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To: P-Marlowe
She will never be president.

I never said she would be President. The GOPe would like a few dozen candidates to split up the primary vote. Just add her to the list. Anyway, one need not meet the qualifications to be a candidate. For example, there is no need to be 35 before inauguration day.

Her only connection to her citizenship is the geographical location of her birth.

She was born in the United States. She was also born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Those are the only qualifications stated in the 14th Amendment to make one a citizen at birth.

Neither of her parents were citizens of the United States at the time of her birth.

14A: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." Where do you find the secret hidden codicil about the citizenship of the parents?

So she is a natural born citizen of India and as such is legally eligible to be Prime Minister of India.

Actually, she has no claim to citizenship in India pursuant to the laws of India. You just made that crap up.

If a citizen of India also holds a second citizenship which he or she does not revoke within six months after their eighteenth birthday, the claim to Indian citizenship is automatically terminated. Not that it matters with regard to United States citizenship. In India bestowed citizenship upon all persons born in the United States other than American tribal indians, it would not make American tribal indians the only ones eligible for President of the United States. Foreign citizenship laws are irrelevant.

The founders put that clause in the constitution to prevent any person with dual loyalty from becoming President.

The Founders founded the United States in 1776. The Framers wrote and proposed the Constitution in 1787. The People, as States, subsequently ratified the Constitution as written and gave force to the words. The intentions of the Framers, real or imagined, were neither submitted to, nor ratified by, the People. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 and would supersede any previous intentions inconsistent with the words of the Amendment.

President Chester Arthur was the son of an Irish citizen who was not naturalized American until more than a decade after Arthur became President. President Barack Obama's father was not an American citizen. Chester Arthur was Vice President as the son of an alien. Vice President Kamala Harris was born to two aliens.

Parentage is irrelevant to the citizenship of a child born within the territory and jurisdiction of the United States. In the 18th century and this century.

"A Matter of Interpretation," Federal Courts and the Law, by Antonin Scalia, 1997. This book contains an essay by Antonin Scalia and responses to that essay by professors Ronald Dworkin, Mary Ann Glendon, Laurence Tribe, and Gordon Wood. There is a final response by Antonin Scalia.

To demonstrate the breadth of legal agreement on this point, I quote from Laurence Tribe and Antonin Scalia.

Laurence Tribe, pp. 65-6

Let me begin with my principal area of agreement with Justice Scalia. Like him, I believe that when we ask what a legal text means — what it requires of us, what it permits us to do, and what it forbids — we ought not to be inquiring (except perhaps very peripherally) into the ideas, intentions, or expectations subjectively held by whatever particular persons were, as a historical matter, involved in drafting, promulgating, or ratifying the text in question. To be sure, those matters, when reliably ascertainable, might shed some light on otherwise ambiguous or perplexing words or phrases — by pointing us, as readers, toward the linguistic frame of reference within which the people to whom those words or phrases were addressed would have "translated" and thus understood them. But such thoughts and beliefs can never substitute for what was in fact enacted as law. Like Justice Scalia, I never cease to be amazed by the arguments of judges, lawyers, or others who proceed as though legal texts were little more than interesting documentary evidence of what some lawgiver had in mind. And, like the justice, I find little to commend the proposition that anyone ought, in any circumstances I can imagine, to feel legally bound to obey another's mere wish or thought, or legally bound to act in accord with another's mere hope or fear.

Antonin Scalia, responding to Dr. Tribe, p. 133

He is correct that we both regard as irrelevant the intentions of the drafters....

Conroy v. Aniskoff, 507 US 511, 519 (1993), Scalia, J., concurring

The greatest defect of legislative history is its illegitimacy.

We are governed by laws, not by the intentions of legislators. As the Court said in 1844: "The law as it passed is the will of the majority of both houses, and the only mode in which that will is spoken is in the act itself...." Aldridge v. Williams, 3 How. 9, 24 (emphasis added). But not the least of the defects of legislative history is its indeterminacy. If one were to search for an interpretive technique that, on the whole, was more likely to confuse than to clarify, one could hardly find a more promising candidate than legislative history. And the present case nicely proves that point.

Right now, like most of the rest of the Constitution, that clause has no teeth and has been interpreted into meaninglessness.

Your creative interpretation of the clear black letter text of the 14th Amendment is what is meaningless. The words are too clear to admit of any parental citizenship requirement. There are only two classes of citizen recognized in the United States — natural born citizens and naturalized citizens. Naturalization pertains only to alien born persons who become citizens at some time after birth by way of a legal process. Persons who acquire citizenship at birth are natural born citizens, to use the emphasis given by John Jay.

166 posted on 02/17/2023 7:13:19 PM PST by woodpusher
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 158 | View Replies ]


To: woodpusher
Great post.

Also, if Nikki Haley is asked to produce her long form birth certificate, she will do so within days, not years.

168 posted on 02/18/2023 2:41:48 PM PST by TChad (Progressives are in favor of removing healthy sex organs from children. Conservatives oppose this.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 166 | View Replies ]

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