Posted on 09/29/2011 8:43:31 AM PDT by Politics4US
Mark Levin says Rubio is a natural born citizen, and threatens to ban birthers on his social sites.
It’s what passes for reality.
You let me know when something else happened.
You said: “. What happened after the founding era is IRRELEVANT to what were the meanings of concepts ratified in the founding era. Subsequent legal history is inconsequential regarding articles of the Constitution. Unless they are SPECIFICALLY repealed, Articles of the Document which CREATED THE COURTS are still in effect. Subsequent judges cannot rule them void, the articles have higher legal authority than does the judges. Congress cannot vote them void, the Document has higher legal authority than Congress.”
Again, this is proof you Vattle Birthers do not have a CLUE what you are talking about. Even that case that you are sooo proud of, the Minor people. . .even they said that courts have to do stuff to figure out what the Founding people meant by stuff.
Plus, the Wong people and the Indiana judges DID NOT “over-rule” the Constitution or the Founders. They just explained what the words meant.
Oh, I guess what you are trying sooo hard not to see and admit is, from the Supreme Court:
It thus clearly appears that by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, and the jurisdiction of the English sovereign; and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.
III. The same rule was in force in all the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the constitution as originally established.
All persons born in the allegiance of the king are natural-born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country, as well as of England. We find no warrant for the opinion that this great principle of the common law has ever been changed in the United States. It has always obtained here with the same vigor, and subject only to the same exceptions, since as before the Revolution.
Plus, you Vattle Birther’s inability to understand these few simple words is why conservative intellectuals are telling you to “shut up.” Maybe you should listen to them!!!
I’ve wasted a lot of time reading Wong Kim Ark. Haven’t gotten the whole thing done, but the citation that makes the jump to say that “under the allegiance” means the LOCATION of birth is from the Dred Scott decision. And that decision, as we know, did not grant that Negroes born in the US were “natural-born US citizens” - which would be the natural conclusion if natural-born citizenship was truly conferred ONLY by the place of birth. So something is decidedly screwy in all this.
There are so many contradictions and leaps between this decision and other decisions that it is hopeless to try to make sense of any of it.
For instance, this talks about the intention of the 14th Amendment to allow Blacks to be US citizens by virtue of their birth on US soil. They believed that it was unnecessary to specifically mention Blacks or other races/ethnicities because that was inherent in the word “person”. Little did they know that in 1973 the court would decide in Roe v Wade that the word “person” as used in the 14th Amendment doesn’t mean “biological person” but only “legal person” (that is, somebody who has Constitutional protection). Blacks were ruled in Dred Scott to not be legal persons, so if the 14th Amendment only applies to “legal persons”, as ruled in Roe v Wade, it never applied to Blacks - and still doesn’t, because no Constitutional amendment has ever specifically granted legal personhood to Blacks.
So none of the 14th Amendment applies to Blacks or any other biological person who is denied legal personhood, according to the SCOTUS in Roe v Wade. That means that even though citizens can’t be denied the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude (ala Fifteenth Amendment), the ability to even BE a citizen doesn’t apply to Blacks who are not considered “legal persons” according to the Dred Scott decision.
We can look at what was decided about citizenship in Wong Kim Ark and other earlier cases, but Roe v Wade overturned all that for Blacks because it changed the 14th Amendment’s definition of “person” back to the Dred Scott version - “legal personhood”, which specifically excluded Blacks according to Dred Scott.
So the whole thing is convoluted and makes absolutely no sense. Same thing applies with the whole issue of “under the jurisdiction”. According to Wong Kim Ark, it seems like every foreign terrorist who happens to be on US soil is “under US jurisdiction” and thus has all the same due process rights as anybody else, and their children would be “natural born citizens” based on the convoluted reasoning of Wong Kim Ark. So how can it be that due process for somebody “under US jurisdiction” is different than due process for an actual US citizen? Stuff like habeus corpus?
