Posted on 08/15/2020 2:35:33 PM PDT by Ennis85
Well, that didn’t take long.
A non-White American citizen born right here in the United States has gotten a spot on the Democratic presidential ticket, and the birthers have come scurrying out from whatever rock they have been living under since Barack Obama left office.
Within hours of former vice president Joe Biden’s announcement Wednesday of his history-making running mate, once-reputable Newsweek posted a story posing “Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility.”
The author, John Eastman, a conservative law professor, wrote that “some” are “questioning” whether Harris might be “constitutionally ineligible” to be vice president because, should she have to step into the presidency, she might not meet the Constitution’s Article II requirement that this country’s chief executive be a “natural born” citizen.
Jenna Ellis, who appears frequently these days on cable television as a “senior legal adviser” to the Trump campaign, quickly embraced this nontroversy, retweeting a link to Eastman’s article and later declaring Harris’s eligibility an “open question.” So we are left to assume that the president’s reelection campaign is on board with this line of inquiry, which is reminiscent of President Trump’s own leadership of the “birther” movement when it was first launched against Obama.
Harris is the daughter of immigrants. Her father (from Jamaica) and her mother (from India) were not citizens at the time of her birth in 1964. A birth that — Have I mentioned this? Stay with me here, because this is important — happened in Oakland, Calif., which was then and is now in the United States of America. That means Harris was a U.S. citizen from the first second of her life.
The theoretical and esoteric question of whether first-generation Americans are eligible to be president is booted around from time to time in law-professor circles.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
PING
Ping if you really, really, really want another birther discussion.
Thanks, Brown Deer.
He doesn’t get blamed???
.
What amazes me (and pisses me off) is being among FReepers that so readily accept a child raised by one or two foreign citizens becoming our President or VP, who argue legalisms but not the core problem — loyalty to America only.
I am so sick of this shit I do sometimes scream.
If "some guy" wrote the first-ever law book on American constitutional law and was appointed by George Washington to be the first U.S. Attorney for Pennsylvania, I'd guess his opinion as to the original intent of the Constitution matters a bit more than yours.
With notable exceptions.
So, I am verified and not “nope no way”
This is why I lover birther threads.
Now or then?
Nope. What I really really really want is a DNA test. I anticipate there will be no connection between him and the Dunhams, nor the Onyango family in Kenya.
That is the definition of “natural born citizen”. Think about it ... a diplomat family has a child while stationed in the U.S. Are you saying that child qualifies to become president some day? No, they are NOT. She may be a citizen through a faulty reading of the 14th amendment, but she is not a “natural born citizen”.
Speaking of “key words”.... are the children, born overseas to two American citizen parents, legally subjects of America at the time of their birth?
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Now or then?
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One of the things I learned early in Infantry OCS at Fort Benning was that quibbling is not a good thing. Quibbling is beneath you... please answer the question.
And yet again mlo, who is avoiding me like COVID-19, can feel free to answer the question also.
Words and terms matter, else they wouldn’t have bothered. The clerk of the constitutional convention was a genius compared to modern politicians. ..
Native = born here, natural= born Here of citizen parents, or born elsewhere of citizen parents on official duty.
True. How many NBCs today, born within the boundaries of the continental US to two parents whose parents were also NBC do not have allegiance to the US, its constitution, and its laws?
An informed electorate is the needed key. With our schools and media .... a very doubtful one.
This is why I lover birther threads.
https://tesibria.typepad.com/whats_your_evidence/BIRTHER%2520CASE%2520LIST.pdf
The BIRTHER SCORECARD to help you enjoy birthers even more. All their cases, documenting their acts of futility, including records of appeals, and their perfect record of 0-226.
No, of course not. It's a silly question. They are not citizens because they are one of the classes that do not fall "under the jurisdiction". We all know that.
What we're talking about here is a regular person. Not a diplomat, not an invading soldier. Just a regular person that's a foreign citizen but inside the US.
Thanks for that. I think I misplaced all my bookmarks from the Obama years. :-)
Incorrect. The 14th specifically excludes people not "under the jurisdiction". That means diplomats and invading soldiers. People that aren't under the jurisdiction of US law even though they may be on US territory. Nobody reads the 14th to think a diplomat's child would be a citizen. But that has no bearing on Harris.
