Levin: Friendly Advice For Donald Trump

" He should let them go at it."

He should be encouraging the debate.

Engage on real and substantive issues that matter to the country.

Because “Trump is a NY Liberal nener, nener, nener” is so substantive and issue oriented. Team Cruz can dish it out but not take it apparently. Cruz is looking more and more like a Surrender Party loser, sadly.

Because it’s funny as hell watching you braying trumpeters lose your damned heads when someone dares to point out that trump is a liberal jackass?

Yeah, I’d go with that one....

Levin firing at Trump makes Cruz look weak. Like leave my little brother alone. He should let them go at it.

Cruz is never going to beat the rampaging Marxists hiding behind Levin’s skirt.

Um, not so friendly. Levin has struck back every time his boy Cruz got hit.

I agree. I prefer Cruz, but was OK with Trump as a second choice. Now I am getting fed up with Trump and his lowlife tactics. Aldo, I am hearing more and more about his past support of Democrats, including Pelosi, who is one of the worst, most disgusting and idiotic persons in Congress. He also previously supported abortion and gay marriage. Those may be NY City values, but they are not mine!!!

Trump has supported Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, as well. If that’s not enough, Trump is using dirty tactics just like Harry Reid. He can’t compete on substance because he’s a died-in-the-wool liberal.

I agree, he is a citizen by statute which is his naturalization.

I too agree Las Vegas Ron. This somewhat ridiculous barrage of presumed Mark Levin comments brings out some interesting realities:

1) Mark is now involved with a presumably “Conservative” web site. I say “presumably” because Mark has said many things which raise questions about both his knowledge of the Constitution, and about his integrity. He has conflated U.S. Code (Congressional Acts) with articles of the Constitution, which is surprising given his support for application of Article V, which is a very long shot, but seems to give hope for correcting the stranglehold on Congress.

Mark’s conflation of naturalized with natural born citizens makes the child born to Islamic terrorists hiding in New Mexico eligible to the presidency. It makes the child born and raised in Qatar or Iran or Somalia ... who was educated in Madrassas, but sent to Harvard with a large donation eligible to eh presidency after 14 years. We may have one of those now. Mark, like treats the 1790 Naturalization Act as accepted U.S. Code, like Larry Tribe and Ted Olson did in their letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting John McCain’s claim to natural born citizenship, based upon the unquestioned citizenship status of both of McCain’s parents. I said “treats the 1790 ...Act as accepted code because that act was quickly rescinded by Madison and Washington, in 1795, and may have been replaced with “citizen” because the wording -”considered as a natural born citizen”, meant to imply. as did Justice Gray in Wong Kim Ark, that naturalized citizens have all the rights and privileges of natural born citizens; the don’t however satisfy the eligibility requirements to be president.

Mark, not Larry Tribe, point to Wong Kim Ark, in which Wong Kim, born as were Rubio, Jindal, and Haley, on U.S. soil to resident alien parents. The decision confirmed that Wong Kim was a 14th Amendment citizen, not a natural born citizen. Justice Gray cited and quoted the precedent for natural born citizenship established in the unanimous decision in Minor v. Happersett, which needed to confirm the U.S. common law definition, included in many Supreme Court cases before the 14th Amendment, because before the 14th Amendment there was no constitution definition for who were citizens, only the certainty that if someone is a natural born citizen, he/she is a citizen.

2. Mr. Robinson, to his credit, stating clearly that he supported Ted Cruz (as I used to), has never prevented posts questioning Cruz’ eligibility. He demonstrates his adherence to the 1st Amendment and Obots, of whom there have always been many, are given relatively free reign, even when some threads have gone to thousands of posts between two or three posters (who could have been the same person with several accounts), who disrupt cogent discussion with what I’d call a form of “denial of service” attack. Legitimate readers get frustrated with the silly insults and packaged citations of such nonsense as the Indiana Ankeny case.

3. Mark Levin is/has destroyed his credibility, and certainly damaged the market for his books, not because he is acting like media, which he is obviously part of, but because he isn’t as clever as Larry Tribe and Jack Maskill, and has to many obviously untrue statements about our framers and Supreme Court decisions, demonstrating that he is not the trusted master of our constitutional history the he claims to be. He claimed that the 14th Amendment rendered Obama eligible.

