So what are your qualifications to unequivocally state this? Who are you? You're posting under an anonymous name on FR! Why should anybody value your opinion over that of a man who is known to be a lawyer?
That's a good and legitimate question.
The ONLY reason for anybody to value my opinion - OR Donofrio's - is the quality of the information they receive from either source.
Valuing Donofrio's opinion simply because he's passed a bar exam and is working as a lawyer is not really a good reason.
Or do you not know that not all lawyers are good at what they do, and not all lawyers are honest in what they say?
Donofrio's authority is based on the fact that he's passed a bar exam somewhere, and hung out a shingle as a lawyer.
Any authority I have comes from the fact that I've done a significant amount of research for myself, I've done a significant amount of analysis, I've critiqued Donofrio's statements, and no one, apparently, can really find any good fault with my critiques.
If you find that I am consistently honest in what I say, and careful in my reasoning, and am therefore generally a source of reliable information, then that might lead you suspect that what I'm saying may very well be correct.
But if you want to have the best shot at ferreting out the truth (all the more so since you haven't established my reliability in your own mind, but as a good general policy even when you have), don't take my word for it, or Donofrio's.
Go through the process I outlined in the other thread to someone else:
1) Read the actual court cases for yourself. See what they actually say. Do so without reference to writings by Donofrio, Apuzzo, etc. to interpret them for you and tell you what they supposedly mean.
You can start with the four Supreme Court cases that supposedly define natural born citizen as being a child born on US soil of two US citizen parents.
Read the entire text of all four cases, and see if you can find any explicit statement in the majority opinion of any one of the four that says:
"A natural born citizen is a child born on US soil of two US citizen parents."
Or, "Persons born on US soil are not natural born citizens unless both parents are US citizens at the time of birth."
Or, "The Founding Fathers relied upon Vattel for the meaning of 'natural born citizen,' and not upon English common law."
See if you can find any one of the above. And don't let the assumption that you're not going to, stop you from looking. Read all of the majority opinions carefully, and analyze what the courts actually said.
2) Answer the question that I asked you in the other thread. Think long and hard and see if you can really come up with an answer.
3) Work your way through my reasoning on Minor v. Happersett - not for the purpose of trying to prove me wrong, but for the purpose of understanding what I said, asking yourself whether it makes sense, and seeing whether it seems to match what Minor v. Happersett actually says.
4) Read through the entire majority opinion in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, very carefully, taking notes as you go along, of what Justice Gray actually says - not what you or Leo Donofrio want him to say.
5) Spend at least 3 or 4 hours doing outside research into historical writings regarding the meaning of "natural born citizen." And by "outside," I'm talking about outside of Donofrio's and Apuzzo's blogs, although you can certainly include those as well. There's plenty of material on the internet.
6) Go through Donofrio's post on Minor v. Happersett setting a binding precedent, very carefully and logically. See what logical fallacies you can pinpoint.
Actually... sigh... I didn’t really want to do this, because - as I just said - I do prefer more to deal in the arguments themselves than in the personals.
But I just sent a freepmail to Las Vegas Ron advising him of a couple of things about Leo Donofrio that I felt he should be aware of before taking his opinions as gospel.
And the information is all public. It’s been written, put out there and promoted by Donofrio himself, and in fact has been published here on FR before.
And I realized that LVR isn’t necessarily going to have a quick reference to what I’m talking about.
And then I thought, you know, it’s not just LVR. It’s relevant that anybody knows what Donofrio states about himself before they take his writings too seriously.
For that reason, I am posting Leo Donofrio’s statements about himself in the following thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2741006/posts
A failed lawyer, that's how Donofrio described himself. And a drug addict, a stalker, a professional poker player and the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, who "speaks with a mandate from Heaven" and channels Paul McCartney from the music of the Stone Roses.
Oh, and you might also want to google "appeal to authority".