A Mexican citizen in the US, according to Wong Kim Ark, would have no immunities from US justice unless they were official ambassadors of the country, since they, like every citizen, are “under US jurisdiction” just by virtue of being here and having to follow US laws. And yet we’ve got the Mexican government claiming the US can’t execute capital punishment on a Mexican citizen who was sentenced to death for capital crimes - because as a MEXICAN CITIZEN he is NOT SUBJECT to US justice but immune from it.
Trying to make sense of all the discrepancies would drive a person insane because none of it is consistent. The Wong Kim Ark decision shows that different countries have at different times had multiple different versions of what constitutes either civil or political citizenship, and our own courts have openly said - even after the 14th Amendment - that “natural born citizen” has NOT been defined as “citizen at birth” or anything else. The WKA court jumped on that as meaning that it allows that persons born to aliens on US soil MIGHT be US citizens. But it could just as easily be said that it means that persons born to aliens on US soil MIGHT NOT be US citizens, much less “natural born citizens”. What it means is that it hasn’t been decided.
The whole thing is an exercise in frustration and futility because it is all so inconsistent. It makes me think of somebody spilling pizza on the Mona Lisa, and then trying to work it all together to make it all fit. There’s no way to make a pizza spill fit into the Mona Lisa. And there’s no way to take crappy decisions and make them fit into the jurisprudence of centuries.
Roe v Wade, for instance, throws EVERYTHING from before and after it out of whack. It came after Wong Kim Ark, and so everything in Wong Kim Ark would be overturned in the instances of Blacks, because Roe v Wade would revert us back to Dred Scott. That, in turn, would mean that some other factor - either skin color or ancestry - would negate a biological person’s ability to be a US citizen at birth. So even if “natural born citizen” meant “citizen at birth”, it would require some other criterion besides merely being human and being born in the US.
Seems to me that Wong Kim Ark did the same thing to Minor v Happersett. Minor v Happersett said NBC hadn’t been defined and yet Wong Kim Ark used Minor v Happersett to argue that “citizen at birth” is the same thing as NBC. It’s circular reasoning and none of it is either internally or externally consistent.
In the end what I come out of this with is the realization that human justice doesn’t exist. It’s all a vain, futile endeavor. We go from one botched human opinion to another botched human opinion, and none of it makes sense. It’s all meaningless. When we argue the iffy legal questions we have no way to make a reasonable decision because there is no way to reconcile the Mona Lisa with a pizza splotch, with a chocolate cake smear, or with any other flaw or twist in the prevailing human wisdom of the time.
And in the meantime I haven’t gotten my grapes picked or canned, the beans stemmed, the dishes washed, my daughter’s dress sewn, the laundry put away, or the newspaper inserts gathered. Nor have I made homemade ice cream to console ourselves with while we watch the Huskers get creamed by Wisconsin tonight.
The Wong Kim Ark decision was that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship at birth to persons born to aliens within the country. It cited a circuit court case which said: “All persons born in the allegiance of the King are natural-born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens.” WKA made the leap to say that “born in the allegiance of the United States” means place of birth, by quoting from the Dred Scott decision, which said: “The first section of the second article of the Constitution uses the language, “a natural-born citizen.” It thus assumes that citizenship may be acquired by birth. Undoubtedly, this language of the Constitution was used in reference to that principle of public law, well understood in this country at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, which referred citizenship to the place of birth.”
So the Wong Kim Ark court concludes that being “born in the allegiance of the United States” means being born here. But the very same Dred Scott case that WKA uses to make the leap (equating “natural born citizen” with “born in the US”) REFUSED ANY citizenship to Blacks - ever - even if born on US soil. Which defies the very point the WKA court claimed the Dred Scott case made.
So you tell me where we’re at. Wong Kim Ark reasoning from Dred Scott would have Dred Scott proving that Blacks born in America are not only citizens but also “natural born citizens”, but Dred Scott actually said that Blacks can NEVER be any kind of US citizen. Wong Kim Ark seems to allow Blacks to be US citizens, but then Roe v Wade claims that only “legal persons” can be US citizens (or “persons” at all, and thus able to have ANY protections under the law), and there has never been a Constitutional amendment overturning Dred Scott by declaring Blacks to be legal persons.
