Is this really it? (re: possible Obama's Kenyan B.C.

If the 14th changed citizenship into just born and naturalized. Why wasn’t the text of Article II changed to require the president to be a born citizen?

I'm going to save your excellent explanation. Trying to learn more of the history of Law of Nations, I got too fascinated with Leipniz’ history, and haven't found my way yet to law of the Roman Republic. I think FR needs to build a list of authoritative resources. I see too that you are new here as a blogger, and very welcome.

I will guess at your background, and mention that I've read seven or eight law review articles by presumably credible academics which assiduously avoid both supreme court case law, as well as even a reference to Vattel or Law of Nations. I'll point to one by Associate Dean for Research at Univ. of Illinois, another editor of the Harvard Law Review, only Lawrence Solum has actually published “Originalism and the Natural Born Citizen Clause”. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1263885

Solum acknowledges the Vattel definition, but sets up a straw dog by asserting that it is indeterminate because it depends up English Common law, with "subject" mucking things up. Solum never mentions John Marshall or or The Venus, or Minor or Bingham. He appears to be writing about “Originalism”, and mentions Scalia a number of times, dancing completely around the dozens of references in supreme court decisions to Vattel, and the several very explicit direct quotations in decisions citing Vattel. He also uses the Obama supporter ploy of quoting the 1790 Naturalization Act without noting that is was replaced. There are another half dozen such law review articles which, while not at written with quite the style, follow the same pattern.
Is this pay-to-play, the constitutional lawyers provide talking points should the issue become germane or viral?

The Venus, 12 U.S. 289

The whole system of decisions applicable to this subject rests on the law of nations as its base. It is therefore of some importance to inquire
how far the writers on that law consider the subjects of one power residing within the territory of another, as retaining their original character
or partaking of the character of the nation in which they reside.
Vattel, who, though not very full to this point, is more explicit and more satisfactory on it than any other whose work has fallen into my
hands, says
“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 indigenes are those born in the country of parents who are citizens. Society not being able to subsist and
to perpetuate itself but by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights.”
“The inhabitants, as distinguished from citizens, are strangers who are permitted to settle and stay in the country. Bound by their residence
to the society, they are subject to the laws of the state while they reside there, and they are obliged to defend it because it grants them protection, though they do not participate in all the rights of citizens. They enjoy only the advantages which the laws or custom gives
them. The perpetual inhabitants are those who have received the right of perpetual residence. These are a kind of citizens.

Concurring decision by Chief Justice John Marshall
Because I suspect you will note the use of the word “indigene”, I'll suggest that you find the same passage in any of the English translations of Law of Nations to learn that “indigene” was translated to “natural born citizen”.

Generally speaking (meaning discounting the early and special case exceptions), you would not expect to find American Colonial statutes concerning the establishment of native born citizenship in the late 18th Century, because it was already established as an English common-law status. Matthew Bacon, A New Abridgement of the Law, Vol 1, 1736), p. 77.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England (originally published 1765-1769)

The English common-law was not the SOLE nor even predominant source of the citizenship laws of the United States, contrary to some utterly erroneous Supreme Court (SCOTUS) holdings and U.S. Congressional testimonies. Proof of that fact can be found by simply reading those first citizenship laws.

After the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, each State began to enact its own legislation regarding citizenship laws. Some states enacted statutes to replace the former English common-laws which followed the principle of jus solis as before in some regards and not in others. Other States such as the State of Virginia enacted statutes using a mixture of jus sanguannis, jus soli, and other laws and customs typical in other regions of Europe. At the time of adoption of the Constitution, the Federal Government was not responsible for establishing uniform laws of citizenship and naturalization, because the States had reserved those powers of legislation for themselves.

Given the wide differences in citizenship laws enacted among the early States, you can see how any claims that the singular source of the citizenship laws of the United States was the immediately preceding English common-law during the period of Colonial America is simply not possible nor true. In fact, the Founding Fathers used Vattel, Law of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 19; some elements of English common-law, and an assortment of other European citizenship laws and legal treatises.

In the final analysis, the misconception regarding the role of English common-law in establishing U.S. citizenship laws and the natural born citizen phrase in the Constitution has led people astray in their search for the definition of the term. By ignoring the fact that most nations other than England-Britain often did not always use the place of birth or jus soli to claim the citizenship nor allegiance of a person born of foreign parents in their domains, these people have overlooked the obvious fact the Founding Fathers were referring to a person’s allegiance at birth and how the allegiance was NOT always determined by place of birth in Europe, the rest of the World, or the United States.

