Posted on 01/11/2016 5:31:53 AM PST by iontheball
Many members of the political-media establishment are either deliberately misrepresenting facts for political reasons or they are simply ignorant of those facts, that is, the manner in which one becomes a citizen as opposed to the concept of natural born citizenship.
Those who equate "citizen" with "natural born citizen" often misinterpret Constitutional law and statute law, the latter meaning that Congress may pass laws only defining the manner in which one becomes a citizen, either citizen by birth or a naturalized citizen, not the Constitutional concept of natural born citizenship.
(Excerpt) Read more at familysecuritymatters.org ...
Indeed so.
Legal precedent and interpretation LEAVE NO DOUBT.
This article is full of crap.
Oh geez. The idiot has come back to the infamous Dred Scott decision as his reason.
He should post this over at the Democrat Underground.
The morons over there might buy this unmitigated crap.
That is like taking one line from Vattel and ignoring the rest of the discussion on citizens.
COMPLETE...
UTTER...
RUBBISH...
“Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)
“The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”
Indeed.
Could also allow the offspring of an American who joined ISIS and birthed a child w/ say, a Syrian, to claim eligibility for office.
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Cruz was born in Canada to a Canadian father......and a native-born American mother......thus making Cruz a dual Canadian-American citizen. Texans elected him to the US Senate not knowing he was a dual Canadian citizen.
It was not until a 2013 Dallas Morning News article that Cruz acknowledged his Canadian citizenry publicly. In 2014, the senator publicly renounced his Canadian citizenship altogether.
Cruz consistently depicted himself as "latino" Yet his family bgrnd indicates only his father is Spanish; his mother is of two nationalities, Italian and Irish from each of her parents.
Cruz ran in Texas as a latino (which has a wealth of latino votes). Cruz even convinced the Senate biographer that he was the first latino elected to the Senate (besides Rubio).
As the immigration issue grew negative in the world of politics, being known as a latino has lost its luster.
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WIKI The 1803 edition of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, perhaps the leading authority for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention for the terms used in the Constitution, noted that the natural born citizen clause is "a means of security against foreign influence" and that "[t]he admission of foreigners into our councils, consequently, cannot be too much guarded against."
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NOTE At the time, King George, and lordly England, were the colonists' boogeymen. It was feared the wealthy Brits could surreptitiously buy their way into our new country's councils and wreak havoc.
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OLD THINGS SEEM SUDDENLY NEW AGAIN Cruz's wife is a Goldman Sachs exec.
Mrs Cruz served on the North American Union task force, and supported their report called---'Building a North American Community."
The North/South border effort was sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in association with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales.
Translated into English, that means forget US sovereignty....just eradicate US borders.
Canada is under the jurisdiction of England.
Ah, Molson Gold.
I wish I could remember when I drank that stuff.
;D
“I’ll be back”
;D
Original intent of the meaning of NBC arguably includes the idea that the legislature can adjust the meaning. Why? Because NBC is based on the UK’s “natural born subject”, per multiple Supreme Court rulings. and the meaning of NBS had been adjusted multiple times by the Parliament, starting in 1350. The Framers understood that NBS could be expanded by the legislature, so why does anyone think the meaning of NBC could not?
If one believes in original intent, and understands that intent based on what the Founders would have known and how THEY used the phrase.
As another FR poster has pointed out, the “arms” in the 2nd Amendment includes only muskets and swords. Our use of “arms” has expanded, although the Congress has also contracted the meaning - no nukes in your garage, and at times no “assault weapons”.
All Congress has done is expand the accepted (as of 1765) meaning of NBC to include it being passed thru the mother and not just the father.
But instead, you want the US Supreme Court - the ones who invent wholly new rights, such as the right to not be lonely in the night, to define NBC for you?
Fine. Let TRUMP sue Cruz, and then the court can ask the US Supreme Court to define NBC for them - because under the law, Ted Cruz cannot ask the Supreme Court to do so. Something Trump knows, but doesn’t care about. Trump & truth have little in common.
Natural born citizen: Both parents are citizens.
The US Supreme Court has already ruled that the MEANING of NBC is rooted in the meaning of NBS. That is a given.
Much of our law is based on English Common Law.
What did the English say on the subject?
Children born out of the country to citizens are natural born.
This interpretation, by the way, is in agreement with Vattel.
For example, consider the British Foreign Protestants Naturalization Act 1708:
The children of all natural born subjects born out of the ligeance [i.e. out of England] of Her Majesty Her Heirs and Successors shall be deemed and adjudged to be natural born subjects of this Kingdom to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever.[7][8]”
Unquote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause#Antecedents_in_England
The same article also cites Blackstone.