So at the end of all that, what’s the binding legal definition of “natural born citizen” as intended by the Founders when the Constitution was ratified? I don’t see it anywhere. I see a bunch of contradictions and confusion.
And I see Mark Levin who just calls us stupid and tells us to go somewhere else. Right now the most appealing place I can think of is Heaven, where the stupidity of man will finally be overcome. Since that’s not fully available to me right now I think I’ll go pick grapes or sew a dress.
Wong Kim Ark assumes that “natural born citizen” as intended by the Founders is the same thing as “citizen at birth”, based almost entirely on Dred Scott and other cases from around that time, which were primarily focused on whether Blacks, gypsies, and “Mongolians” could be US citizens.
How would a person know what the Founding Fathers intended back in 1787 by looking at a racist Dred Scott decision of 1857? A decision that denied ANY kind of citizenship to Blacks even if they were the 14th generation born on US soil, I might add. How the Wong Kim Ark court got from that Dred Scott decision to saying that the Founding Fathers intended anybody born here to be eligible to be POTUS is astounding. I’ve seen pretzels that were less convoluted.
You said: “Wong Kim Ark assumes that “natural born citizen” as intended by the Founders is the same thing as “citizen at birth”, based almost entirely on Dred Scott and other cases from around that time, which were primarily focused on whether Blacks, gypsies, and “Mongolians” could be US citizens.
How would a person know what the Founding Fathers intended back in 1787 by looking at a racist Dred Scott decision of 1857?”
That is not what I saw when I read it again. It was mostly old-timey English stuff from before the American Revolution, then they showed how the same stuff held true until then (1898). Sooo, I don’t think Dred Scott was a big part of it at all because nothing I posted above came from Dred Scott, I don’t think.
What you quoted is not the decision of SCOTUS. It is a citation from “Dicey Conflict of Laws, pp. 173-177, 741.”
Who is this “Dicey” and what authority does he have in the US courts? Why should he be believed any more than somebody like Donofrio, for instance? If the court had cited Leo Donofrio, what weight would you give that citation in their decision?
The WKA decision introduces Dicey’s work thusly:
“Mr. Dicey, in his careful and thoughtful Digest of the Law of England with reference to the Conflict of Laws, published in 1896, states the following propositions, his principal rules being printed below in italics:”
Propositions. Just like Leo Donofrio has offered propositions.
See, the Wong Kim Ark decision quotes everybody as if they all had the same weight, lived at the same time, were addressing the same issues, etc. Just sorting out the quotes and putting them in order of date, authority, and direct relevance could take me weeks.
I wonder what Mr Dicey has to say about both Britain and the US denying citizenship to Blacks born on their soil, subject to their jurisdiction - since he claims that citizenship has always for the last 3 centuries been automatic for anybody born on the soil of a particular country.
How old are you?
Read it again. The leap from “natural born citizen” to “place of birth” comes from a direct quote taken from the Dred Scott decision.
The citation you keep giving us is from somebody who claimed in 1896 that the previous 3 centuries had seen automatic British or US citizenship (respectively) granted to anybody born on British or US soil. And this was just a few years after the US fought a very bloody Civil War regarding whether Blacks born on US soil could be US citizens, with Constitutional protections.
I’m sorry, but this is kind of a “duh” moment. We get done with a bloody Civil War, and then this guy claims that one of the major reason for the war had never even existed for the previous 300 years?
You asked: What you quoted is not the decision of SCOTUS. It is a citation from “Dicey Conflict of Laws, pp. 173-177, 741.”
Who is this “Dicey” and what authority does he have in the US courts? Why should he be believed any more than somebody like Donofrio, for instance? If the court had cited Leo Donofrio, what weight would you give that citation in their decision?
See, the Wong Kim Ark decision quotes everybody as if they all had the same weight, lived at the same time, were addressing the same issues, etc. Just sorting out the quotes and putting them in order of date, authority, and direct relevance could take me weeks.
To which I say AMEN!!! That stuff is just all over the place for page after page and it is like TORTURE trying to follow it. But that Indiana case that quoted the Wong Kim Ark stuff made it real easy to follow, which I guess that is their jobs as judges, to sort it all out. Which is usually where I go if I have to cut and paste stuff in debates.