One of the most perplexing puzzles people have faced when trying to determine the intended definition of the natural born citizens phrase used in the Constitution versus the natural born subject phrase used in the English common-law are the outright conflicts and inconsistencies encountered in particular cases when you try to define a natural born citizen soley by place of birth. Such a construction is impossible to reconcile with the fact the phrase was recommended for inclusion in the Constitution by John Jay, George Washington, and the other Founding Fathers for the explicit purpose of excluding any person born with allegiance to a foreign sovereign.

On the other hand, the construction makes perfect sense when you read it as the Founding Fathers so easily understood it as meaning the natural born allegiance of a person. The Founding Fathers were concerned with a person’s allegiance in the case of a naturalized citizen, and they were concerned with natural born allegiance of person born with allegiance only to the United States and without allegiance to any foreign sovereign. Since some foreign nations granted citizenship by jus sanguinnis, a person born in one of the United States could be born in the United States owing allegiance to a foreign sovereign in accordance with the Law of Nations.

In the era before the existence of dual citizenship, the child of a foreign father was born with allegiance only to the foreign sovereign of the father’s nation. In the era since the existence of dual citizenship, the child of a foreign father was born with divided allegiance to the foreign sovereign of the father’s nation when their laws allowed and allegiance to the United States.

Ultimately, the natural born citizen phrase is about having a natural born allegiance to the United States, just as the oath of allegiance is about transferring allegiance and conferring naturalized citizenship on a person born with allegiance to a foreign sovereign. It’s all about allegiance at birth. The Founding Fathers deliberately excluded a person born with allegiance to a foreign sovereign at birth from ever being eligible to the Office of the President or Commander-in-Chief of the United States.

See how the phrase was used in America in the late 18th Century and early 19th Century at John Greschak’s website: What is a Natural Born Citizen of the United States? Note how allegiance is the common element used in virtually every variant form of the phrases natural born citizen, free citizen, free born citizen, naturalized citizen, etc. In other words, the Constitution’s natural born citizen is a person who has a natural born allegiance only to the United States of America.

So, this game of gotcha isn't quite working out for you. Maybe you can argue from the facts of the matter.

This coming from a poster who has produced nothing but empty assertions. Too funny.

Meese and the Heritage Foundation scholars trump your Obama as a "constitutional scholar" card.

This just proves that you can never be too old to learn new things! THank you all for the excellent synopsis of the situation regarding Hamilton. Obviously, this was a point of history that I had misunderstood, or had forgotten.

Actually, it is something I probably had never been taught, since at the time I studied American History we were taught that our founding fathers (except for the despicable Burr) did no wrong. ;^)

I don't doubt that you are right El Gato. I read that the hospital was just a few hundred meters off base, and a claim regarding the birth certificate, and dismissed the rest of the details. It didn't much matter, but I should know that sources should be questioned. This is the first I've heard of his mother saying he was born on base. If mom said so, I'll buy it. Would that mom had run for President with Sarah Palin. But it wouldn't make any difference, according to Gabriel Chin in the Michigan Law Review.

Apparently Panama is a unique case, and there had never been citizenship established for children of servicemen stationed in Panama as of 1936. There was a bill passed in 1937, but it could not have conferred natural born citizenship, a fact that Chin glibly ignored. The children of servicemen, born in Coco Solo, have been deported - in the days when we still did that. I'm sure, had McCain somehow secured the votes, the left would have gone after his eligibility.

There was a case brought in New Hampshire challenging McCain's eligibility. The big legal guns of the left were brought out to try to make a case for McCain, including the Dems in the Senate who were the firmly behind Obama. That case was dropped! We'll probably never confirm it, but I suspect McCain was provided with faux legal support by the left so Republicans wouldn't dare question Obama’s eligibility. Chin conceded that there was no law which could make McCain eligible.

I'm happy to be corrected!

Was the hospital a US military one ?

Then it is part of the base...

We lived in base housing at one base 3 miles from the actual base...

But it was still part of the base.

Tell me where it came from. Then it will be taken seriously. Until then it’s mental masterbation to speculate.