So at the time of the United States constitution, there was no doubt that children born abroad to citizens are natural born.
Geez.
But by several more modern statutes ... all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception; unless their said fathers were attainted, or banished beyond sea, for high treason; or were then in the service of a prince at enmity with Great Britain.”
The US Supreme Court has already ruled that the MEANING of NBC is rooted in the meaning of NBS. That is a given.
...
I’m not surprised. English common law does play an important role in constitutional decisions.
Is it?
"If not Vattel, then where did they arrive at this term. Many of those who ridicule us like to quote Blackstone as authoritative that the United States adopted English Common Law. They like to state that Blackstone's natural born subject is equivalent of a natural born citizen. There is no doubt that the Founding Father's were influenced from Blackstone’s Commentary. However, the Framers of the Constitution recognized that it was Blackstone, who argued that the Parliament and King could change the constitution at will. Blackstone was increasingly recognized by the Americans as a proponent of arbitrary power. In fact, the framers rejected the notion that the United States was under English Common Law, "The common law of England is not the common law of these States." George Mason one of Virginia's delegates to the Constitutional Convention."
More here.
A go example was pointed out last night using the Queen of a ME country. She too was born in US. Do the prince and princess of that country qualify to be President. They do if you use the Cruz/Obama scenario.
Time to get a ruling from the SCOTUS. Overtime. None of this standing BS this time. No more unsettled law
“We are not confusing anything. There are only two categories of citizen. natural born and naturalized.”
No. Natural born, naturalized at birth by statute, and Naturalized.
The Bingham article cited, was from congressional discussion in 1862.
What was happening in 1862?
Anybody?
That’s right.
He was arguing that black men and women born in this country were citizens of the United States, just as much as were the white men and women.
The full text can be read here.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llcg&fileName=059/llcg059.db&recNum=680
Getting a Cruz case to court would create an opportunity for discovery. Discovery gives an opportunity to compel evidence to support precident in formulating a case. Think the Democrats want to go there? Discovery could require the unsealing of some sealed Obama records...
Colonel Sellin makes the same mistake that many have made in these many discussions. He frames an argument as if he was presenting a case to a court, praying for a decision favoring his argument. The problem is that this question will never be put before a court and therefore these arguments are fruitless.
The courts will continue to avoid the issue leaving us with the current operation of the law to prevail. The United States have two classes of citizens: Natural Born and Naturalized. Naturalized citizens are easily determined, their citizenship status is defined by a document, issued by the State Department, determined by action of a court. They were citizens of some other country, but by these documents, they are now U.S. citizens.
Natural born citizens have no documentation declaring them to be citizens. The facts of their birth makes them a citizen and the operation of law today says that the facts establish this is either birth within the borders of the United States or birth elsewhere of a child of a United States Citizen. If the court sits on their hands (and they will until the cows come home), then this definition will stand and Colonel Sellin’s argument is meaningless.
This is why the Obama camp was so brilliant in their approach to this issue. They manipulated people and their opposition to focus on this argument rather than the real flaws that were in Obama’s attic. We took the bait and engaged in an argument that could not be resolved. This argument ended 150 years ago and is not going to be reopened.
Are you thinking there is no difference between a Bill being introduced and a Bill passing Congress and enacted into Law?
Presidential Eligibility
In the 2008 election both major parties nominated candidates whose eligibility is dubious. For Barack Obama the question was whether he was born in Hawaii, which is U.S. soil. For John McCain the question was whether the Panama Canal Zone, where he was born, was U.S. soil. It is not, and being born of parents both of whom were U.S. citizens did not make him a “natural-born” citizen, although a statute was later adopted naturalizing such persons at birth.
The U.S. Constitution provides as follows:
Article II Section 1 Clause 5:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Amendment XIV Section 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The main authority for the original meaning of “natural born” is William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, Volume II, edited by St. George Tucker, a Founder, published in 1803, especially Chapter 10:
As to the qualifications of members to sit at this board: any natural born subject of England is capable of being a member of the privy council; taking the proper oaths for security of the government, and the test for security of the church. But, in order to prevent any persons under foreign attachments from insinuating themselves into this important trust, as happened in the reign of king William in many instances, it is enacted by the act of settlement,l that no person born out of the dominions of the crown of England, unless born of English parents, even though naturalized by parliament, shall be capable of being of the privy council.
