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I’ve wasted a lot of time reading Wong Kim Ark. Haven’t gotten the whole thing done, but the citation that makes the jump to say that “under the allegiance” means the LOCATION of birth is from the Dred Scott decision. And that decision, as we know, did not grant that Negroes born in the US were “natural-born US citizens” - which would be the natural conclusion if natural-born citizenship was truly conferred ONLY by the place of birth. So something is decidedly screwy in all this.

There are so many contradictions and leaps between this decision and other decisions that it is hopeless to try to make sense of any of it.

For instance, this talks about the intention of the 14th Amendment to allow Blacks to be US citizens by virtue of their birth on US soil. They believed that it was unnecessary to specifically mention Blacks or other races/ethnicities because that was inherent in the word “person”. Little did they know that in 1973 the court would decide in Roe v Wade that the word “person” as used in the 14th Amendment doesn’t mean “biological person” but only “legal person” (that is, somebody who has Constitutional protection). Blacks were ruled in Dred Scott to not be legal persons, so if the 14th Amendment only applies to “legal persons”, as ruled in Roe v Wade, it never applied to Blacks - and still doesn’t, because no Constitutional amendment has ever specifically granted legal personhood to Blacks.

So none of the 14th Amendment applies to Blacks or any other biological person who is denied legal personhood, according to the SCOTUS in Roe v Wade. That means that even though citizens can’t be denied the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude (ala Fifteenth Amendment), the ability to even BE a citizen doesn’t apply to Blacks who are not considered “legal persons” according to the Dred Scott decision.

We can look at what was decided about citizenship in Wong Kim Ark and other earlier cases, but Roe v Wade overturned all that for Blacks because it changed the 14th Amendment’s definition of “person” back to the Dred Scott version - “legal personhood”, which specifically excluded Blacks according to Dred Scott.

So the whole thing is convoluted and makes absolutely no sense. Same thing applies with the whole issue of “under the jurisdiction”. According to Wong Kim Ark, it seems like every foreign terrorist who happens to be on US soil is “under US jurisdiction” and thus has all the same due process rights as anybody else, and their children would be “natural born citizens” based on the convoluted reasoning of Wong Kim Ark. So how can it be that due process for somebody “under US jurisdiction” is different than due process for an actual US citizen? Stuff like habeus corpus?

A Mexican citizen in the US, according to Wong Kim Ark, would have no immunities from US justice unless they were official ambassadors of the country, since they, like every citizen, are “under US jurisdiction” just by virtue of being here and having to follow US laws. And yet we’ve got the Mexican government claiming the US can’t execute capital punishment on a Mexican citizen who was sentenced to death for capital crimes - because as a MEXICAN CITIZEN he is NOT SUBJECT to US justice but immune from it.

Trying to make sense of all the discrepancies would drive a person insane because none of it is consistent. The Wong Kim Ark decision shows that different countries have at different times had multiple different versions of what constitutes either civil or political citizenship, and our own courts have openly said - even after the 14th Amendment - that “natural born citizen” has NOT been defined as “citizen at birth” or anything else. The WKA court jumped on that as meaning that it allows that persons born to aliens on US soil MIGHT be US citizens. But it could just as easily be said that it means that persons born to aliens on US soil MIGHT NOT be US citizens, much less “natural born citizens”. What it means is that it hasn’t been decided.

The whole thing is an exercise in frustration and futility because it is all so inconsistent. It makes me think of somebody spilling pizza on the Mona Lisa, and then trying to work it all together to make it all fit. There’s no way to make a pizza spill fit into the Mona Lisa. And there’s no way to take crappy decisions and make them fit into the jurisprudence of centuries.

Roe v Wade, for instance, throws EVERYTHING from before and after it out of whack. It came after Wong Kim Ark, and so everything in Wong Kim Ark would be overturned in the instances of Blacks, because Roe v Wade would revert us back to Dred Scott. That, in turn, would mean that some other factor - either skin color or ancestry - would negate a biological person’s ability to be a US citizen at birth. So even if “natural born citizen” meant “citizen at birth”, it would require some other criterion besides merely being human and being born in the US.

Seems to me that Wong Kim Ark did the same thing to Minor v Happersett. Minor v Happersett said NBC hadn’t been defined and yet Wong Kim Ark used Minor v Happersett to argue that “citizen at birth” is the same thing as NBC. It’s circular reasoning and none of it is either internally or externally consistent.

In the end what I come out of this with is the realization that human justice doesn’t exist. It’s all a vain, futile endeavor. We go from one botched human opinion to another botched human opinion, and none of it makes sense. It’s all meaningless. When we argue the iffy legal questions we have no way to make a reasonable decision because there is no way to reconcile the Mona Lisa with a pizza splotch, with a chocolate cake smear, or with any other flaw or twist in the prevailing human wisdom of the time.

And in the meantime I haven’t gotten my grapes picked or canned, the beans stemmed, the dishes washed, my daughter’s dress sewn, the laundry put away, or the newspaper inserts gathered. Nor have I made homemade ice cream to console ourselves with while we watch the Huskers get creamed by Wisconsin tonight.

The Wong Kim Ark decision was that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship at birth to persons born to aliens within the country. It cited a circuit court case which said: “All persons born in the allegiance of the King are natural-born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens.” WKA made the leap to say that “born in the allegiance of the United States” means place of birth, by quoting from the Dred Scott decision, which said: “The first section of the second article of the Constitution uses the language, “a natural-born citizen.” It thus assumes that citizenship may be acquired by birth. Undoubtedly, this language of the Constitution was used in reference to that principle of public law, well understood in this country at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, which referred citizenship to the place of birth.”

So the Wong Kim Ark court concludes that being “born in the allegiance of the United States” means being born here. But the very same Dred Scott case that WKA uses to make the leap (equating “natural born citizen” with “born in the US”) REFUSED ANY citizenship to Blacks - ever - even if born on US soil. Which defies the very point the WKA court claimed the Dred Scott case made.

So you tell me where we’re at. Wong Kim Ark reasoning from Dred Scott would have Dred Scott proving that Blacks born in America are not only citizens but also “natural born citizens”, but Dred Scott actually said that Blacks can NEVER be any kind of US citizen. Wong Kim Ark seems to allow Blacks to be US citizens, but then Roe v Wade claims that only “legal persons” can be US citizens (or “persons” at all, and thus able to have ANY protections under the law), and there has never been a Constitutional amendment overturning Dred Scott by declaring Blacks to be legal persons.

So at the end of all that, what’s the binding legal definition of “natural born citizen” as intended by the Founders when the Constitution was ratified? I don’t see it anywhere. I see a bunch of contradictions and confusion.

And I see Mark Levin who just calls us stupid and tells us to go somewhere else. Right now the most appealing place I can think of is Heaven, where the stupidity of man will finally be overcome. Since that’s not fully available to me right now I think I’ll go pick grapes or sew a dress.