“I am still digesting your other points but you are just a little premature to imply that the definition of NBC has been settled by Ankeny.”
The point is any other court, state or Federal, will rule the same way. If you dont get it, you either havent read or havent understood the courts reasoning, which is clear, simple and based on precedent. Citizen at time of birth is what ‘natural-born citizen’ means, and when you combine that with Wong Kim ark, you get a clear and simple result. “Third, the decision arguably misapplies Wong Kim Ark” - wrong, the root of the NBC argument is a disagreement WITH Wong Kim Ark’s implications. Attempts to use semantics or misreadings of other court rulings , like Happersett, will fail in front of any real judge who looks at the whole law and not just some snippets that are convenient for birthers. Arguing the point is arguing against 100+ year old precedents and IMHO is fruitless as courts will not agree.
Obama was not the first President with a foreigner for a Dad.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2703612/posts
The full audio for the interview is available via the links I shared. The transcript follows the audio.
My good FRiend, as a practicing attorney, I stand before real world judges quite often, and while some of them (perhaps those who did not ascend to the bench on merit or who did not make Law Review) can be unduly affected by dicta, most judges I work with are quite competent and thus principally concerned with holdings, i.e., that group of magic words that tells you what the court’s actual decision is in the specific fact pattern before the court on that particular day.
In the case of Wong Kim Ark (WKA hereinafter), we find the court, after spending precious ink on it’s general musings over the question of NBC, finally returns to earth with a very narrow holding that has absolutely no bearing on whether someone in Obama’s specific set of facts constitutes an NBC. The money quote is here:
“The evident intention, and the necessary effect, of the submission of this case to the decision of the court upon the facts agreed by the parties were to present for determination the single question stated at the beginning of this opinion, namely, whether a child born in the United States, of parent of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States. For the reasons above stated, this court is of opinion that the question must be answered in the affirmative.”
As you can see, the actual holding only addresses generic citizenship and the minimal requirements of parental citizenship for entering that class. It does not address how one enters the specialized subclass of “natural born.”
Therefore, while some future SCOTUS may yet decide those details, and may well draw from the WKA dicta whatever it sees fit to that end, there is nothing to overturn. The holding just doesn’t go there. Sorry.
As for Arthur Chester, there is more than one side to that story. In fact, I find it disconcerting that the Ankeny court could miss such easily accessible information. Indeed, Chester’s intriguing story makes the case that openly declaring the mixed citizenship of one’s parents was a positive hazard to presidential aspirations. The reason his defective parentage was held to be a rumor is that he purposefully destroyed evidence of his father’s heritage, so that it could never be more than a rumor. However, his deceit was posthumously exposed by naturalization records revealing that his father’s naturalization came many years after Arthur’s birth. You may not like the source, but the following makes for compelling reading, and you should, as an apologist for anti-birtherism, at least be aware of the material:
So you see, in the only potential precedent case that matches Obama’s, the solution of the candidate was obfuscation, the destroying or hiding of records. In that sense, the precedent does match the new situation. However, it is truly doubtful that any sober judge, looking at the matter dispassionately, would find that precedent helpful to Obama’s case.