Please provide links.
Are the legal sources obscure 18th century legal dictionaries?
It strikes me that the term has never been defined in American law, nor in case law, so essentially you have an interpretation - based on "original intent". And as we know many of the most learned legal scholars and high ranking judges believe that original intent is only one of many factors one uses to interpret the law, along with current community standards, evolution of our understanding of justice, penumbras and emmanations, European and Native American legal traditions and other factors.
So, it's asking a lot for people to toss out a sitting President (or forbid him from running again) based on this hard adherence to a defintion.
After all we violate huge swaths of the Constitution every day: Social Security is clealy unconstitutional based on the Founders Intent. So is Foreign Aid. So is maintaining a standing Army.
Do you favor abolishment of the standing Army?
Most conservatives, and even many birthers are not ever consistent, so it does start to look like an obsession with one facet of a stone with thousands of facets on it.
As the key or demonstration issue I believe it is a very weak one.
The sources I provided were Vattel’s “Law of Nations” and Minor v Happersett.
My point in all of this is that the courts are the proper people to tell us what “natural born citizen” means, and this bill would give the courts a case that they could decide. It should be a win-win for anybody interested in having the courts fulfill their Constitutional role of interpreting the Constitution and applying it to particular cases.
This is basic, basic stuff. If even this basic stuff has to be fought for so hard, it tells us where we’re at as a nation.
There are a lot of Constituitonal issues that I haven’t spoken out on because I have not researched them in depth. This one is Constitutionally a no-brainer. The courts should decide this issue.
My particular interest in this issue is from a “rule of law” perspective - probably because I have observed first-hand how badly the laws and rules have been broken by just about every government entity there is, at local, state, and federal levels - and how law enforcement and courts at every level have turned a deaf ear to all the evidence and pleas for an investigation.