[rxsid]

HOW CAN A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN'S STATUS BE "GOVERNED" BY GREAT BRITAIN?

Office	Citizenship		Age	Residency (or years citizen)
Commander in Chief (1 of 1)	natural born Citizen		35	14 years resident
Senator (1 of many)	Citizen		30	9 years a Citizen
Represantative (1 of many)	Citizen		25	7 years a Citizen

[editor-surveyor]

This is nothing new.

We’ve been discussing this case for two and a half years, and the honest among us have always agreed that MvH firmly established natural born citizenship as that of the child of two citizen parents.

There is not a shred of foundation for any other position.

[SarahPalinForPresident2012]

This is awesome — this means Gov Palin will be facing “Can I call you Joe?” Biden in the election?

[faucetman]

TYVM, EXCELLENT, I would have missed this! Appreciate it.

[CzarChasm]

There's a common abbreviation in Internet comment/forum threads that applies here:

TL;DR

It means Too Long; Didn't Read.

While I understand that Leo is a lawyer and is used to blathering on and on and on, the expectation from the headline would be one bullet point highlighting the SC case and one or two sentences summarizing the precedent.

After that, Leo will have the audience's attention and can go into detail for those that care, and the rest of us can go look up the court case and decide for ourselves.

As written, I doubt most people (other than the really interested and patient FReepers) will actually read this. It's too long, too dense, and doesn't get to the point right away

[Mr Rogers]

The Minor case did NOT deal with who is a citizen. It dealt with the question of who had the right to vote.

It made a passing reference to citizenship:

“The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their [p168] parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.”

It is obvious to an honest reader that Minor does NOT require two citizen parents for someone to be a NBC, nor did they attempt to answer that question.

Here is what they considered:

“The question is presented in this case, whether, since the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, a woman, who is a citizen of the United States and of the State of Missouri, is a voter in that State, notwithstanding the provision of the constitution and laws of the State, which confine the right of suffrage to men alone.”

It was admitted, from the beginning, that she was a citizen. This was a 14th Amendment case in the sense that it used the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment, which provides that “no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”.

Only an idiot would believe this case was about the citizenship of the woman.

The facts of the case:

“In this state of things, on the 15th of October, 1872 (one of the days fixed by law for the registration of voters), Mrs. Virginia Minor, a native born, free, white citizen of the United States, and of the State of Missouri, over the age of twenty-one years, wishing to vote for electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, and for a representative in Congress, and for other officers, at the general election held in November, 1872, applied to one Happersett, the registrar of voters, to register her as a lawful voter, which he refused to do, assigning for cause that she was not a “male citizen of the United States,” but a woman. She thereupon sued him in one of the inferior State courts of Missouri, for wilfully refusing to place her name upon the list of registered voters, by which refusal she was deprived of her right to vote.”

Please note that NO ONE argued she was not a citizen. That was given. The question was if citizenship and the equal protection clause meant that women had the right to vote.

The actual decision:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0088_0162_ZO.html

[Nathanael1]

Donofrio gets it wrong in nearly every respect. First, of course, the antecedent of "class" in MvH is not "citizen", it's "children". MvH is not talking about two classes of citizen, it's talking about two classes of children: the first class of children, jus soli and jus sanguinis, are universally acknowledged as citizens. As to the second class of children, those born jus soli alone, there is some disagreement as to whether they, too, are citizens, but never mind: voting rights don't devolve from the 14th amendment, so it's all dicta anyway. And, unfortunately for Donofrio, you don't build legal arguments out of dicta.

[socialism_stinX]

Bump....well I suppose now he won’t be able to run for re-election because the MSM will be all over this major news event.