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To: Jeff Winston

Jeffy, you troll, stop pushing disinformation!

Three types of citizenship are recognized by our government: native born; naturalized; and citizen-by-statute (derived citizenship from parents). All have equal rights. All can serve in Congress, either as a Representative in the House, or as a Senator in the Senate.
The following link will take you to the government’s own Immigration Service web page describing the three types of citizenship.
http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=a2ec6811264a3210VgnVCM100000b92ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=a2ec6811264a3210VgnVCM100000b92ca60aRCRD
Natural born Citizen is NOT a type of statutory citizenship. Natural born is ONLY an eligibility requirement for the U.S. Presidency per Article II, Section 1, clause 5, of the U.S. Constitution, and requires, as per the Founders, the President to be born in the United States (jus solis) AND of two citizen parents (jus sanguinas).
The definition of natural born Citizen appears in the holding of SCOTUS’s unanimous decision of Minor v. Happersett (1874).

Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Constitution did not grant women the right to vote...

The Minor v. Happersett ruling was based on an interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court readily accepted that Minor was a citizen of the United States, but it held that the constitutionally protected privileges of citizenship did not include the right to vote.

SCOTUS rejected Minor’s argument that she was a citizen under the 14th Amendment of the U.S.Constitution, and examined her eligibility, concluding that she belonged to the class of citizens who, being born in the U.S. of citizen parents, was a natural born Citizen, and not covered by the 14th Amendment. This holding has been used in 25 consequent SCOTUS decisions since 1875.

The eligibility requirement of Natural Born Citizenship (jus solis + jus sanguinas: born in the U.S. of U.S. citizen parents) must be viewed as a means to prevent split allegiance for any President of the United States.

The following is often used to support people like Sen. Marco Rubio who seek to be President, but it was superceded centuries ago and is a false argument.

“The First U.S. Congress included in the 1790 Immigration & Naturalization Act language to alert the State Department to the fact that Americans born abroad are “natural born” citizens” and are not to be viewed as foreigners due to foreign birth. They were not granted citizenship via that US statute rather citizenship was stated as a fact that must be recognized by immigration authorities. These children were not citizens by any other means than natural law, according to Congress, and statutory law was written to insure that their natural citizenship was recognized.”

This is not a reasonable explanation. It fails to recognize that Congress only has powers over naturalization and has no power to define “natural born Citizen”, which has nothing to do with naturalization. Furthermore, if Congress wants to tell the State Department something, they don’t have to enact legislation to do it.

But more important is that all of the following naturalization acts, 1795, 1802, etc., were also passed to naturalize the children of U.S. citizens born abroad. And the words “natural born” were repealed in the 1795 Naturalization Act and never returned again.

HOLDING EQUALS PRECEDENT

The direct holding of the Supreme Court in Minor set a binding precedent. Those pretending that the Supreme Court’s direct construction and definition (in Minor) of the natural-born citizen clause is dicta are mistaken. They need to review the first two points of the syllabus, which state:

1. The word “citizen ” is often used to convey the idea of membership in a nation.

2. In that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United states, as much so before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution as since.

Check the words “if born of citizen parents” again. They are stated at the very top of the syllabus and more than once in the Opinion of the Court. This is a direct holding of the case. It is clearly precedent. For it not to be precedent, the Court could not have held that Mrs. Minor was a US citizen. But since that determination was part of the holding, the grounds by which they made that determination are precedent, not dicta.

The recognition of US Supreme Court precedent excluding Obama from POTUS eligibility is a theoretical game changer. This places a permanent asterisk* upon his administration’s authority. It may lead to multiple challenges against official actions of his administration.

If he wishes to be a true statesman to this nation, President Obama ought to directly petition the US Supreme Court for a declaratory judgment as to his eligibility rather than let the asterisk fester.

*************************************************************************

In 1996, the US Supreme Court’s majority opinion by Justice Breyer in Ogilvie Et Al., Minors v. United States, 519 U.S. 79 (1996), stated that when the Court discusses a certain reason as an independent ground in support of their decision, then that reason is not simply dictum.

“Although we gave other reasons for our holding in Schleier as well, we explicitly labeled this reason an ‘independent’ ground in support of our decision, id., at 334. We cannot accept petitioner’s claim that it was simply a dictum.”
The Minor Court’s construction of Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5, of the United States Constitution was the independent ground by which the Court avoided construing the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause.

Therefore, such construction is precedent, not dicta, despite POTUS eligibility not being an issue. The Court determined it was necessary to define the class of natural-born citizens, and the definition is current legal precedent.


53 posted on 04/02/2013 11:10:02 AM PDT by SatinDoll (NATURAL BORN CITZEN: BORN IN THE USA OF CITIZEN PARENTS.)
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To: SatinDoll
I have to take issue with the statement that the federal government recognizes three types of citizenship. It does not. There are only two types of citizenship: citizen at birth and naturalized citizen. What the federal government recognizes is multiple paths to becoming a citizen at birth.

Those granted citizenship at birth under the Constitution are natural-born citizens. Those granted citizenship at birth by federal statute are statutory citizens. Both are citizens and not naturalized. (Of course one could argue that a federal statute granting citizenship is inherently an act of naturalization, but I digress.) As stated in the Foreign Affairs manual, statutory citizens may or may not be natural-born citizens under the Constitution and therefore eligible to the presidency. There is no judicial ruling on the matter.

86 posted on 04/02/2013 1:32:57 PM PDT by BuckeyeTexan (There are those that break and bend. I'm the other kind. ~Steve Earle)
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