“He doesn’t say the doubt can be resolved,”
Actually, he said he didn’t need to try: “For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts”. He leaves OPEN the possibility that someone will need to solve those doubts, which happened then in 1898.
“What you don’t seem to understand or want to admit is that it should have been easy to say that the 14th amendment resolves any doubts or changes the definition” - except that the question before him only needed to know if sex prevented citizenship. And it had no bearing, so he had no need to discuss either provision at length.
“Why bother to talk about natural born citizenship at all when you have a brand spanking new Constitutional amendment that could define citizenship for your plaintiff?”
Because she was already a citizen without regard for any amendment. It simply wasn’t relevant to the facts of the case.
“It’s obvious: He’s and the court are rejecting this amendment as applying to natural born citizenship.”
No, he says it is irrelevant: “The fourteenth amendment did not affect the citizenship of women any more than it did of men. In this particular, therefore, the rights of Mrs. Minor do not depend upon the amendment.”
“IOW, the court in both Minor and WKA are saying that anyone who needs to have their citizenship defined by the 14th amendment (like Obama) CANNOT be a natural born citizen. “
No. Neither says that. And while you can reject my explanation, there isn’t any doubt that the rest of the world - every Congressman, every state, every state DA, every state SecState, both political parties, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh - they ALL accept my explanation and reject yours.
Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General wrote, “Under the longstanding English common-law principle of jus soli, persons born within the territory of the sovereign (other than children of enemy aliens or foreign diplomats) are citizens from birth. Thus, those persons born within the United States are “natural born citizens” and eligible to be President. Much less certain, however, is whether children born abroad of United States citizens are “natural born citizens” eligible to serve as President …”
You can continue to reject my interpretation as I reject yours. What you haven’t been able to do is convince any court any where, or any state, or any Congressman that your interpretation is right.
“This is pure delusion. There aren’t any pages saying this at all. None. “
Good point. The first third of the WKA decision doesn’t exist. It isn’t there. The decision doesn’t start until half-way down. The rest is my imagination.
That's the whole point. Obama is NOT a citizen without regard for any amendment, therefore he cannot be a natural born citizen.
Nice try of again obsfucating Meese’s standing on this issue. Here is his current standing as recorded with SCOTUS in the Hamdi v Rumfeld case:
Brief of Amicus Curiae The Claremont Institute
Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence
In Support of Respondents
Edwin Meese III
214 Massachusetts Ave. N.E.
Washington D.C. 20002
As noted above, Hamdi was indisputably born in the United States, so the issue in this case is whether he was also at the time subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. The widely-held, though erroneous, view today is that he clearly was.
Textually, such an interpretation is manifestly erroneous, for it renders the entire “subject to the jurisdiction” clause redundant. Anyone who is “born” in the United States is, under this interpretation, necessarily “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Yet it is a well established doctrine of legal interpretation that legal texts, including the Constitution, are not to be interpreted to create redundancy unless any other interpretation would lead to absurd results. See, e.g., Gustafson v. Alloyd Co., Inc., 513 U.S. 561, 562 (1995) (“this Court will avoid a reading which renders some words altogether redundant”)
The “subject to the jurisdiction” provision must therefore require something in addition to mere birth on U.S. soil. The language of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, from which the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was derived, provides the key to its meaning. The 1866 Act provides: “All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” 14 Stat. 27, ch. 31 (April 9, 1866). As this formulation makes clear, any child born on U.S. soil to parents who were temporary visitors to this country and who, as a result of the foreign citizenship of the child’s parents remained a citizen or subject of the parents’ home country, was not entitled to claim the birthright citizenship provided by the 1866 Act.
The jurisdiction clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is somewhat different from the jurisdiction clause of the 1866 Act, of course. The positively-phrased “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States might easily have been intended to describe a broader grant of citizenship than the negatively-phrased language from the 1866 Act, one more in line with the modern understanding accepted unquestioningly by Professor Dorf and others that birth on U.S. soil is alone sufficient for citizenship. But the relatively sparse debate we have regarding this provision of the Fourteenth Amendment does not support such a reading.
The Overly-Broad Reading of this Court’s Decision in Won Kim Ark Needs to be Narrowed to Conform to the Original Understanding of the Citizenship Clause.