The Indiana case said one legally-binding thing: the plaintiff lacks standing.
Without taking the case up, anything the court said about the case and its underlying issue has as much legal weight as any other legal blowhard. If they wanted to rule on the case they should have accepted it and made a legally-binding decision. As it is, all they said that legally “counts” is that the plaintiff lacked standing.
Leaving out context is almost always a bad thing, even if it takes less time. Rush a miracle, man, you get rotten miracles.
In the meantime, who is this Dicey, and how can he claim that citizenship by jus soli had been automatic for the last 300 years, when Blacks born on the soil of the country had been denied citizenship almost the entire 300 years referenced?
I don't think so. Here is what they said:
Based upon the language of Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 and the guidance provided by Wong Kim Ark, we conclude that persons born within the borders of the United States are “natural born Citizens” for Article II, Section 1 purposes, regardless of the citizenship of their parents. Just as a person “born within the British dominions [was] a natural-born British subject” at the time of the framing of the U.S. Constitution, so too were those “born in the allegiance of the United States [] natural-born citizens.”
============= Then you said:
"In the meantime, who is this Dicey, and how can he claim that citizenship by jus soli had been automatic for the last 300 years, when Blacks born on the soil of the country had been denied citizenship almost the entire 300 years referenced?"
Uh, slaves were exempt from citizenship here until the 14th Amendment. As far as Dicey, who knows sooo, I googled him and you can go read it at page 173.
You asked how old I was and then said: I’m sorry, but this is kind of a “duh” moment. We get done with a bloody Civil War, and then this guy claims that one of the major reason for the war had never even existed for the previous 300 years?
Uh, how old are you??? Laws and stuff applied to white people that did not apply to blacks, and slaves, and even. . . WOMEN!!! That is why they passed the 14th Amendent to make it apply to everybody.
Sooo what, now you are trying NOT to believe your eyes about what Wong Kim Ark says, by fussing about Dred Scott and slaves??? Quit playing games and just read the case. This kind of stuff is why Mark Levin and other people are telling Vattle Birthers they are stupid and not rational.
You all are indeed a very thin-skinned lot.
"Us" meaning "conservatives", no doubt. Authentic freepers. And "thin skinned" meaning "intolerant of lying crap slung by a leftist troll".
Pontifications from a person who’s been on the site less than 2 mos. Your manners stink.
Did the Indiana court take up the case on its merits, or not? If it didn’t take up the case, then it has no business ruling on anything IN the case, because it hasn’t gone through the due process of hearing input. The court can jaw around all they want but from a legal sense the only binding thing that court said was that they denied the plaintiff standing.
It’s sort of like somebody saying, “I’m not the referee in the game and I didn’t even watch it, but I say the pass was incomplete.” Doesn’t work that way. If you’re not the ref, you can spout off all you want but even if your day job is to referee the NFL, your jawing about a game your not refereeing has no more weight than the lowliest couch potato second-guessing the refs on TV.
Just glancing at that site you linked to, almost all Dicey’s references depend on the Brith Nationality Act of 1870, which is about 100 years after the US Constitution was ratified. To use this source in an attempt to discern exactly what the US Constitution’s Framers meant when they said “natural born citizen” is about like using 2011 laws to discern what the US Congress intended in its laws on women’s suffrage in 1911. There’s a lot of water under the bridge between those 2 times, and a more accurate measure would be the writings actually cited or read by the Founding Fathers when they were writing the Constitution.
That would include Vattel, whose book was only recently discovered as being LONG OVERDUE from one of the Founding Fathers’ (Jefferson’s?) library.
Wong Kim Ark wasn’t about NATURAL BORN CITIZENSHIP, but only about citizenship - which the Constitution only addressed/defined in the 14th Amendment, which might explain why the court involved itself wih writings around that time.
