Posted on 04/21/2010 8:28:03 PM PDT by MrChips
OK, so I have read a little, listened a little, and figured that the question of Obama's citizenship and birth would never be answered, so why dive into it. But just now, I listened to Anderson Cooper on CNN (I know, I know, why am I watching PRAVDA?) blabber on and on in a very assertive, denunciatory tone to someone from Arizona over that state's recent passage of a bill requiring presidential candidates to prove their citizenship. Cooper went on ad nauseum about how stupid anyone is who questions Obama, how the birth certificate has been PROVEN to be authentic, that the matter should be settled. But the adamancy in his voice bothered me. Why is he so exercised about it if that is really true? He'd be calm, or so I said to myself. Anyway, anybody else watch this?
There is good reason for this. Justice Gray [you can tell from his writing] desperately wanted to declare Ark NBC. To that end, he bastardized, exaggerated, and even lied about the meaning of some of the citations in the opinion [Calvin's Case, Dicey, Blackstone, etc.] So, why didn't he do it [declare Ark NBC]?
There is only one possible explanation - he WOULD NOT have gotten a majority on the Court if he had insisted that Ark was NBC. They were willing to go along with Ark being a citizen under the 14th Amendment [which, he clearly was] - but NOT NBC ...
In lawyer-speak, they call it "splitting the baby". Ark got half a loaf - but it was better than none ...
So his 50 percent and below approval numbers are a result of this political mileage??
I have (not) yet, however, found one single person who can explain Obamie’s refusal to show a REAL birth certificate.
Edit complete.
In your hypothetical, are presuming that the AZ Secretary of State will discover - without equivocation - that Obama was born someplace outside the US?
Or, are you thinking that the Supreme Court in finally settling the definition of "natural-born" once and for all, will define it in such a way that it will preclude Obama from eligibility irrespective of actual birth place?
For my own $.02 - I think if the AZ SoS does somehow discover Obama was born someplace outside of the US, there's still a remote possibility that the Supremes could craft a definition of natural-born that would include birth on foreign soil. That's unlikely. But, it's also unlikely that the Supremes would create for themselves the authority to actually remove the President. I'm guessing that they,d leave it to Congress to impeach and convict Obama of fraud, and just craft a decision that would allow AZ to keep him off the ballot. That is assuming, of course, that they'd hear the case in the first place, and not pass for justiciability reasons. Whatever would happen, I don't think it a stretch to call their decision the most important decision since Marbury.
Assuming Obama was born in the US, I doubt that this Supreme Court would craft a definition of "natural-born" that strays very far from Ark in it's definition of citizen at birth. I suspect - as an attorney and avid court watcher - that this court would define natural-born solely based on the principle of jus soli. The odds of them finding that a child has to be born to two citizen parents and on US soil very, very slim.
Compared to whom? Uncle Joe Stalin? Karl Marx? Mao? Fidel?
I doubt that the S Ct would kick Obama out of office based on a reading that Obama’s dad couldn’t have been Kenyan. That’s all assuming that Obama turns in a good birth certificate that proves he was born in the US.
You are granting Obama the right to amend the Constitution you have sworn to protect? Or, are you granting that right to the Electoral College? Forgive me, but that sounds like the position of an SA Brownshirt, not an honorable member of the US Army.
That is the only part of what you posted that is relevant to a specific determination of citizenship status. It supports what I posted before. There final decision, based on definitions of "natural born citizenship," established in Minor v. Happersett, was that someone born of foreign citizens on U.S. soil was "native-born," as opposed to the classification of "natural-born."
I don't see how anyone can say that SCOTUS has not definitively ruled on the issue. They weren't trying to say the subjects of either case was natural-born but in the process they did define it.
And in the process set a SCOTUS precedent that someone born to non-citizen parents is not “natural-born.”
Well, if this Arizona thing passes, it’ll be much easier for Republicans.
They can just say “well I haven’t given much thought to it. Certainly, when he turns in his birth certificate to Arizona, there won’t be any question at all. So it’s not something that I really even have to think about. You know, with this new Arizona law, the penalties for falsifying a document are so strict, life in prison, that I really really doubt that Obama would risk life in prison. I’m confident that if Obama appears on the Arizona ballot, he’s qualified.”
I have read a lot about this stuff, which has been around since 2008 at the latest. But I really haven’t completely mastered it.
What about the age of Obama’s mother? Often that’s discussed in these arguments.
Yes, both Wong and Minor used this defintion of natural born citizen: "all children, born in a country of parents who were its citizens." The modern case, Ankeny v. Daniels, acknowledges that Wong Kim Ark did not declare its plaintiff to be a natural born citizen.
Because the Court has only discussed the issue in dicta. Natural-born has never been part of a Supreme Court decision's central holding therefor precedent (and stare decisis) isn't established. Dicta can be used for lower courts and the Supreme Court as persuasive precedent, but not binding precedent. So, they can weight it, but they're not bound by it.
If you want a better, more detailed explanation, an Illinois law professor, and one of the foremost authorities on semantic originalism, Lawrence B. Solum, wrote a piece that appeared in the Michigan Law Review several years ago. It can be found searching google with those parameters.
You are saying that 0bummer has been playing a grade school level game of gotcha with every citizen of the U.S. in order to make Republicans look foolish. Then, after more than a year in office, he is going to admit to playing the entire electorate like little children and his base and the media will just laugh and say "how cute!"