Odawg, your one-hand-tied-behind-your-back approach to exposing Harris’s non-NBC status, in which you enshrine her notably questionable birth circumstances (i.e., having had zero citizen parents at birth) as the sine qua non of POTUS disqualification, subtly encourages us to believe that an individual born here who split the scene with their two citizen parents to grow up entirely overseas is no different than the friend they made in the international school in Berlin whose background is identical (i.e., two U.S. citizen parents who moved overseas and do not plan to return), but for the fact that in the latter case, their mother left the U.S. while still pregnant, and gave birth in Germany.
As between these two individuals, both inarguably U.S. citizens, are you sure there is no difference in the quality of their citizenship? Multiply these two individuals by one thousand. Is there no likelihood in your mind, with respect to the 1,000 such individuals born here but persistently living overseas, that, on average at least, if not also to a person, their U.S. citizenship is of higher quality than that of the foreign-born individuals in their respective one thousand? Aren’t you slumming it by equating the two groups?
You know, don’t you, that two separate woke armies, The Drones of the Dirt, and the Drones of the Blood, are simultaneously attacking those of us who speak up in defense of the logical, double-barreled loyalty- and affection-ensuring NBC definition (born in a U.S. state to citizen parents)?
The two armies don’t even have to coordinate with each other to achieve their true objective. They just have to attack, attack, attack. It’s Critical Theory in action, and the effect is rapid and frightful. They couldn’t care less if they are right or not on the merits. In fact, the stultifying effect of their brutal, logic-starved attacks is made that much more pronounced by virtue of the fact that they are both almost certainly DEAD WRONG. Like 2 + 2 = 5-type, Orwell’s 1984, Ministry of Truth brain warping totalitarian propaganda wrong.
Your line of reasoning also lazily plants the Levin-esque idea that an overseas birth to only one citizen parent, ala Ted Cruz (3 nationalities at birth!) and Winston Churchill, is probably okay too, honkey dorey, no problem. The more potential POTUS candidates the merrier, the more exotic and spiced-up half-foreigner POTUS candidates we can encourage to get up in our grill every four years, the better, the more variety in overseas places of birth and that one oddball Castro-promoting black sheep parent nobody can quite pin down, the more we can virtue signal to the rest of the world our charming commitment to multiculturalism and the admirable goal of global citizenship. So you really are doing the bidding of Ted Cruz and Winston Churchill by pooh-poohing the real and enduring connection people have to the place of their birth, the country that gave them life and heard their first cries. Come to think of it, you might be a stealth Obama supporter who believes, despite Obama’s (deliberately weak?) attempts thus far to prove otherwise, that he was actually born overseas to one U.S. citizen parent (Moms, that is—who was only 17 and thus unfortunately too young per the applicable naturalization statute to even convey citizenship!) and wants to protect his legacy at all costs, particularly if what you (according to my crackpot theory) fear turns out to be true (meaning that ... maybe his book publisher actually told the truth about his birth in Kenya? Nahh...no way.).
In the meantime, the 14th Amendment, as recently (clearly incorrectly) interpreted to convey citizenship to everyone born in a U.S. state regardless of parentage, has been on an uber-statutory policy bender for so long now due to its seemingly untouchable status as a sainted provision of the Constitutional, and which has been singing the “rule of the soil” song you find so off-putting so loudly, sounding that clear trumpet blast, continuously blaring and broadcasting (like an out-of-control mental patient) the “all you need to do is cross the border into the U.S. the minute before your child is born and your child wins” message to huddled pregnant masses yearning to secure life-long U.S. citizen status for their respective children, that it has become the equivalent of a combined domestic Kilamanjaro piled on top of Everest compared to your never-considered distant anthill of a civil-law (i.e., French) -inspired Jus Sanguinis or “Rule of the Blood” theory of citizenship transmission that is frankly only of abiding interest to the relatively small number of Americans that at any given time are living overseas as expatriates. Out of sight, out of mind, Odawg.
In other words, you sir, look rather like a troll at this juncture!
The subject here is a legal one. You are talking about a political one. Probably nobody on this thread would actually vote for Harris. That's not the point. "Legalisms" are precisely the point.
“No, of course not. It’s a silly question. They are not citizens because they are one of the classes that do not fall “under the jurisdiction”. We all know that.
What we’re talking about here is a regular person. Not a diplomat, not an invading soldier. Just a regular person that’s a foreign citizen but inside the US.”
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Please see posts 92, 145 and 170 above. I’d like your views and “insight”.
The question at hand is whether a child born in the US who’s parents are not diplomats or hostile soldiers, is a natural born citizen. The answer is yes. You can take that and apply as needed to any other hypotheticals without my help. That’s the answer.
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