I like you! You are 75%ish wrong, but I like you! You don’t just post pictures and fling poop like some of the Birther Chimps on this thread. You put your thoughts into English, and lay them out for a good bout of intelligent discourse. So, I like you! You will be a worthy adversary.
Now, lets take your points. There is nothing wrong with your “original intent” argument. In fact, if you will read Wong a few times, you will realize that “original intent” was exactly what the Wong Court was trying to figure out. That is why they went into all that analysis.
And, remember, a goodly number of the Founding fathers were LAWYERS. You are not wrong to think that they feared “foreign influence”. They did. But the legal point is, what is a natural born citizen. And to those LAWYERS, well groomed in ENGLISH LAW, those words had a meaning. The Wong Court investigated the law, extant at the time of the framing, to determine what that meaning was.
LO AND BEHOLD! There was a real long history of “natural born” sitting right out there and just waiting to be mined. So, the Wong Court did. If you need a link, I will give you one, but the Wong Court wrote a LENGTHY analysis of this and cited numerous sources. The Wong Court even considered the law of nations.
And, as a result, they come up with “natural born” meaning “born inside the country”. They even provided the exceptions, none of which apply to us in the Obama case. The Wong Court did not just pluck the concept out of thin air. Nor were they the first court to determine this, nor are they the last. I provided you, I think, a recent case which arrived at the same determination. Wong is not radical, activist law by any stretch of the imagination.
I think where you are going astray, logically speaking, is that you want “original intent” but you don’t like the way that “original intent” gets determined. You seem to want to impute YOUR idea of original intent, and walk away satisfied, while ignoring the fact that there is a group of people we have paid handsomely over the years to decide this exact thing. We call them “judges.” The really good ones, we call “Supreme Court Judges.” The system has worked pretty well over the years.
You make cogent arguments, with sources, about what YOU think “natural born” means, but with no offense intended, it don’t work that way. Here, in the United States, we have a system of building these concepts through the legal system. The Founders wanted a stable legal system based upon stare decisis, or precedental law. Courts are the way we accomplish this, and the Supreme Court is the biggest one in the whole dang country.
Your desire to just sorta skip over them, and go straight to what YOU think “natural born” means is neither workable nor Constitutional. You are free to make your arguments as to what you think “natural Born” means, but if you love the Constitution, then you should respect the system the Founders established.
Wong is the staring point. Now you wish to delve into allegiance, and Wong does, FWIW, but do you think it possible for a court to READ A CANDIDATE’S MIND? Should Obama be treated differently than another person born with say, a Canadian father? Should a court inquire into one’s political leanings in deciding these things?
Well dang if the Founders didn’t think of that too! They gave us ELECTIONS, and a FREE PRESS. You see, what you want the Court to do, isn’t their responsibility beyond defining a “natural born citizen.” It is OUR responsibility to decide if a candidate is is “pro America” enough. We can vote for him or not.
YOUR system could result in a panel of 9 Sara Sotomeyers deciding that Sarah Palin is too CHRISTIAN to be free of that influence. See where this is headed? You are advocating for a system where the Supreme Court does our job for us. That ain’t American. That ain’t Constitutional.
parsy, who says once again, thanks for not being a chimpanzee like some of the others on this thread