Posted on 08/24/2010 6:37:15 PM PDT by RobinMasters
The State Department is maintaining a "counter-misinformation" page on an America.gov blog that attempts to "debunk a conspiracy theory" that President Obama was not born in the United States, as if the topic were equivalent to believing space aliens visit Earth in flying saucers.
However, in the attempt to debunk the Obama birth-certificate controversy, the State Department author confirmed Obama was a dual citizen of the U.K. and the U.S. from 1961 to 1963 and a dual citizen of Kenya and the U.S. from 1963 to 1982, because his father was a Kenyan citizen when Obama was born in 1961.
In a number of court cases challenging Obama's eligibility, dual citizenship has been raised as a factor that could compromise his "natural born" status under Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution. The cases argue dual citizenship would make Obama ineligible even if documentary evidence were shown the public, such as the hospital-issued long-form birth certificate that indicates the place of his birth and the name of the attending physician.
The entry "The Obama Birth Controversy" was written by Todd Leventhal, identified as the chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team for the U.S. Department of State. The office appears to have been established "to provide information about false and misleading stories in the Middle East," as described in a biography of Leventhal published on the U.S. Public Diplomacy website.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
You are exactly right.....how sad.
False.
In common law, a natural born subject could have two alien parents.
False.
There is a reason no state DA or Sec of State has touched this, nor any member member of Congress...
The reason is not the one you imply, but rather because it is constitutional controversy which, according to Article III of the Constitution, lies within the judicial authority of the federal courts. So far, all courts presented with a case aimed at settling the question of Obama's presidential eligibility have lacked the courage to do so.
BTW, you are either ignorant of the subject matter at hand, or are deliberately trying to spread legal and historical misinformation about it.
As a general rule, there is nothing wrong with countering misinformation. It only gets to be a problem when what a government labels as "misinformation" happens to be real and true information.
Correct. Therefore, since the United States applied the same criteria for determining natural born citizens as were used in common law for natural born subjects, it follows that a natural born citizen can also have two alien parents.
YOU are the one denying the facts. I’ve posted the link to WKA, and explained why it means that...and every court, state and Congress has backed MY interpretation of WKA, not yours.
Sorry, but you don’t get to make up facts. They have said what they said, and in a 1983 decision went so far as to suggest that a NBC could have 2 ILLEGAL aliens for parents - which would go well beyond the argument in WKA.
Your assertion in agreement with Mr Rogers, that, "In common law, a natural born subject could have two alien parents," is complete poppycock.
You cite a case that only applies to all free persons, not ALL persons born within the territory. Those are remarkably different conditions than those set forth in the 14th amendment. Second, I’ve already shot down your ‘analagous’ argument. Analogous does not mean exactly the same. The President of the United States can be considered precisely analogous to the Monarch of Britain (or if you prefer, the Prime Minister) however, they are not the same, in either case. Allegiance is demanded from a subject, but a citizen has to declare allegiance or be born with a birthright to citizenship. There’s no birthright inherently derived from the soil of birth.
I presume you are talking about some Supreme Court decision. Will you kindly cite the case for me, and quote the relevant passage from that decision, so we can determine if they actually said what you presume they did?
The Supreme Court said the difference between NBS & NBC is terminology based on form of government. That is it. They then use the meaning of NBS to make WKA a NBC, and thus a citizen. THAT is what the first half of the WKA decision is about.
The other decision was one I read in passing after Ann Coulter mentioned it, but I didn’t bookmark it and I don’t have time today to search for it. It wouldn’t be binding regardless, since it was a footnote. It had to do with anchor babies, if that helps.
You seem to have forgotten these clear words of Justice Gray and the Wong Kim Ark Court:
“In Minor v. Happersett, Chief Justice Waite, when construing, in behalf of the court, the very provision of the Fourteenth Amendment now in question, said: ‘The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that.’ And he proceeded to resort to the common law as an aid in the construction of this provision.”
And these are the words from Minor v. Happersett and Justice Waite that the Court and Justice Gray in Wong Kim Ark cited from, are they not:
“The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.”
Is Justice Gray and his Wong Court in his own words accepting or rejecting Justice Waite and the Minor Court’s definition of “natural born citizen”???
I don’t know what army you served in, or what constitution you took an oath to, but we here in the States are under our Constitution and are American citizens — not British subjects. You may be a British subject — but we’re not.
Try the facts and the truth for once.
Alexander Hamilton never ran for president.
Burr was qualified to run under Article 2, grandfathering in those who were born in the colonies.
What you should know is that the Supreme Court cited the part of Minor they WANTED to cite. They then spent pages explaining what the meaning of NBC is, IAW their belief that NBC is the American form of NBS.
If you cannot read WKA without understanding why they mentioned NBC at all, then there is no hope for you - or you equally illiterate friends. You will just have to go on losing, and wondering why no one with any legal training agrees with you...
This is a reference to a decision from the North Carolina Supreme Court. He's saying here that North Carolina law equated "subject" with "citizen". He makes no claim about the US constitution. And when you say "Notice they DO consider the terms natural born subject and natural born citizen to be 'precisely analogous'", you are referring to the South Carolina court, not the USSC.
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
This was a statement by Chancellor Kent from the 6th edition of his commentaries, not a SC decision. And without fuller context, it's difficult to say if he's stating that simple birth in the US makes the person a NBC.
“They make NO argument that Wong Kim Ark qualified as a a naturalb born citizen. The only definition per the Constitution is citizen of the United States via the 14th amendment.”
Sure - they wrote for pages just for the fun of it!
They also delved for quite a while into the citizenship of a child born to US citizens abroad. That also has nothing to do with NBC in their analysis. They covered a lot of citizenship territory, quoting many different sources, authoritative, and non-authoritative, and sometimes conflicting.
WKA clearly establishes TWO arguments based on the Constitution for WKA’s citizenship - the 14th, which is their second argument, and the original intent of the phrase ‘natural born citizen’, which is their first argument.
Most references to "natural born" are talking about English law, and most of those references are to English statutes, not common law.
It seems to me that WKA brought in just about every possible discussion of citizenship as background information. Why else talk about children of citizens abroad? They're being thorough. Not using it all to decide Wong's fate, not establishing a definition, or to set precedent for future NBC cases. It looks to me like the definition of NBC is as "undefined" after WKA as it was before.
You’re still misrepresenting WKA. It did not use the meaning of NBS to make WKA an NBC. It used the meaning of NBS to justify calling WKA a citizen of the United States. Nothing in there says WKA is a natural born citizen. Read it. All of it. Learn it. Understand it ... correctly.
So then was Gray lying when he cited Justice Waite's definition of "natural born citizen"???
I'm aware of Vattel, and you are correct on this point.
Vattel is considered the common law source
Here you are incorrect. Vattel is not writing in the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition, but in the continental European legal tradition, which is based on Roman law. US law is based on Anglo-Saxon common law, whose definition of natural born subject/citizen does not require two citizen parents. Hence whatever Vattel says on the matter is irrelevant.
"In common law, a natural born subject could have two alien parents," is complete poppycock.
No it's not, it's based English common law precedent that goes back to the middle ages, much of which is referenced in the Wong Kim Ark decision. Mr. Rogers has already provided the relevant citations, so I will not reproduce them here.
Depends on who you talk to. The purpose of the natural born citizenship clause was to ensure that any president had a connection and loyalty to the U.S. from birth.
And the evidence of this Indonesian passport is where?
For what?
In short, Wong Kim Ark is a 14th Amendment matter, while Obama's eligibility in an Article II matter.
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