“I’m assuming you didn’t go to law school, otherwise you would’ve learned in the first week that treatises such as Vattel have no binding force whatsoever in our legal system.”
It’s futher ironic that these birthers are trying to convince of the unimportance of common law in our system, all the while peddling theories that could not even apply without a common-law interpretation.
Federal Courts have to rule based on the statutory law and the Constitution.
Nowhere in the constitution or Federal statutes are their claims to be found. They misinterpret a simple term of art ‘natural-born’ (a term meanign those who acquire citizenship at birth) to be something special or different from what it really is. That’s why they have to lean on an 18th century treatise written by a foreign source and with no legal binding authority on any US court.
Vattel is NOT part of our written law, and hence has no authority in the courts per se.
“Courts which originate in the common law possess a jurisdiction which must be regulated by their common law until some statute shall change their established principles, but courts which are created by written law and whose jurisdiction is defined by written law cannot transcend that jurisdiction. It is unnecessary to state the reasoning on which this opinion is founded, because it has been repeatedly given by this Court, and with the decisions heretofore rendered on this point no member of the bench has even for an instant been dissatisfied.” – Chief Justice Marshall, Ex Parte Bollman, 8 U.S. 75 (1807)
There is simply no reasoning with these people on this issue. First they say look to the plain meaning and then they say not to look at the plain meaning, but to reference an 18th cen treatise.
They also cannot cite to any official govt’t document such as a birth certificate or passport which draws a distinction between “natural born” and ‘born’ citizens of the USA.
Of course they cannot do so because there is no such distinction.
“The distinction between citizenship by birth and citizenship by naturalization is clearly marked in the provisions of the constitution, by which ‘no person, except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall be eligible to the office of president;’ and ‘the congress shall have power to establish an uniform rule of naturalization.’ Const. art. 2, § 1; art. 1, § 8. By the thirteenth amendment of the constitution slavery was prohibited. The main object of the opening sentence of the fourteenth amendment was to settle the question, upon which there had been a difference of opinion throughout the country and in this court, as to the citizenship of free negroes, ( Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393;) and to put it beyond doubt that all persons, white or black, and whether formerly slaves or not, born or naturalized in the United States, and owing no allegiance to any alien power, should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 73; Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 306.
This section contemplates two sources of citizenship, and two sources only: birth and naturalization.”
Elk v. Wilkins 112 U.S. 94, 101-102, 5 S.Ct. 41, 45 (U.S.1884)
There is a reason there is no case or procedure for a person born in the US to foreign nat’l parents who are here illegaly to be naturalized. The reason is because that person is a citizen at birth and doesn’t need to be naturalized.