Mark has said the same about Cruz, Rubio, Jindal (and those same issues apply to Nikki Haley). He seems not to recall that his own book, Liberty and Tyranny, contains a lengthy explanation (p37) by Madison of why there are not definitions in the Constitution, a bit of misdirection used by Tribe and Olson, and by Levin. Wong Kim Ark was rendered a “NATURALIZED” citizen, not a natural born citizen. Mark, not that I’ve heard - I still listen to him with skepticism - made the direct connection. If Mark respects the Constitution, the court was explicit in Wong Kim Ark, that Wong Kim, like Rubio, Jindal, and Haley, was born to non-citizen parents on our soil; because Wong Kim was “native-born”, meaning on our soil, and, unlike our “native-born” Indians, his parents respected our Constitution and lived under its protections, was naturalized at birth. Naturalization at birth did not render him a natural born citizen, as Cruz, Rubio, Jindal, Haley, and Levin assert.

Read Wong Kim Ark, though you may be confused, as was I, at the exhaustive treatment of English Common Law by Justice Gray. Gray was appointed by the only other president, Chester Arthur, one of whose parents was not a citizen. Arthur hid his Vermont birth certificate, almost certainly to misdirect questions about his eligibility from his Irish father’s citizenship. Arthur had all his personal papers burned just before his death from kidney disease. Wong Kim was not made a natural born citizen.

Our Supreme Court has explained the meanings of the Constitution, and remain the most trustworthy source of interpretation. Mark doesn’t like Chief Justice John Marshall, and never mentioned him during the most active debates about who he, Obama, was and about his eligibility. Marshal attended Jefferson’s creation, our first law school at William and Mary, in 1780, and used our (not England’s) first law book, assigned by Jefferson, Vattel’s “Natural Law and the Law of Nations”. Marshall cited Vattel and quoted the definition in his 1814 case addressing citizenship of the claimants, The Venus, 12 U.S. 253. Natural born citizenship was not at issue, so the definition was dictum; it didn’t count as precedent, which didn’t appear until the 1875 case, Minor v. Happersett, in which the Vattel definition was confirmed.

Levin gave hints of some other issue guiding his opinions. We are now learning more about who he may be. Was he for sale? Is he a John Roberts, perhaps with some skeletons guiding his influence peddling talents? When someone lies, the questions are bound to arise. The Constitution was based upon documents and by men who value rigorous construction. Among Vattel’s major influences was Gottlieb Leibniz, a creator (separately but concurrently with Issac Newton) the Calculus. Constitutional scholars, like Chief Justices Marshall, Waite, and Charles Evans Hughes, value the foundations they alone have the authority to interpret and treat articles of the Constitution as axiomatic. Levin and Cruz demonstrably disagree. They assert that frequently modified U.S. Code 1401 made Cruz a natural born citizen at bith, even though he wouldn’t even have been made a citizen before a modification in naturalization law about 60 years ago eliminated the need for his mother to file naturalization papers.

Cruz, stating that Trump’s mother’s, being a naturalized citizen, born in Scotland, naturalized four years before Trump’s birth, rendered Trump not natural born, is a bald-faced lie, which may or may not be hidden by the media. Cruz demonstrates is ignorant of the Constitution, or he is comfortable lying on a big stage, knowing that he is targeting a suitably ignorant sector of potential voters. Knowledgeable voters know he is untrustworthy with the Supreme Court and Constitution about which he and Obama claim to be authorities.

Obama, at least, never claimed to be a natural born citizen. Obama told us that he considers the Constitution to be an interesting artifact, not relevant in our contemporary global society. Obama wants to create a new bill of positive rights. That’s who he is. Thank goodness he didn’t succeed, but he was honest about his citizenship.

That Obama claimed natural born citizenship is an Arizona application filed by Nancy Pelosi. Obama, if he ever saw that document, corrected it on his own web site, Fightthesmears.com. “I am a native-born citizen of the U.S., born a subject of the British Commonwealth by the British Nationality Act of 1948 because my father was a subject of the Commonwealth”. Obama was native-born, born on our soil (Hawaii), a citizen naturalized at birth because of his mother’s citizenship. He didn’t lie. The same political-appointee judges never allowed standing to any case challenging Obama’s eligibility, just as Levin, perhaps correctly, told us, would happen if Cruz were to be the nominee. Forget the Constitution. The Supreme Court, with the addition of Kagan and Sotomayor, will obey the left; what a court will do depends upon who is claimed to have won the election. Levin may be telling us that our last hope for representative government is via Article V, and I have not done enough reading to have a strong position on Article V. So far, my only concern is that the path to an Amendment via Article V is long. But it does offer to circumvent a compromised Congress, Executive, and Judiciary. Until Levin stops lying about verifiable written law, I’ll keep that as an unlikely explanation for his behavior. Until then, since we don’t have an Allen West or Mike Lee, or Condoleezza Rice, or Susan Martinez, or Miguel Estrada, or Rudy Giuliani, we have Donald Trump, who still leads everyone, and doesn’t claim to legal authority, and has never denied changing his mind about all sorts of things. He, so far, is an honest man, who many Democrats will prefer to Hillary, who is anything but an honest woman.