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To: STARWISE
"As is your right, that belief appears to be your personal interpretation."

Nope. The following is not my personal interpretation:

"It thus clearly appears that, by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the Crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, the jurisdiction of the English Sovereign, and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign State or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born."

"III. The same rule was in force in all the English Colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established."

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898)

"(1) The Wong Kim Ark Court references the Minor v Happerset opinion three times, but does not overrule or elaborate on Minor’s discussion of natural born citizen."

The passage I just quoted in fact covers it very nicely. The full majority opinion in Wong goes on for pages discussing the issue.

"(2) Despite the exhaustive discussion of natural born citizens, the Court finds Mr. Wong to be a US citizen, but does not declare Mr. Wong to be a natural born citizen."

Read that passage again. Can you claim that somehow that doesn't apply to Wong? No.

Did they write it in the last paragraph of the decision, or specifically write, "Mr. Wong can run for President"? No. So what? You can't ignore the rest of the opinion because they didn't word the end how you want.

"(3) The use of the Wong Kim Ark decision to justify the natural born citizen status of a person who is born in the US to two parents who are permanent residents but perhaps not citizens is undermined by the circumstances of its author, Justice Gray, and the president who appointed him to the Supreme Court, Chester Arthur."

Nonsense. It was a majority opinion of the US Supreme Court. You don't get to ignore it just because you have a problem with one of the judges. It doesn't work that way.

1,629 posted on 10/12/2009 4:45:28 PM PDT by mlo
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To: mlo

You are wong.


1,631 posted on 10/12/2009 4:56:09 PM PDT by rolling_stone (no more bailouts, the taxpayers are out of money!)
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To: mlo

That’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla.

I don’t believe the opinion conclusively
determines that Wong Kim Ark’s case, a
case being considered WITHOUT the backdrop
of him as a candidate for US president, was
made by SCOTUS in any manner to comport
with Article II of the Constitution in mind ...

“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; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.”

Any such POTUS eligibility case today would be a case of first impression. That would open up an entirely new landscape of legal and Constitutional analysis yet untouched.


1,632 posted on 10/12/2009 5:29:17 PM PDT by STARWISE (The Art & Science Institute of Chicago Politics NE Div: now open at the White House)
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