That's your theory? You don't think anyone on the left will stop and say "Hey, that's something a ten year old would do. What's up with that?"
His mother's age is only material if he was born outside the country. If he was born in the states, he's a citizen irrespective of his mother's age, and I suspect that if the court were to define NBC, they'd hold that his US birth also makes him an NBC - but, that's just a guess. However, his mother's age wouldn't be relevant.
If Obama was born outside the US, his mother's age is germane. In fact, it's possible because of her at the time of birth, he may in fact not be a citizen (to say nothing of NBC) because of the US law at the time of his birth. Sounds crazy, but it's true. Of course, him being born someplace other than HI is a big "if".
Now, for someone to figure out how to get standing in any court.
“That is the weakest theory I’ve ever heard.”
I agree 100 percent.
What advantage is to Obambie to look like a child by bringing out a birth certificate so long after the uproar?
Obama would have had to think up that scam before even seeking the nomination, and for what reason?
I contend that he does not have a birth certificate.
He could have been born on the street, or in a crack house, or that it was a home birth.
The home birth scam would have gotten him off the hook, but it is too late for that now.
The other arguments about who his parents were, are nothing nothing but noise.
“If you read Wong Kim Ark closely, it acknowledges that the children of aliens were considered natural born subjects...”
No.
U.S. citizens aren’t subjects to any monarch and English Common Law was not the actual basis for the U.S. Constitution.
In a recent Illinois Public Law & Legal Theory written by Professor Lawrence B Solum of the U of IL, College of Law, Chicago, Solum further explains why the English common law definition of ‘natural born subject was not the definition adopted by the Framers for the Sovereign citizens of the United States of America.
[Blackstone Commentaries (1765): When I say, that an alien is one who is born out of the king’s dominions, or allegiance, this also must be understood with some restrictions. The common law indeed stood absolutely so; with only a very few exceptions: so that a particular act of parliament became necessary after the restoration, for the naturalization of children of his majesty’s English subjects, born in foreign countries during the late troubles. And this maxim of the law proceeded upon a general principle, that every man owes natural allegiance where he is born, and cannot owe two such allegiances, or serve two masters, at once. Yet the children of the king’s ambassadors born abroad were always held to be natural subjects: for as the father, though in a foreign country, owes not even a local allegiance to the prince to whom he is sent; so, with regard to the son also, he was held (by a kind of postliminium) to be born under the king of England’s allegiance, represented by his father, the ambassador. To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. III. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband’s consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants. But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception;...]
[F.E. Edwards, Natural Born British Subjects at Common Law, 14 Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation 314 (1914): The pro- position that British Protectorates, and consequently any less interest of the Crown, should be excluded from our definition of the King’s protection, is supported by Sir William Anson, who declares that birth within such a region is not sufficient to found a claim for British natural-born status. The real test of whether a given territory is part of the British Dominions is that it must have passed openly, completely, and unequivocally into the possession of the Crown.]
[Solum: If the American conception of “natural born citizen” were equivalent to the English notion of a “natural born subject,” then it could be argued that only persons born on American soil to American parents would have qualified. This might lead to the conclusion that McCain would not be a constitutional natural-born citizen, because the Panama Canal Zone was not the sovereign territory of the United States, but was instead merely subject to its administrative control.
The language of the Constitution recognizes a distinction between the terms “citizen” and “subject”. For example, in Article III Section 2, which confers “judicial power” on the federal courts, “citizens” of the several states are differentiated from “citizens” or “subjects” of foreign states—corresponding to the distinction between diversity and alienage jurisdiction. In the framing era, these two terms reflected two distinct theories of the relationship between individual members of a political community and the state.
In feudal or monarchical constitutional theory, individuals were the subjects of a monarch or sovereign, but the republican constitutional theory of the revolutionary and post revolutionary period conceived of the individual as a citizen and assigned sovereignty to the people.
The distinction between citizens and subjects is reflected in Chief Justice John Jay’s opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia, the first great constitutional case decided after the ratification of the Constitution of 1789:
[T]he sovereignty of the nation is in the people of the nation, and the residuary sovereignty of each State in the people of each State…
[A]t the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects…]
As you can see, in England there are two very distinct meanings of ’natural born’ subject. In one hand there is the broader view & in the other there is the view of the laws of nations. What the liberal progressive constitutionalists use is the broader view and thus disregard the fact that at some point, even England used the law of nations. The Framers also knew of Englands use of the law of nations and were very aware of its importance when establishing a new nation. It has also been proven that the Law of Nations was in the hands of the Framers at the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
And as pointed out above, please do not come back with the same old lame references to Blackstone & English common law, we know for a fact from the very 1st SCOTUS Justice Washington appointed, a Justice who was only 2nd to Madison in the drafting of the Constitution that the definition for US citizens was not derived from English common law, but on the law of Nations which is the law of nature:
“The law of nature, when applied to states and political societies, receives a new name, that of the law of nations. This law, important in all states, is of peculiar importance in free ones. The States of America are certainly entitled to this dignified appellation…But if the knowledge of the law of nations is greatly useful to those who appoint, it surely must be highly necessary to those who are appointed…As Puffendorff thought that the law of nature and the law of nations were precisely the same, he has not, in his book on these subjects treated of the law of nations separately; but has every where joined it with the law of nature, properly called so…the law of nature is applied to individuals; the law of nations is applied to states.”
The logical conclusion is that there is something terribly wrong with his birth documents.
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