Posted on 06/23/2012 6:13:41 AM PDT by urtax$@work
Contemplating about the subjects of Citizen and natural born Citizen , if anything, has shown me that the few words in the Constitution have sooo... many aspects that have been discovered, realized, understood thru discussions here on FR since 2008.
The FReeper postings from individuals across the country with varied backgrounds and educations have shown me all those varied aspects of better understanding of a subject, specifically the qualification aspects to hold federal office in our country.
Sometimes understanding or epiphanies of the NBC issues have come to me when i was not expecting such. The latest instance was yesterday when i was digging thru my college boxes (to show our youngest college bounder) and ran across my US History Survey text and leafed thru it. Flipped back to the appendices to the US Constitution . I was rereading the requirements to hold office and thinking about how to explain to a noob about the issue. ( I would show bar graphs of the stiffer requirements from US Rep to US Sen to President.)
Then it came to me that sometimes its more than just the plain words themselves that describe our laws but it's how the words are ARRANGED. Reread the qualifications of Rep., Sen., and president. There is one thing missing from the presidential citizenship phrase that is in the other two office holders citizen phrases.....It's the NUMBER OF YEARS. There are prescribed years for Rep and Sen to be Citizens. There are NO PRESCRIBED YEARS FOR NBC- which (again) reinforces the idea that it is attained only at birth.
I know NBC has been well discussed here but i don’t recall specifically the lack of prescribed years wording in conjunction with NBC and what that implies. If i did miss this little point in any previous discussion sorry to have wasted your time.
I didn’t know of that angle yet either.
I thought that perhaps the botching (on purpose) was so that in private, Roberts could swear the bustard in using his potential real legal name which may be Barry Soetoro, or one of his other aliases.
Doing a quick naturalization was not on my radar. Of course doing that still wouldn’t help The Fraud anyway as far as eligibility.
I am seeing “Thank you Governor Walker” signs on I-94 between Lake Mills and Johnson Creek. Great big signs!
Bet the libs love to see those as they drive by in their clown cars!
I LOVE the news about the Walker signs... Thanks.
Not for me. I notice that the Jus Soli pontificators on this thread have all managed to conveniently avoid the simple logic exercise that points quite clearly to what the intent of the founders was in requiring that POTUS/VPOTUS, and only POTUS/VPOTUS be a Natural Born Citizen:
The Framers wanted to ensure to the greatest degree possible that any aspirant to the presidency would have loyalty to, and only to the US. Ergo, citizenship derived by birth in the US to parentS who are themselves citizens. Anything else opens the door to the potential for divided loyalties.
By the "reasoning" of some here, a child born to illegal alien parents but on US soil has better legal NBC status than one born to US servicemember parents on a military base overseas.
Flies in the face of logic.
Thanks for the Pings, melancholy and LucyT.
Certainly not according to the Vattel definition of the term, which informed the framers of Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution when they used "Natural Born Citizen" as a requirement for the presidency.
Marco's status is the same as that of Barry Soetoro, aka Barack Hussein Obama, who is NOT a Natural Born Citizen.
Granted Obama is not a Natural Born Citizen because his father is (alleged to be) a Kenyan who was never a US citizen. But unlike Rubio, we still do not know whether or not Barry was born in the United States, since we've never seen a bona fide US Certificate of Birth for him.
The child of an illegal is arguably one of the few exceptions. To qualify as a natural born subject, the parents had to be present “in amity” with the King. The children of an invading army, for example, were NOT natural born subjects. Thus, they would also not qualify as natural born citizens.
The Founders COULD have written “born of citizen parents”, or even followed Vattel and written “native”. They did not. They used a term with a recognized legal meaning. It was ratified by state legislatures that themselves used the term interchangeably with natural born subject.
There is no legal dispute.
Remember the NBC clause was an afterthought. It was not in the original draft. Originally, the President could have been a naturalized citizen. Time of residency was added for Congressional offices, and the President was then required to be citizen from birth.
John Jay thought it was an important enough "afterthought" that it ended up in our founding document. Way to downplay and otherwise duck the importance of the divided loyalties issue. You make my case for me.
Don't you just love those "AHA!" moments?
Good work.
I’m sick and tired of this nonsense. Play time is over, the democrats are laughing at those who are turning birther arguments against Republicans like Rubio and Jindal.
It doesn’t matter if his parents were naturalized or not as long as they were legal resident aliens as I believe they were.
And hell unfortunately under current interpration of the law even the child of 2 illegal immigrants would be regarded as kosher.
No court is gonna stop Rubio from being sworn in if he is elected and that’s the end of the story. There is a case to be made he doesn’t deserve to be VP based on the MERITS. Those that don’t like him should stick to that (you know stuff people actually care about).
Flies in the face of logic.
And this is the salient point. The Jus Soli interpretation is just plain stupid. It yields ridiculous results, and requires a series of exceptions*, therefore it is wrong.
.
.
* Indians were an exception. Slaves were an exception. Children of Diplomats were an exception. British Loyalists after The War of Independence were an exception. None of these are exceptions according to Jus Sanguinus.
The Democrats are laughing because they don't give a rat's behind about the Constitution, as they've demonstrated over and over again on many fronts. On the other hand, we constitutionalists do and we know what Natural Born Citizen means, or at least what it meant to the people who wrote it into the Constitution.
