Absolutely correct. And Ted is NOT a naturalized citizen because he was a citizen by birth. A citizen by birth is a natural born citizen.
Ted is NOT a natural born citizen. The constitution says “No person except a natural born Citizen........”
Natural born means born of two citizen parents on the soil of the country. This is the definition given in Vattel’s Law of Nations.
People try to insist the Constitution does not define natural born. It does by referencing Vattel’s Law of Nations in Article I Section 8 , “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;
Ctuz is NOT a natural born citizen as the Constitution has not been amended by an Article 5 as is required to make any change.
Absolutely correct. And Ted is NOT a naturalized citizen because he was a citizen by birth. A citizen by birth is a natural born citizen.
( NOTE: this discussion surely pushes up against the unwritten rules here so I am going to specifically leave candidate names out of this. Moreover, since the Supreme Court punted this to the people to decide for themselves, this is an academic discussion and we should refrain from saying that a person is or isn't qualified and vote for what you believe. Absent a Supreme Court decision or a Constitutional Amendment, this is where the issue will remain forever ). ~sigh~ this gonna be a long one ...
--- List of Facts only --- ( we can call these the "dots" we'll try to logically connect later )
The first problem that jumps out is when people excitedly run to statutory law, such as the Naturalization Act of 1790 or 1795, or any law to look for references or guidance as to what the Founders meant by Natural Born Citizen in the Constitution ( from 1787 ) or presumably what we should think of it today! This is the first MASSIVE logical disconnect - looking for guidance in subsequent documents. That is clearly asking for the Constitution to be redefined, clarified, interpreted, edited by Congress! This is a Separation of Powers violation and illogical by any measure. Only the Supreme Court's limited enumerated and still arguable powers fit this scenario, but certainly not the Congress.
Importantly, Congress has never specifically even tried to tie their phrase: Citizen by Birth to the Founders phrase: Natural Born Citizen, nor have they said that they are referencing an *identical* pool of people. They cannot really say they are *identical* because (1) they would be clearly usurping Judicial power redefining and interpreting the Constitution, and (2) they would also be backdoor stealth modifying the qualifications for a Constitutionally defined office, the President. Only We The People get to do that.
It is equally illogical to associate two separate terms, the Constitutional phrase Natural Born Citizen with the later Congressional term citizen at birth. Any person accepting this logic anoints himself as a super Supreme Court Justice as there is no precedent for such a correlation. But even if there was, this itself would be illogical because that later Supreme Court would be saying that a later Congress using their term somehow meant that it was identical to the much earlier Founders term, but without first ascertaining what the Founders did mean in 1787. This is tantamount to mind-reading of two different groups of people from two different eras, and then lumping them together. ( I believe this is why the current Supreme Court has punted it back to us to decide for ourselves ).
The crux of the matter is that modern politics has seen many people directly connecting Natural Born Citizen to Citizen at Birth. The only thing we know for sure is that neither term describes people who require naturalization. The first group, NBC, are who they are by virtue of who they are, by Natural Law, By Nature, By God. They are born citizens who are qualified to run for President as specified by the Founders. The second group is people who Congress has decided are already CITIZENS not ALIENS ( the extent of their legislative power ), and thus are not required to become naturalized through the very same legislation where this term is appearing. This is a classic example of reading too much into something.
There is no reason to lump these two groups of people together or state that one is not a subset of the other because they appear in two differing contexts. In fact, that itself is an un-Constitutional edit, a stealth Amendment, illustrated by the havoc such a precedent will wreak. Congress writes laws signed by the President that deals with "firearms" or "speech" and the ridiculous proposition that we can now say that "firearms" ( or whatever phrase from a Pelosi Congress ) is EQUAL to the broader "arms" in the Second Amendment is suicidal. Every single word of the Founders is then subject to redefinition. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a term reserved for Congress to consider at impeachment time and has absolutely nothing to do with always evolving statutory laws of a given time period. They CAN mean the same thing, but not necessarily. Constitutional terms are typically broadly stated, even ambiguous like "Natural Born Citizen" and "Arms" and "Speech" and "Press", therefore locking them down to a specific definition set by a later Congress instead of We The People for the sake of modern political expediency is beyond ludicrous to seriously dangerous.
Utilizing post-Constitutional events and legislation to somehow determine original intent of earlier thinking is chronologically illogical. The intent is found in preceding debates and contemporaneous writings. Since we do happen to know the actual origin of how the term NBC actually came along, from John Jay writing to the President of the Philadelphia Convention, general George Washington ...
Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.
To say that the terms Natural Born Citizen and Citizen at Birth are IDENTICAL is to also say that there is no Citizen at Birth who is excluded from running for President. This opens the door to anyone that Congress decides NOT requiring naturalization may run for President. The problem there should be obvious. Mere children of a single USA citizen are then qualified, and being born anywhere in the world ( or perhaps another planet as well ). Such children as determined by a Naturalization Act indeed do not require a naturalization procedure and are entitled to vote and receive whatever other benefits we allegedly receive. The logical flaw is taking that last step to calling them NBC which is about the loyalty to a Commander-in-Chief as suggested by Jay, passed along to the Framers by George Washington, and included into the text of the Constitution.
So what we have come to now is that geographic birth is discarded even though that is a primary and direct connection to a nation and reflects the loyalty to that nation and that nation's jurisdiction over them. Likewise, we have discarded inherited nationality because if a single parent is all that is required then that literally discards the other parent and their nationality as irrelevant and inconsequential and subordinate, and it literally ignores the FACT of competing loyalty to two or three nations and the conflicting jurisdiction from two or three nations.
The often disputed reasoning that a pure and unquestionable Natural Born Citizen is a child of two USA citizens born in USA is not something created from thin air, it is merely a quite logical KISS ( keep it simple ) approach to describing someone who has NO potential conflicts by definition. As another Constitutionalist FReeper has logically explained, it means We The People of the United States of America have clear title to such a person. No-one has to follow this logic, but it *is* the only logic that arrives at a clean and unquestionable solution.
It also avoids one really crazy mathematical fallacy. By entertaining the questionable NBC candidates we accept the equation that 50% American == 100% American. Or when considering all three inputs with boolean logic ( geography AND mother AND father ) we actually find that 1/3 NBC == 2/3 NBC == 3/3 NBC. Politically correct thinking swaps out the boolean AND for OR gates. This new math results in one thing, lowering the standards by watering down the qualification criteria. Using John Jay's terminology, a full foreigner is different than a one half foreigner. A one half foreigner is surely different than a natural born citizen. The current politically correct thinking results in bias of half foreigner being closer or equal to natural born citizen than to full foreigner. That is interestingly arbitrary and anti-nationalist at the same time. The Nu-American thinking from academics who admittedly despise America and nationalism is that it is a radical and kooky opinion to seek candidates who are 0% foreigner, like every single candidate ever was until the current occupant of our White House.
Once again, since the Supreme Court has chosen to punt this issue back to We The People, then we get to choose individually for ourselves. Everything written above is purely academic. I'm not happy about their reasoning that we have no standing, but I am now forced to admit that Roberts accidentally arrived at the correct conclusion. Given the makeup of that and earlier Courts, who knows what monster they might create. So I'll leave it here, we get to decide for ourselves. If you want a President of the United States of America who was born in Canada, or Kenya, or Russia, or Iran or Libya ( ... etc ... ) then present circumstances have made this possible. Those of us who disagree are not crazies though. When did arguing for the highest standards for the highest office in the land become kooky?