Stanley Ann, where were you on the night of August 4, 1961 ???

Could be related to a juicy scenario Jerry Corsi posited a week or so ago? Grandma Toots was only 38 years old when BO was born. She was quite attractive. Marshall Davis told of an affair with a married white couple in one of his porn novelettes. Corsi claims to have some evidence that the frequent moves by Stanley and Toots may have been related to indiscretions involving Toots. There are apparently photos of Ann on the beach a few months before the birthdate looking typically svelte - as the salacious nude photos, which I of course have never seen, supposedly show. Toots, Corsi claimed, like Ann, as described in Dreams from my Father, was very attracted to black men.

This, of course, just adds to the confusion, but may offer some more reasons for the concealed birth certificate. If Toots, who raised BO, were the birth mother, Davis was a bit old to be the father, but Obama senior wasn't.

THANKS THANKS.

Why would Davis be too old ???

Charlie Chaplin was 80 when Geraldine was born...

Thanks for posting the link to Madelyne Dunham’s obit.

She “volunteered” at the library, the courthouse, and served as an arbiter for the State Judiciary after her retirement from the bank.

For some reason, the obituary site will not allow me to copy and paste from it. Thus, the summary.

I knew that she volunteered some where where she had access to SS numbers, but the above is quite a list of volunteer activities. She was described as “very sharp & quick” and she intimidated those working around her and her trainees. The obit sheds a slightly different light on her — not a person who was a slave to her family at all. Instead, she sounds like a person who called all the shots.

Her advice to her grandson is interesting too. I wonder what she meant by “keep your head on straight...”?

I'm reposting Prince of Space's link to the Dunham obituary.

Dunham Obit. It's interesting and sheds a different light on the family.

The phrase, “natural born citizen,” as it was used in the Constitution was all about “natural born” allegiance and not about “natural born” place of birth.

I respectfully disagree. The Constitution means EXACTLY what it says i.e. a naturally BORN citizen.

Hello newbie....
WhiskeyX Since Aug 3, 2009

She thought that Stanley was going to fly to Boston, establish her domicile etc., then return thru Seattle to Hawaii. She said SHE NEVER SAW HER AGAIN, although she knew through another mutual friend John, and Maxine Box, that she was again in Seattle in spring 1962. She said from what she's read that Stanley was a correspondence student at the UW in fall 1961, but that she didn't necessarily have to be there to be a correspondence student. However she knew Stanley was there in spring 1962.

I asked that question on some thread, somewhere over the past 5 days. Other accounts describe Stanley Ann as an extension student. There is a difference between extension and correspondence. I don't even know if UW had both. Extension students have to show up for classes occasionally, although the classes are probably given at unconventional times and places. Correspondence students do all of their work by mail and never (seldom) set foot on campus. I'm merely pointing out this detail because it differes from other accounts reported, whether it be more accurate or the friend mis-remembered the circumstances.

Thank you again for all the great work you have done on this.

Madelyn Dunham blazed a trail for women in banking
By Susan Essoyan

POSTED: 12:35 p.m. HST, Nov 03, 2008

(Single Page View) | Return to Paginated View

Madelyn Payne Dunham opened doors for women at Bank of Hawaii with a firm hand and no fanfare, the same way she helped raise her grandson, Barack Obama.

Dunham, 86, died last night after a battle with cancer, according to a statement from Obama and his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.

Petite and determined, Dunham rose from clerk to bank vice president in the space of a decade, one of two women to reach that position at Bankoh in 1970, the first ever. Dunham remained reserved then, just as she was decades later when the world’s spotlight shone on her grandson.

“She’s a very down-to-earth person, a tiny little woman,” said Alice Dewey, a University of Hawaii professor emeritus and family friend. “No nonsense.”

During Obama’s historic campaign for the U.S. presidency, Dunham steadfastly declined media interviews. Ill and frail, she stayed cloistered in the two-bedroom Punahou-area apartment where she and her late husband Stanley had helped raise “Barry.”

Obama brought his family to Hawaii to visit her in August and paid tribute to her when he accepted his party’s nomination later that month.

“She’s the one who taught me about hard work,” he said. “She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me.”

Just 11 days before the election, Obama suspended his campaign to fly to Honolulu again and spend time with Dunham after she broke her hip and her health failed. He said Dunham, who turned 86 on Oct. 26, was alert but might not live until Election Day.

