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To: BlackElk

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President


112 posted on 02/17/2016 4:26:00 AM PST by Lurkinanloomin (Know Islam, No peace - No Islam, Know Peace)
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To: Lurkinanloomin; PrairieLady2
I am conflating part of my response to PrairieLady2 (#108) with my response to Lurkinanloomin's (#112).

Where is the constitutional provision that says, "'Natural Born Citizen'" shall be defined in the future, according to the convenience and candidate preferences of people who shall be called Birthers, even if every court with jurisdiction and which has entertained such claims will have rejected them.

Now, if, as in the Omen movies, Satan were to father the Antichrist who would be born of a jackal, that would seem a clear violation of the NBC clause and disqualify the Antichrist from becoming POTUS. Query as to whether this covers Chelsea Clinton Whatshername?

In essence, you are begging the question. We all agree that there is an NBC requirement. We disagree on what constitutes an NBC. By repeating what we agree on lanl, you are ducking and dodging the real question because the meaning of NBC is not at all so obvious as you seem to assume. No one really cares about the philosophical speculations of some Swiss philosopher predating the revolution much less predating the adoption of the present constitution.

Common law has much to recommend it as amply demonstrated by Blackstone but, by its very nature, it is modifiable by courts and legislators as they respectively see fit. You cannot elevate common law to the level of constitutional law. To this very day, the Brits refuse to have a written constitution lest their government be limited. Having a constitution to chain our government was a bedrock principle of our revolution against the Brits.

Natural law (a politically correct title for God's Law) makes it impossible to "legalize" baby butchery or the butchering at will of those already born except in punishment of crime. It is silent on such trivia as who might be a "natural born citizen." Catholic SCOTUS Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has tried to introduce natural law to our nation's laws and I applaud him for it but it is misunderstood by anyone imagining that it dfines NBC. Natural law is the vernacular of great Church scholars like St. Thomas Aquinas who died centuries before Columbus reached the shores of any North or Central or South American lands and centuries more before there were United States of America or a constitution thereof. As much as I admire St. Thomas Aquinas, he was not an expert on natural born American citizenship nor did he pretend to be. He would not have known that there was a North and South America or that there would be a nation known as the USA.

More extreme Catholics than I (all three of them) might see the Teaching Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church as a major source of natural law. I recognize that we live in a non-denominational republic under God and that the Founding Fathers were unlikely to have delegated such authority over American law to the Roman Pontiff. Given the views of Pope Francis, keeping his ideas on globaloney generally and as to climate change and immigration and opposition to capitalism, out of our constitutional law is a good thing.

122 posted on 02/17/2016 8:54:32 AM PST by BlackElk (Dean of Discipline: Tomas de Torquemada Gentlemen's Society/Rack 'em Danno!)
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