The Indonesian Citizenship Myth
And you may not consider it "relevant," but the fact that both the mother and daughter retained their US citizenship is indicative of intentions. Again, on what basis could Obama obtain Indonesian citizenhsip?
Look it up yourself. It’s not a hidden fact that he went to Bali to work on his book. You are wasting my time not even reading the posts and not even bothering to look up facts.
If you believe everything that is written in Obama's autobiography, I have a bridge to sell to you. Obama claims to have gone there with Michelle after they were married. If he went there, it was as a tourist and on a US passport. It is not relevant. He also visited Kenya, but that doesn't prove he was born there or used a British passport.
This particular issue is whether Obama expatriated himself under the terms of our laws and ceased to be a citizen at all. It has nothing at all to do with Tribe's and Olson’s or anyone else’s opinion on what constitutes “natural born citizen” under the Presidential Eligibility Clause.
You must be smoking something. He never ceased being a citizen.
Yes, he was a foreign student. Dianna Cotter published an article on Pravda, http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/29-03-2012/120917-barack_obama_foreign_student-0/
“He never ceased being a citizen.”
You assert this as fact? You have absolutely ZERO credibility on this issue.
The only thing you have demonstrated in this thread is:
(1) you have little command of the facts in this case and
(2) you have even more ignorance of the relevant law.
From you, a flat assertion of fact like that is completely worthless.
As for the facts, it is clear from your responses that coming into this thread:
(1) You didn’t even know that Obama traveled to Indonesia in 1981 and had no idea that Obama had ever returned to Indonesia after age 10.
(2) You didn’t know that Obama had traveled to Indonesia to work on his book (and apparently are ignorant of the sources that confirm that trip).
(3) You didn’t know about Stanley Ann’s passport documents or what was in them, including that she renewed her passport in Indonesia and removed Barry from her passport at that time.
As I have shown, much of your responses to me in this thread consist of misstating what I said and then trying to rebut the misstatement.
As for the law:
(1) As you indicated in post 53, you WRONGLY thought the only way for Obama to lose citizenship was to formally renounce it before a state department official. This is a BREATHTAKING IGNORANCE of the pertinent provisions of the law for someone who then goes on to offer such strong opinions on this case.
(2) I pointed out to you that the relevant provisions of law governing what Obama may have done were OTHER paragraphs under Section 1481(a) of the INA:
“taking an oath or making an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision thereof”
or
“obtaining naturalization in a foreign state upon his own application”
(3) You then continued to pretend these other statutory provisions do not exist, and tried to brush the matter off with vague generalizations like “dual nationality is an accepted fact” (citing as your authority a webpage from the State Dept providing a very general summary for the public) and “people acquire foreign passports all the time.”
The web page itself has no force of law. The law is the language passed by Congress as extant at the relevant times for Obama, which I set forth verbatim in my posts 56 and 57.
Indeed, the very webpage you cite undermines your own breezy statements about “dual nationality is an accepted fact” and “people acquire foreign passports all the time” by stating that “However, a person who acquires a foreign citizenship by applying for it may lose U.S. citizenship.”
Yes, a person CAN lose U.S. citizenship by acquiring a foreign citizenship. The reason is not because a State Dept employee writes something on a web page. The reason is because of the text of the statute passed by Congress that I cited.
(4) You didn’t even understand the larger legal context of this issue, thinking it has something to do with the debate over what “natural born” means in the Constitution. It has nothing whatsoever to do with that. If Obama is not even a citizen, we don’t even reach the question of what “natural born” means.
Anyone with any intellectual honesty or integrity who had realized he was so woefully ignorant of both the facts and the relevant provisions of law would be at least a bit circumspect in making flat pronouncements. But not you!
And you continue to be unable to grasp what I have told you. The site you cited “The Indonesian Citizenship Myth” rebuts the notion that Obama’s mother or Lolo could have renounced little Barry’s US citizenship for him, and in any event any purported loss due to their action would not have been effective because Obama established residence in the US before age 25.
That’s fine. But THAT IS NOT MY ARGUMENT, as I have told you OVER AND OVER on this thread.
I am not arguing that Barry lost his citizenship because of something his mother or Lolo did on his behalf. You are once again rebutting a straw man.
Yet once again, let me state that I am arguing that Obama may have done something ON HIS OWN APPLICATION AS A YOUNG ADULT, perhaps during or just prior to his college years, such as obtain an Indonesian passport, renew an Indonesian passport or make a formal declaration to the government of Indonesia that he desired to continue to be an Indonesian citizen, in circumstances where Indonesia, unlike countries like Israel and Ireland, required that such a person in effect forswear United States nationality or any other nationality because Indonesia refused to confer such documents or status to someone who was a citizen of the United States or any other country.
If he did so purport to forswear United States nationality, or if what he did would be considered tantamount to obtaining naturalization upon his own application within the meaning of U.S. law, then he may well have lost his United States citizenship by virtue of such action, according to the statutory provisions of our law in effect during that time period. (In this matter, the citizenship status of his mother or of his sister and his mother’s divorce has no legal relevance whatsoever.)
What did Obama actually, in fact do? I DON’T KNOW. Neither do you, contrary to your flat assertion.
Was he adopted by Lolo as a small child? Did he gain Indonesian citizenship status as a child as far as Indonesia was concerned? I don’t know.
But we DO know that the one document that emerged from Indonesia, his school record, shows him as an Indonesian citizen at that time.
And we DO know that the divorce papers for Lolo and Stanley Ann speak of him as the child of both of them, indicative of adoption (although this could be simply sloppy lawyering).
And as I outlined in detail above, if we look at the course of what happened without the benefit of hindsight, it would have been quite natural for someone in Lolo’s position to want to or be willing to adopt for purposes of Indonesian law the toddler son of the woman he married, since by all appearances they would have expected to live the rest of their lives in Indonesia and raise Barry at least to adulthood there. (And in life, circumstances later change due to unforeseen events.)
And then we are led to the question of his college applications and any financial aid papers.
Did he claim Indonesian nationality when he applied to Occidental, or Columbia? I don’t know, these papers are under lock and key.
But there is reason not to dismiss this idea out of hand. For some reason, at Occidental Obama quickly fell into a circle of foreign students as both friends and roommates. Was Occidental under the impression that he also was a foreign student and included him at functions for foreign students? Or was this just a coincidence?
That it might have been advantageous to him to claim status as a foreign student I can well understand, especially if had lousy grades in high school and the only extracurricular activity was basketball. Perhaps just being black was not enough to get him in. I personally recall quite clearly from those years, that at least at elite-level colleges and law schools, there were efforts by many American universities to raise their profile from a national to an international one, by accepting more foreign students to diversify the student body internationally, by establishing exchange and semester abroad programs with foreign universities and by attracting more visiting professors from foreign universities.
If he DID claim Indonesian nationality for those purposes, then the question arises, was he lying or did he actually have a basis for claiming Indonesian citizenship?
And if he was not lying, then that leads us back to the question I raised at the beginning:
Did Obama gain citizenship as a child in Indonesian and then do something as an adult to maintain that status and make use of it? If so, then depending on the circumstances it is quite possible he is not even a citizen at all of the United States.