The very fact that it requires a special act of law to make someone a citizen is absolute proof that they are not a "NATURAL" citizen.
One of the dumbest but oft repeated birther truisms disregards that the Constitution itself is an act of law. Where in the Constitution does it say that Congress shall make no law defining citizenship of any sort they choose? Congress has been making laws defining citizenship and retroactively granting citizenship to various classes of people since the Founding. The key problem with birthers is their utter incapability to view history linearly and recognize the state of the law as it applies to the present.
Since you scoffed at the 14th, George Edwin Taylor, born to a slave father, ran for president in 1904. A whole slew of candidates who did not become president failed to meet the birther definition. Chester Arthur and Barack Obama both fail to meet the birther requirement.
Let me put this bluntly: you have to be literally INSANE to believe that the Supreme Court will EVER declare the 21st and 44th Presidents of The United States to have been ineligable and subsequently negate all their acts as president. Please beem yourself back down to the planet as you are living in an unhealthy place.
Mark Levin may be misguided and uninformed, but you are just an idiot.
One of the dumbest but oft repeated birther truisms disregards that the Constitution itself is an act of law.
And it does not presume to define "natural born citizen" because the founders knew that no act of man could change what is Natural Law.
Where in the Constitution does it say that Congress shall make no law defining citizenship of any sort they choose?
Is it really worth my time to show you? I CAN show you, but I don't perceive you as having the competence to understand it. I'm not going to bother looking it up. You look it up if you want. It's under congresses power to naturalize.
Congress has been making laws defining citizenship and retroactively granting citizenship to various classes of people since the Founding.
They have been using their enumerated power of "naturalization", which means "to make like Natural." Note this is not the same thing as being natural, it is making something "like natural." It is the legal equivalent of adoption.
The key problem with birthers is their utter incapability to view history linearly and recognize the state of the law as it applies to the present.
I would say that this is the problem with you folk. The fact that there were several hundreds of thousands of British Loyalists before, during and After the Revolutionary war, and who did not become American Citizens, though they were born in the United States, is a massive amount of evidence that your theory is incorrect, yet here you are trying to make us believe this nonsense because you are incapable of recognizing the state of the law as it applied to the past.
Since you scoffed at the 14th, George Edwin Taylor, born to a slave father, ran for president in 1904. A whole slew of candidates who did not become president failed to meet the birther definition. Chester Arthur and Barack Obama both fail to meet the birther requirement.
The People in Chester Arthur's time knew very well that a President must be a "natural citizen". They just did not know at the time that Chester Arthur was not. Now that Barack has come along, people have simply forgotten what this seldom studied and seldom used component of Constitutional law really meant.
Perhaps Breckinridge Long (1916) can explain it to you, though I very much doubt it. You have a mental density that is likely impenetrable by facts or logic.
The Constitution does not define what a “natural born Citizen” is. But the Constitution at Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 does give to Congress the power to make uniform the naturalization laws. With the “natural born Citizen” clause being a provision that establishes a certain class of citizenship which has nothing to do with regulating immigration, Congress’s naturalization power does not include the power to amend or dilute the constitutional meaning of a “natural born Citizen.”
Seriously?
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
It's called the Rule of Exclusion.
If the power is not enumerated, it isn't there!
• § 207. XIII. Another rule of interpretation deserves consideration in regard to the constitution. There are certain maxims, which have found their way, not only into judicial discussions, but into the business of common life, as founded in common sense, and common convenience. Thus, it is often said, that in an instrument a specification of particulars is an exclusion of generals; or the expression of one thing is the exclusion of another. Lord Bacon's remark, "that, as exception strengthens the force of a law in cases not excepted, so enumeration weakens it in cases not enumerated," has been perpetually referred to, as a fine illustration.
Justice Joseph Story on Rules of Constitutional Interpretation
Doug - you seem to use the term “birther” a lot in your comments. What is your definition of “birther”? Is it:
A) someone who does not believe 0bama was born in the United States?
B) someone who thinks 0bama is not a natural born citizen based on the conditions of his birth, regardless of whether he was born in the U.S. or not?
The general use of the term “birther” is a pejorative to ridicule and diminish the credibility of those who believe, rightly or wrongly, that 0bama was not born in the U.S.
The “B” definition is someone who is interested in a point of law.
Your use of the “birther” term in the context of discussions about 0bama’s natural born citizen status is an attempt to diminish the credibility of (or ridicule) the person with whom you are discussing, and redefine the current definition of the word in the process.
You are practicing Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, rule 5 and rule 10. This implies that you are not really interested in winning the discussion, just discrediting the person with whom you are discussing.
For the record, I’m sincerely disappointed in Mark Levin (and the rest of the conservative commentators). For someone as Constitutionally-knowledgeable as he is supposed to be, his inability to have a civil discussion about natural born citizenship implies there is something else going on that we don’t know about. It should be easy for him to have a show that lays out why 0bama is a natural born citizen and, in his capacity as a Constitutional scholar, put our doubts to rest. Instead, he ridicules those who broach the subject. Can you imagine the listening audience he’d have with that subject, a civil discussion and callers such as DiogenesLamp, Mario Apuzo and Leo Donofrio?