... the king has also the prerogative of conferring privileges 53 upon private persons. Such as granting place or precedence to any of his subjects, as shall seem good to his royal wisdom:g or such as converting aliens,54 or persons born out of the king’s dominions, into denizens; whereby some very considerable privileges of natural-born subjects are conferred upon them. Such also is the prerogative of erecting corporations;55 whereby a number of private persons are united and knit together, and enjoy many liberties, powers, and immunities in their politic capacity, which they were utterly incapable of in their natural. Of aliens, denizens, natural-born, and naturalized subjects, I shall speak more largely in a subsequent chapter;
The first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England;
... the prince is always under a constant tie to protect his natural-born subjects, at all times and in all countries, for this reason their allegiance due to him is equally universal and permanent. But, on the other hand, as the prince affords his protection to an alien, only during his residence in this realm, the allegiance of an alien is confined (in point of time) to the duration of such his residence, and (in point of locality) to the dominions of the British empire.
Thus allegiance, then, both express and implied, is the duty of all the king’s subjects, under the distinctions here laid down, of local and temporary, or universal and perpetual. Their rights are also distinguishable by the same criterions of time and locality; natural-born subjects having a great variety of rights, which they acquire by being born within the king’s ligeance, and can never forfeit by any distance of place or time, but only by their own misbehaviour:
The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.10 In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.c
St. George Tucker, the editor, says this in a footnote:
Persons naturalized according to these acts, are entitled to all the rights of natural born citizens, except, first, that they cannot be elected as representatives in congress until seven years, thereafter. Secondly, nor can they be elected senators of the United States, until nine years thereafter. Thirdly, they are forever incapable of being chosen to the office of president of the United States. Persons naturalized before the adoption of the constitution, it is presumed, have all the capacities of natural born citizens. See C. U. S. Art. 1, 2.
Blackstone uses the term “subject” rather than “citizen”, so are citizens the same as subjects for this purpose? We have from Ainslie v. Martin, 9 Mass. 454, 456, 457 (1813):
And if, at common law, all human beings born within the ligeance of the King, and under the King’s obedience, were natural-born subjects, and not aliens, I do not perceive why this doctrine does not apply to these United States, in all cases in which there is no express constitutional or statute declaration to the contrary. . . . Subject and citizen are, in a degree, convertible terms as applied to natives, and though the term citizen seems to be appropriate to republican freemen, yet we are, equally with the inhabitants of all other countries, subjects, for we are equally bound by allegiance and subjection to the government and law of the land.
Before Blackstone, the leading authority for the meaning of constitutional language is Edward Coke, who explains in Calvin’s Case, 7 Coke Report 1a, 77 ER 377 (1608), that a child born on the soil of England to a foreign national visiting the country who is not an invader is a “natural born subject” of England:
[A foreign national]... so long as he was within the King’s protection; which [though] but momentary and uncertain, is yet strong enough to make a [natural bond] he hath issue here, that issue is a natural born subject; ... There be regularly ... three incidents to a subject born. 1. That the parents be under the actual obedience of the King. 2. That the place of his birth be within the King’s dominion. And, 3. The time of his birth is chiefly to be considered; for he cannot be a subject born of one kingdom that was born under the ligeance of a King of another kingdom, albeit afterwards one kingdom descend to the King of the other. ... many times ligeance or obedience without any place within the King’s dominions may make a subject born, but any place within the King’s dominions may make a subject born, but any place within the King’s dominions without obedience can never produce a natural subject. And therefore if any of the King’s ambassadors in foreign nations, have children there of their wives, being English women, by the common laws of England they are natural-born subjects, and yet they are born out-of the King’s dominions. But if enemies should come into any of the King’s dominions, and surprise any castle or fort, and possess the same by hostility, and have issue there, that issue is no subject to the King, though he be born within his dominions, for that he was not born under the King’s ligeance or obedience. But the time of his birth is of the essence of a subject born; for he cannot be a subject to the King of England, unless at the time of his birth he was under the ligeance and obedience of the King.
The subject of whether jus soli or jus sanguinis applies to the United States came up in a debate in the U.S. House of Representatives, May 22, 1789, when James Madison said:
It is an established maxim, that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth, however, derives its force sometimes from place, and sometimes from parentage; but, in general place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.
That was not on the point of presidential eligibility, but it does show which rule applies.
