(1) Is that, indeed, the law?
(2)If yes, then is there any controversy at all about the relative citizenships of Obama's parents?
no.. I was quoting someone else. When Heritage.org and Mark Levin get heated over this issue it's time to listen. There are more Constitutional scholars on birther threads than walking the halls of the Supreme Court. These guys will argue preConstitutional British common law because of the Founding Fathers' "intent" and they expect people to listen to them.
Unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise, there are only 2 types of citizens. Those who were not born citizens but earned citizenship sometime after birth (naturalized) and those born with citizenship whether here to foreign parents or abroad to US parents. If you gained citizenship at birth you are a natural born citizen and all this crazy talk otherwise is nothing but wasted bandwidth.
Maybe someone already chimed in, but if you check rxsid’s comments, he posts often on this topic and has some good summaries that explain this clearly. Maybe he’ll post it on this thread.
The very short version is that the men who wrote the Constitution, and educated people in general, knew the accepted meaning of natural born citizen to mean one born on the soil, to parents who were themselves citizen. It’s like the word “arms” in the Constitution - everyone knew what “arms” meant, so there was no need of a definition or court decision.
Courtesy ping to rxsid.
Some people on FR just haven’t gotten up to speed yet, and there are a fair number of trolls about this issue, quite a few have gotten banned. There are freepers who have done incredible research on this and now it’s getting a lot more traction and notice.
A Natural Born Citizen is born in the United States to citizen parents.
Both parent’s must be citizens. Parents citizenship can be: naturalized, by-statute, or native born.
Natural Born Citizenship is not defined by legal statutes because it is NOT a form of citizenship. It’s only purpose is as an eligibility requirement, per Article II, for the U.S.Presidency.
All citizens have equal rights. Civil rights statutes don’t apply in the case of Natural Born Citizenship, as no one has the right to be President.
The term ‘Natural Born Citizen’ was derived from “Law of Nations”:
http://i477.photobucket.com/albums/rr131/stevesharp2918/VattelsNBC-LawofNations-citizenS.jpg
This is where the term originally came from.
The author’s credentials:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerich_de_Vattel
