. . . . Check out 376, then read to end of page.
Thanks for the images and comments, DiogenesLamp.
SP alert...
I suppose to be fair to the Court, almost all the cases I know about are correctly decided because the lawyers were not sophisticated, experienced, or knowledgible enough to get a Constitutional issue before a Court that could hear it.
But the threashhold proposition needs to be understood that the Supreme Court is a political institution. Half the expertise of the fine lawyers who practice there is involved in an understanding of the political forces that are likely to shape a decision on any individual case.
I may sound like a broken record on the subject of Vittel. There is no doubt that the founders used the term "natural born citizen" based on a reading of Vittel they thought would restrict eligibility to serve as President to persons who had a generational attachment to citizenship of our country.
And yes, I recognize there are lots of arguments that adoption of the 14th Amendment was not intended to affect this question.
But none of that is really relevant in the present context. The bottom line is that if an Obama eligibility case ever reaches the Court on facts that do not demonstrate his birthplace outside the geographical limits of the United States, the Court is going to hold that by adoption of the 14th Amendment, we eliminated any question about the quality of citizenship of a person born in the United States.
The Court is going to hold him eligible unless the record demonstrates that he is born outside the US.
Now careful legal work is likely to be able to place the evidentiary burden on Obama to show where he was born but some of the many pleadings in these cases do not do this correctly and will muff this issue. Fortunately I now believe most of those cases are gone. But this is one of the places a real legal action needs to start--be sure we are able to get the burden on the ultimate issue on Obama.
If we do that, and he still gets a finding of fact that he was born in the US, it doesn't matter who his father was or where the father was born or where he was a citizen--the Supreme Court will find Obama eligible to serve.
It was my pleasure.