Drawing from Max Farand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, historian George Bancroft characterized the debate on qualifications for the Presidency in his History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States (1884) (Volume 1 Page 346):
One question on the qualifications of the president was among the last to be decided. On the twenty-second of August the committee of detail, fixing the requisite age of the president at thirty-five, on their own motion and for the first time required that the president should be a citizen of the United States, and should have been an inhabitant of them for twenty-one years. The idea then arose that no number of years could properly prepare a foreigner for the office of president; but as men of other lands had spilled their blood in the cause of the United States, and had assisted at every stage of the formation of their institutions, the committee of states who were charged with all unfinished business proposed, on the fourth of September, that ‘no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the the of the adoption of this constitution, should be eligible to the office of president,’ and for the foreign-born proposed a reduction of the requisite years of residence to fourteen. On the seventh of September, the modification, with the restriction as to the age of the president, was unanimously adopted.
The questions centered on how persons became citizens, and how long they had been citizens, but the subject of parentage was never raised.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated “children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens.”, but “considered as” does not change the definition of the term or the fact of the physical circumstances of birth, nor can conferring a privilege by statute change an eligibility requirenent in the Constitution. They made a mistake, using sloppy language, and corrected it in the next act on the subject. It is also irrelevant. It is a naturalization act, and a statute cannot change the meaning of a term in the Constitution. For that one has to go back to the usage of the term before 1787, and that means usage by Coke and Blackstone, especially Coke, in Calvin’s Case. That case controls the meaning for the Founders, who regularly referred to those authors when they were unclear on legal terms of art. The early Congresses often made constitutional errors. Then as now they did not always think everything through. For that matter, the Framers made some mistakes in the Constitution, but we are stuck with those mistakes unless or until we amend it. That error was corrected by repeal with the Naturalization Act of 1795.
Sometimes miscited is Emmerich de Vattel, in his work Les Droit des Gens (Law of Nations), taking out of context the words from Book I:
§ 212. ... The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.
But this is not a precise translation from the French, which has no exact equivalent to “natural born”, and the French word word “parens” can mean close family, not necessarily biological parents. He was writing of a modified form of the rule of jus sanguinis that was municipal law (not the law of nations), and only for some countries on the European Continent. A little further down, he explains:
§ 214. ... there are states, as, for instance, England, where the single circumstance of being born in the country naturalizes the children of a foreigner.
However, “naturalizes” is also not an exact translation, which in Anglo-American law has come to mean a statutory or administrative process, but which for Vattel meant “makes one a citizen”, which could include natural circumstances.
The rule of jus soli goes back to at least 508 BC in Athens, when it was used to establish citizenship in districts called demes. The Romans mainly used jus sanguinis to organize the empire into national groups each with its own legal system (although they had to introduce the office of praetor peregrinus to adjudicate disputes between members of different groups). However, the Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD made jus soli the rule for the entire Empire. The rule was carried to France and England under Roman domination, and the Normans adopted it and spread it to Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall.
However, jus sanguinis prevailed in many Eastern and Central European countries at the time Vattel wrote, and spread to other countries on the European continent. It displaced jus soli in Britain in 1983 and in France in 1993, mainly in response to immigration of persons of different ethnicity.
On July 25, 1787, John Jay wrote to George Washington, presiding officer of the Convention:
Permit me to hint whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government, and to declare expressly that the Command in chief of the American army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.
There is no proof that deliberations took place at the convention on the subject of the letter. While the Committee on Detail originally proposed that the President must be merely a citizen as well as a resident for 21 years, the Committee of Eleven changed “citizen” to “natural born citizen” without explanation. The Convention accepted the change without further debate.
Sometimes miscited on this subject is the Supreme Court case, The Venus, 12 U.S. 8 Cranch 253 253 (1814), which commented in dictum on various views of citizenship and the rights of citizens in a case in which the issue was whether a ship or cargo belonging to a U.S. citizen may be seized as a prize if it was bound to a nation with which the U.S. was at war, even if the U.S. citizen did not know it was at the time, but the holding was not on the issue of what constitutes citizenship, much less natural born citizenship.
In his 1826 Commentaries on American Law, James Kent said:
Natives are all persons born within the jurisdiction and allegiance of the United States. This is the rule of the common law, without any regard or reference to the political condition or allegiance of their parents, with the exception of the children of ambassadors, who are in theory born within the allegiance of the foreign power they represent.
In an 1829 treatise, A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, William Rawle (1759-1836), formerly the U.S. Attorney for Pennsylvania (1791-1799), wrote that The citizens of each state constituted the citizens of the United States when the Constitution was adopted. ... [He] who was subsequently born the citizen of a State, became at the moment of his birth a citizen of the United States. Therefore every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural born citizen in the sense of the Constitution, and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining to that capacity. .... Under our Constitution the question is settled by its express language, and when we are informed that ... no person is eligible to the office of President unless he is a natural born citizen, the principle that the place of birth creates the relative quality is established as to us.
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