>>> Obviously you are a legal scholar. So now please give us lesser minds a citation
Never claimed to be.
This subject is not that hard to understand.
>>> I tell you what . . . I will start the game first. Below is a quote from Wikipedia. Of course thats not the final word . . . but till you cite something its alot more than hot air. Pretty sure its too much reading and thinking but . . . .
Ok.. so you cite Wiki, unnamed scholars, and the media???
My turn....
1. See post #26 and the link to 4 Supreme court cases which re-affirms the definition understood by our founding fathers... Citizen Parents and born within jurisdiction.
2. During the controversy in 2008 over Obama’s run for president, the court consistently “PUNTED” to congress... so let us assume that Congress once again should be relied upon to settle the issue of what Natural Born means. In 2008, at the same time Ambassador Keyes was challenging Obama in Court, the US Senate conducted a legal hearing for the sole purpose of determining if John McCain was eligible to run (since he was born in panama) NOW.. regardless of whether we consider their findings on McCain accurate or not, what is important is to examine the test parameters THEY APPLIED during that hearing and investigation.
The Senate in 2008 applied BOTH birthplace AND citizenship of BOTH PARENTS to John McCain... and finding that both parents were citizens, and his birthplace was on a military installation (considered US soil), they ruled that McCain WAS eligible to be president.
The citations, in each case AFFIRM a known concept. For example: The natives or indigenes are those born in the country of parents who are citizens.. Of course that sentence is correct. But it does NOT define natural-born.
Now I agree we can disagree on that interpretation. So allow me to share this.
From the Harvard Law Review: Written March 2015
All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase “natural born Citizen” has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time. And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States.
As to the British practice, laws in force in the 1700s recognized that children born outside of the British Empire to subjects of the Crown were subjects themselves and explicitly used “natural born” to encompass such children.
These statutes provided that children born abroad to subjects of the British Empire were “natural-born Subjects . . . to all Intents, Constructions, and Purposes whatsoever.”
The Framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like “natural born,” since the statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War. They were also well documented in Blackstone’s Commentaries, a text widely circulated and read by the Framers and routinely invoked in interpreting the Constitution.
The proviso in the Naturalization Act of 1790 underscores that while the concept of “natural born Citizen” has remained constant and plainly includes someone who is a citizen from birth by descent without the need to undergo naturalization proceedings, the details of which individuals born abroad to a citizen parent qualify as citizens from birth have changed. The pre-Revolution British statutes sometimes focused on paternity such that only children of citizen fathers were granted citizenship at birth.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 expanded the class of citizens at birth to include children born abroad of citizen mothers as long as the father had at least been resident in the United States at some point. But Congress eliminated that differential treatment of citizen mothers and fathers before any of the potential candidates in the current presidential election were born. Thus, in the relevant time period, and subject to certain residency requirements, children born abroad of a citizen parent were citizens from the moment of birth, and thus are “natural born Citizens.”
http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/03/on-the-meaning-of-natural-born-citizen/
Actually McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, an unincorporated US Territory at the time of his birth. Thank You Jimmy Carter for screwing that pooch.
Soooo . . . I looked that up. Hmmmm . . . pretty ambigious for me, but OK, I can see how you write that. After reading the story, I get that Senator McCaskill would have put that ammendment forward regardless where McCain was born, and she would have been correct. A child of a military family HAS to be born on base to be elgible? Not particularly fair as she says.
The account of the story I am reading is from the New York Times. They write:
When questions arose in 2008 about whether Senator John McCain was a “natural born citizen” qualified to be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was stationed, his Senate colleagues were outraged. They bristled at the very thought that there could be any doubt whatsoever that the respected Republican lawmaker and war hero from Arizona was eligible under the Constitution.
Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, was so worked up at the idea that on the day The New York Times published the article examining the issue, she arrived at the Capitol with corrective legislation written in longhand on a yellow legal pad.
“In America, so many parents say to their young children, ‘If you work hard and you play by the rules, in America someday you can be president of the United States,’ ” Ms. McCaskill said at the time. “Our brave and respected military should never have to spend a minute worrying whether or not that saying is true for their child.”
The Senate passed a nonbinding resolution declaring that “John Sidney McCain, III, is a ‘natural born citizen’ under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States.”
Whether that bipartisan resolution would have carried the day legally was never tested, and Mr. McCain lost the presidency to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who was a co-sponsor of the McCain resolution.