacking that I think we’re just going to have to disagree for now.
But only if the parent(s) are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Aliens and illegal aliens are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They are subject to the jujrisdiction of the governnent of their own country.
Sorry, Charlie. No anchor babies. No Obammy babies either.
Really? So they can commit crimes on US soil and US law has no jurisdiction over them?
I’m not disagreeing. I was referring to a printed Constitution published in 1935 in which the comma does not appear. Why would it be in the original but not in published versions since then? I don’t know what the history of publishing the Constitution is, and why the printer would publish it without the comma. It would interesting to see if, when, and why it was published with or without a comma. The sentence doesn’t make sense with the comma inserted, and perhaps if it occurs in the original, it was omitted at some point for grammatical clarity.
are you addressing comment #301? Your response does not make sense..
Apparently, there is great contention over this description of Natural Born Citizen, even amongst the members here. I've taken a lot of shots from lawyerly folks over positing this lately.
My understanding is that the Founders' original intent was that no President should have their loyalty divided between America and another nation. The surest way to ensure that, was to plainly state in our Constitution that a President must be a Natural Born Citizen.
The problem is that they failed to define this in the Constitution. I'm sure that at the time of its writing, the Framers felt no need to precisely define such ordinary and plain language. In the parlance of the time, the phrase would have conveyed their meaning and intent with no mis-understanding.
In my opinion, it's the lawyers who have subverted the Founders' original intent by torturing the language of the Constitution to force meanings from it that were never intended.
If this is allowed to continue, then there isn't much point in retaining the Constitution at all, as the basis upon which all US law resides. We might as well re-incorporate the Republic in whatever form the mob wants, and hope for the best.
Naturally, I don't subscribe to that option. It's why I hope that our Supreme Court will come down with a ruling soon that bolsters and clarifies the original intent of the Framers.
As I said earlier, copies were made by hand by people who could make a fortune these days as forgers. Just because a person could faithfully copy an important document doesn’t mean he was good at punctuation too. I believe there were at least thirteen first generation copies made - one for each state - and no one knows how many more were made from those copies. Every one of those required someone with a steady hand and a good sense of what he was doing. I’m sure some of those copiers were better than others and made mistakes. Heck, my supposed photocopy might actually be from one of those copies of copies.
The age of Obama's mother only matters if Little Barack was born overseas. If this case conceeds that he was born in Hawaii, then her age is meaningless.
What's the status of legal aliens who plan on becoming a citizen but have not yet taken the oath?
In either case, are one or the other, or both, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States yet?
I found another copy I have which is an official publication of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution and it DOES have the comma between “States, at.” So what does this mean?
The phrase “at the time of the adoption of this Constitution” has to refer to something, either to “natural born Citizen” or “Citizen of the United States” or both. It makes the most sense, both historically and grammatically, that it would refer to “Citizen of the United States” since it follows that phrase directly and seems to be the intent of the founders.
At least we are all pulling out our Constitutions and looking at them! Which is a good thing. Thanks for pointing that out in the interest of accuracy, which is what I was interested in.
Right, you are.
I may have to step back from the legal arguments. There's just too much minute detail that gets overlooked in the commentary, which of course leads to more argument. Then, there's everyone chiming in with basic questions, etc.
I'm much more concerned with the moral implications of this issue than I am with the exact wording of various statutes.
In fact, it's my belief that the Framers held morality as a superior force, above the laws of men, and did their very best to encode that into our Constitution. It's what gives the US Constitution its immense power, and is what has allowed us to become the most successful nation in world history.
When lawyers are fighting each other over the precise meanings of words, you need an entity like the Supreme Court to step in with wisdom and deep deliberation to settle the matter.
What do they use as their basis for judgment, and how do they determine the meaning of that signature document? I suggest that they do not approach it from a lawyer's point of view, but from that of the Framers.
That reminds me of the story about the printer who set July 4, 1776 into history when it was actually supposed to be July 2!
If he, in fact, did so. The whole passport story stems from the claim that U.S. citizens were forbidden from traveling to Pakistan in 1981 and so Obama must have travelled on an Indonesian passport. In the first place that wasn't so, citizens may have been warned not to travel there but there is no evidence supporting the claim that they were forbidden to travel there. In fact during the first half of 1981 the U.S. was announcing multi-billion dollar aid packages for Pakistan and talking about resuming delivery of F-16's. Secondly, Obama left Indonesia when he was 10 and never lived there again. How and where did he get an Indonesian passport? Finally, dual citizenship is not against the law, so even if Obama had a foreign passport it would not count as an expatriating act. He would have had to formally swear allegiance to Indonesia and disavow any further loyalty to the U.S. Since he was in school at the time that's highly unlikely.
Punctuation conventions change over time, and there are different styles of punctuation that are observed even today. We are in a more "when in doubt, leave it out" mode than in the past. I am wondering if that is why it was taken out of my copy on the wall, because it appears to be something that may have been used in a school, and perhaps they "corrected" the punctuation. Or it may have simply been a mistake, or the printer thought it was a mistake and "fixed" it?
So if they rob a bank or shoot someone we can't arrest them?
Nothing personal, but statements like this one are deeply troubling to me, and highly irritating, because they suggest that the high court is simply a group of dis-interested scholars in darkened chambers, wholly divested of any sense of import over matters of national importance that may come their way, and who only view these momentous cases in a purely analytical light.
I don't think that that's the case. The high court cleared their docket in 2000 to rapidly address the ballot re-counts in Florida. It was a national crisis, and the high court responded with due diligence, in a timely fashion.
This case is likewise, if not more so. The obvious questions which have arisen concerning Mr. Obama's citizenship are real, and threaten to cause great unrest in the body politic, if they are not satisfactorily put to rest, one way or another.
The Supreme Court Justices know this, and I trust that they will move with high regard for the critical importance and urgency it deserves. To do otherwise will invite chaos at every level.
I do believe that IF the SCOTUS was to examine the facts and documents (i.e. vault BC) they would be able to make an informed decision.
I believe that the SC, or Congress, will HAVE to examine Mr. Obama's original birth certificate, as well as any other supporting documentation to put this thing to rest. Again - it will either be fully disclosed and decided to the satisfaction of the American people, or it will never die.
It's either put to rest fully, and I mean with complete disclosure of Obama's hidden past, or the doubts about him will grow into an untenable situation of mistrust and illegitimacy in the mind of the public, and even among members of our gov't and military.
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