But Article II of the Constitution - speaking specifically about NATURAL BORN citizenship - was written about 100 years before the 14th Amendment, and the proper century to reflect the views of those authors is the 1700’s, not the 1800’s, 1900’s, or 2000’s. Probably not even 1607, which is over 150 years removed from the ratification of the US Constitution. The court in Wong Kim Ark seems to be projecting the mindset of the late 1800’s onto the Founding Fathers, even while citing a previous Supreme Court decision which treated natural born citizenship differently than just plain citizenship and said that natural born citizenship had not been defined. The end determination of the WKA court regarded citizenship, not specifically “natural born” citizenship so they might not have thought it made much difference that their sources were all either 150 years before the Founding Fathers or 100 years after. A court case specifically taking up the definition of NATURAL BORN citizenship should not be so careless.
The citizenship status of both slaves and married women were largely determined by factors other than place of birth. That’s more than half the population whose citizenship (or lack thereof) was determined by something besides place of birth. That’s a lot of people.
Oh come on, what do you *really* think. ;)
Joking aside, it is odd to be insulted by a person who won’t even call him/herself pro-life. He/she can’t figure out when life begins, in fact, and has no idea whether RU486 is good or bad. This poster is very good at putting others down, but not so good at figuring out the basics of pro-life vs pro-abortion/death.
I have read the case. That should be obvious to anybody who has read my comments.
Wong Kim Ark didn’t decide anything about NBC, although it used a citation from Dred Scott to conclude that “natural born” means “born in the US”. If the Dred Scott court had meant that, they would have concluded that Blacks were eligible to be POTUS but in reality they concluded that Blacks have the same rights and protections as cattle. So I somehow think that the Wong Kim Ark court misunderstood the Dred Scott reference.
What it comes down to is this: the Wong Kim Ark court didn’t cite anything from the Founding Fathers regarding “natural born citizen” and they probably felt they didn’t need to because the issue before them was not specifically about “natural born citizenship”. It was about any of the ways that a person could be a US citizen. They said that a person born on US soil to aliens is a US citizen at birth.
They cited Minor v Happersett but missed the main point of that very Minor v Happersett reference they gave - which is that there were still legal questions, even after the 14th Amendment was ratified, as to whether anybody but a person born on US soil to US citizens could be a “natural born citizen”. That DOESN’T sound like the Minor v Happersett court understood the Dred Scott decision to mean that “citizen at birth” is the same thing as “natural born citizen”. The Minor v Happersett court didn’t decide the issue of NBC because it was outside the scope of the case, and it was also outside the scope of Wong Kim Ark.
I think it’s a matter of not wishing to articulate his position...
Boy, if I keep on doing this kind of stuff I am going to be able to work as a para-legal or something. OK, I read the stuff and googled some stuff, and NO The Case Was NOT Dismissed On Standing Stuff!!!
It was dismissed because there was NO LEGAL BASIS for all the stuff the Vattle Birthers were saying!!! That is because all the law the Vattle Birthers tried to use was just, in Mark Levin’s words, “Vattle Birther Crap.”
A “Failure to State a Claim is A 12B6 thingy which is this: “Within a judicial forum, the failure to present sufficient facts which, if taken as true, would indicate that any violation of law occurred or that the claimant is entitled to a legal remedy.”
Which means when the court said:
Based upon the language of Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 and the guidance provided by Wong Kim Ark, we conclude that persons born within the borders of the United States are “natural born Citizens” for Article II, Section 1 purposes, regardless of the citizenship of their parents. Just as a person “born within the British dominions [was] a natural-born British subject” at the time of the framing of the U.S. Constitution, so too were those “born in the allegiance of the United States [] natural-born citizens.”
The Vattle Birthers were all wrong in their legal theories.
So, nooo, “standing whatever” is not mentioned there as why they threw it out. Which means, they must have read the law and decided the Vattle Birthers didn’t know what they were talking about. *Which I can certainly understand!!!). Which means if the Vattle Birthers file some more “ Vattle Birther crap” they are going to lose some more.
It also looks like a matter of making it personal, and being nasty about it. When I used the phrase in question, I explained exactly what I was talking about and why it qualified. Mr. SoCo just tosses it out as a personal insult. Perhaps he’s not read the posting rules?
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