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To: SirJohnBarleycorn
I've outlined the possibility that a birth certificate could have been issued on the basis of nothing more than a claimed home birth.

You are misinformed. That is simply not true.

You can't understand why a young American woman who unexpectedly gave birth in a third world country would want to hurry back to America to her family and doctor, even though it entailed a difficult trip?

No, what I can't understand is why a young American woman, in her THIRD TRIMESTER OF PREGNANCY, in 1961, would fly half way around the world to a third world country.

The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question of what is required to be a natural born citizen for purposes of the Constitution.

That's because it is obvious. There are only two types of citizens mentioned in the Constitution: natural born and naturalized. If you're not naturalized, then logically you can only be natural born. Period. This is not an open question, the rantings of a guy who sees black helicopters following him everywhere he goes notwithstanding

343 posted on 07/23/2009 9:41:04 AM PDT by curiosity
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To: curiosity

Black helicopters? Huh?

It is remarkable how the suggestion that the president should disclose his long form birth certificate is making you become unhinged. I guess it would really send you around the bend if I noted that I think he should also release his college and law school transcripts and financial aid records!

Again, if, in the unlikely event Ann did travel somewhere other than Hawaii prior to giving birth, we don’t KNOW how far along in the pregnancy she might have been if she had so traveled.

Shouting with all caps that she must have been in the third trimester does not make it so.

Furthermore, one should step back a moment when considering these various scenarios.

For purposes of modeling behavior of large groups of people, making an assumption, such as that each person is a rational actor who makes decisions in an informed manner reasonably designed to maximize his or her personal benefit, may be appropriate and useful, for example in understanding the effect of an event or circumstance on a large system such as a national economy.

But when considering the possible behavior of an individual person, such as Ann Dunham Obama, it is foolish to make the same type of assumption.

Individuals often do dumb things that one would not expect a rational actor in the abstract to do. Implausible things happen all the time in the lives of individual people. Ann might well have been foolish enough to travel when pregnant, even quite far along. Who knows? She might have gotten on a plane with a two-week old infant and moved somewhere alone with little or no money far away from the support of her parents and doctor.

Supposing that a rational, informed person would or would not have taken some action, and then purporting to conclude definitively that therefore Ann Dunham Obama did or did not take that same action, is nonsense.

The best one can say is that something may be unlikely, or somewhat likely, or very likely, and so forth, depending on the extent and quality of the circumstantial evidence we have on which to make a judgment.

Also, it seems clear you understand little about constitutional jurisprudence, yet you pretend to certainty in this area as well.

Yes, it is possible that a modern Supreme Court might adopt the same or similar conditions and categories that Congress has enacted into current U.S. law (which, by the way, have changed from time to time) defining when a person born somewhere subject to US jurisdiction is a citizen at birth, for purposes of whether a citizen is “natural born” within the meaning of the presidential eligibility clause of the Constitution. But as a legal matter, such an outcome is not compelled by precedent or by the canons of constitutional interpretation. Indeed, such a result would likely be contrary to an originalist approach to the interpretation of the presidential eligibility clause.


344 posted on 07/23/2009 10:32:25 AM PDT by SirJohnBarleycorn
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