This is not exactly a "birther argument" about Rubio and Jindal, nor is it any personal grudge we hold against them. We know they were both American born. It's just that no man is above the law (as Theodore Roosevelt famously said), regardless of his political ideology or popularity, and that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. (That holds for women as well, BTW.)
Rubio and Jindal can continue to excel in their present positions for which they are, respectively, constitutionally and legally qualified. It's just that, due to circumstances beyond their control, they don't qualify for VP or POTUS.
It doesn’t matter if his parents were naturalized or not as long as they were legal resident aliens as I believe they were.
That's not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they required that the President be a Natural Born Citizen (if born after the adoption of the Constitution). The Natural Born Citizen requirement was extended to the vice presidency by the Twelfth Amendment.
“And hell unfortunately under current interpration of the law even the child of 2 illegal immigrants would be regarded as kosher.”
This MUST be changed. Both as matter of national security as well the GIGANTIC economic costs associated.
A statutory citizen (child born overseas with US citizen parent(s)) does not have to renounce the country of their birth before a Certificate of Citizenship is issued. A naturalized citizen must first renounce their citizenship of their home country before they are issued a Certificate of Naturalization.
The State Department has issued guidance it is the policy of the US to consider a statutory citizen to be a citizen at birth. Its debatable a statutory citizen, a citizen with dual citizenship after the Certificate of Citizenship is issued, it a Natural born citizen because of divided loyalty.
John McCain never renounced his Panamanian citizenship.
I agree, Congress should pass a law clarifying that persons born in the U.S. are citizens at birth only if at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident; children of persons with tourist visas or student visas, or of illegal aliens, should not be entitled to citizenship at birth. We won’t know how the Supreme Court will interpret the 14th Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” until we try to limit birthright citizenship.
That would be a brilliant move for his career!
I suspect there will be a “Red” state that initially attempts to tackle this cauldron of bullish*t. And like gay “marriage”, the battle lines will be drawn and the SCOTUS is going to have to decide.
The SCOTUS is arguably THE ONLY reason to support Glove. Although his judicial appointments here mostly sucked. OTOH, there aren't many GOPs to pick from here.
How could a state, as opposed to Congress, take the lead here? The issue is the language of a federal law and an anendment to the U.S. Constitution. Only Congress could legislate to stop birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens, tourists and other non-residents.
The founders already defined “naturel” as native born in 1781. Obviously this was how those members who read French understood the term “naturel,” thus when the read Law of Nations, they understood “naturel” to mean natural-born, which Vattel defined as born to citizen parents. Vattel also noted that those aliens born in England were naturalized. They would have understood this as well. Just because a state legislature may used natural-born subject and natural-born citizen interchangeably to fit their own states law, has no bearing on what the framers of the Constitution were doing, especially when we have Supreme Court precedent that says otherwise. For the same reasons you argue the framers didn’t just write “born of citizen parents” they also could have just written “born in the country” but they did not do that.
The ALJ in Georgia cited dicta from a state appeals decision. This fails because it's not the highest legal precedence and it its not even the holding of this lower court decision. Nowhere in the Ankeny decision is Obama ever declared to be a natural-born citizen. The Ankeny court made a conclusion about a definition based on misinterpreting dicta from the Wong Kim Ark decision, which they ended up admitting was neither part of the holding nor part of any legal precedent.
We note the fact that the Court in Wong Kim Ark did not actually pronounce the plaintiff a “natural born Citizen” using the Constitution's Article II language ...
Now contrast that with a Supreme Court decision which cited Minor with WKA nowhere to be found:
Under our Constitution, a naturalized citizen stands on an equal footing with the native citizen in all respects save that of eligibility to the Presidency. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, 88 U. S. 165; Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U. S. 94, 112 U. S. 101; Osborn v. Bank of United States, 9 Wheat. 738, 22 U. S. 827.
This quote is from Luria v. United States, decided about 15 years AFTER Wong Kim Ark. The Supreme Court has no problem recognizing Minor has something to do with the NBC question from Article II. Luria uses the term "native citizen" which was defined in Minor as "all children born in the country of citizen parents."
This is a false assumption. Senior was never admitted a resident alien. Even if one were to accept that the WKA decision redefined NBC (which it did NOT do), the court still required the parents to be resident aliens with permanent residence and domicil in order to satisfy the subject clause of the 14th amendment:
the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens ...I hope you start to see a pattern and get the point. Senior never had a permanent residence and domicil, and upon marriage, neither did his wife. Senior was sent home when his last extension request was denied. Had Obama's mama not divored his father, they would have been sent to Kenya along with Senior. Because of this, Obama could not have been a citizen under the 14th amendment and he certainly was not a natural-born citizen.
they were at the time of his birth domiciled residents of the United States, having previously established and still enjoying a permanent domicil and residence ....
The question presented by the record is whether a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States ...
civil status is universally governed by the single principle of domicil
the Supreme Court of New Jersey held that a person born in this country of Scotch parents who were domiciled but had not been naturalized here was "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment ...
when the parents are domiciled here, birth establishes the right to citizenship ...
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