Dunham had appeared briefly in one campaign commercial, her spine hunched with osteoporosis, saying she believed her grandson had “a lot of depth and a broadness of view.”

In what appears to be her last public interview, in 2004, Dunham told the Chicago Sun-Times that she was “a little amazed” by Obama’s keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, the speech that first catapulted him into the nation’s consciousness. With her grandson, however, she was more circumspect.

“She called up, and she said, ‘You did well,’” Obama recounted the day after that speech. “And I said, ‘Thank you.’ And she said, ‘I just kind of worry about you. I hope you keep your head on straight.’”

Keeping your head on straight, working hard and working wise, treating your neighbor as yourself, those were watchwords for Madelyn Payne Dunham. Obama, who called her “Toot,” short for the Hawaiian word “Tutu,” credits her with passing on those values she grew up with in small-town Kansas. Like many grandparents in Hawaii, she and her husband played a big role in his life.

Their daughter, Stanley Ann Dunham, met and married Barack Obama Sr., the first African student at the University of Hawaii, in 1961 while she was still a freshman there. When he left them two years later, the Dunhams stepped in to help raise little “Barry,” so his mother could go back to college and get her degree in anthropology.

They also looked after Barry during his fifth-grade year and again in high school, allowing him to attend the prestigious Punahou School with help from scholarships. His mother spent those years in Indonesia, her second husband’s homeland and the site of her field work as an anthropologist.

“The support she [Madelyn] provided for Stanley and her little boy was quite phenomenal,” said Marilyn O’Neill, a high school classmate of Stanley Ann’s. “Education was paramount for them.”

Madelyn and Stanley Dunham maintained a simple lifestyle, enjoying family meals together and games of bridge with friends, eschewing the trappings that might come with a bank vice presidency. They were “not interested in rank or power or privilege,” said Georgia McCauley, a close family friend who became “hanai mother” to Obama’s younger sister Maya after their mother died in 1995 at age 52.

“Her grandmother’s lived in the same two-bedroom apartment for 40 years,” McCauley said. “They never drove fancy cars. They chose to put their resources into education and travel.”

Madelyn Payne was born in Peru, Kansas, on Oct. 26, 1922, and her family moved to the nearby oil town of Augusta when she was 3. Just before graduating from high school in 1940, she secretly married Stanley Dunham. During World War II, her husband joined the army and she worked on a bomber assembly line for Boeing.

In 1942, Stanley Ann was born, named after her dad because he had wanted a boy. After the war, the young family traipsed across the country in search of opportunity.

“Her mother was more of the strong, silent type,” recalled Maxine Box, Stanley Ann’s best friend at Mercer Island High School, near Seattle. “And her dad was very gregarious, teasing and smiling and very outgoing. He made a good salesman. She was a banker. It suited her.”

In 1960, the Dunhams moved to Honolulu, where Stanley Dunham continued to work in furniture sales and Madelyn Dunham joined Bankoh. She founded the Escrow Association of Hawaii, said Dennis Ching, now president of Integrity Escrow & Title, and a management trainee under Dunham at Bankoh in 1966.

“She was my first boss,” Ching recalled. “We were afraid of her because she was so gruff. But she was a very warm person after you got to know her and you proved that you could do the job.”

Dunham retired Dec. 31, 1985. Her husband died in 1992 and is buried at Punchbowl Cemetery. For many years, she volunteered at the public library and the courthouse. Even as a volunteer, Dunham had an air of authority, her silver hair in a bun, always properly dressed.

“I used to be in awe of her, half intimidated and half in awe,” said Naomi Komenaka, who supervised a program at the state Judiciary where Dunham volunteered as an arbitrator. “She was feisty and sharp, really sharp. I felt like I had to be two steps ahead of her, and it was challenging to be two steps ahead of her because she was so quick … I really learned a lot from her.”

Madelyn Payne Dunham opened doors for women at Bank of Hawaii with a firm hand and no fanfare, the same way she helped raise her grandson, Barack Obama.

Star-Bulletin / 1979
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is pictured getting a hug from his grandmother Madelyn Dunham during his high school graduation.
View more photos >>Dunham, 86, died last night after a battle with cancer, according to a statement from Obama and his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.