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To: Tublecane
People are never without citizenship as you readily admit.
I don’t admit that.
You already have admitted that.

Before the Constitution you were a citizen of the Confederacy or the state in which you lived. Before the Articles of Confederation, you were a citizen of your state and informally I guess of the quasi-nation under the Continental Congress. Before the Continental Congress, you were a British subject.

Or did you not realize what you were saying?

Firstly, you can be born where no government rules...
Where has that ever existed? Even something so small as a tribe has a leader and, henceforth, government.

You cannot have been a U.S. citizen before ratification of the positive law that is U.S. Constitution.
Partly right. Articles of Confederation, but we've been over that. And, precedent that, as a member of a British colony people had British citizenship as you noted earlier.
And the positive law Constitution recognized natural law as you well know,
that being your recognition of the natural law to keep and bear arms.

But what does that matter, for our purposes?
To illustrate that natural law existed before any law was written. I thought you understood that.

If there was a coup tomorrow and Obama wrote a new compact and held guns to the heads of governors to sign it, would you call the resulting entity the same thing as the constitutional U.S.?
I'll take that as rhetorical. Nobody was forced to sign the Constitution just like nobody was forced to sign the Articles of Confederation. Coercion isn't principled and nothing based upon coercion is legal.

148 posted on 05/01/2012 1:18:40 PM PDT by philman_36 (Pride breakfasted with plenty, dined with poverty, and supped with infamy. Benjamin Franklin)
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To: philman_36

“You already have admitted that”

No I haven’t. What you post is beside that point.

“Where has that ever existed? Even something so small as a tribe has a leader and, henceforth, government.”

Leaving aside whether or not tribal eadership constitutes proper government, you do realize that the term “citizen” has its roots in “inhibitant of a city,” right? Cities stretch back to time immemorial, but not forever. You don’t imagine there were always cities, do you, nor that hunter-gatherers recognized eachother as citizens of the tribe. That’s a distinction which comes with civilization at least.

“And the positive law Constitution recognized natural law as you well know,
that being your recognition of the natural law to keep and bear arms”

Yes but, and this is at least the third time I’ve made the point, while you theoretically have the right to bear arms by nature, you cannot be a citizen by nature alone. You must wait until the thing you are a citizen of has come into being. At which point those who naturally come into the world according to certain qualifications are natural born citizens.

“But what does that matter, for our purposes?
To illustrate that natural law existed before any law was written. I thought you understood that.”

Yes, I do. But once again, to be a citizens requires positive law of some sort, or at least custom. There is no British constitution as there is a U.S. constitution, for instance, but there does need to be such a thing as Great Britain before there are British subjects.

“I’ll take that as rhetorical. Nobody was forced to sign the Constitution just like nobody was forced to sign the Articles of Confederation. Coercion isn’t principled and nothing based upon coercion is legal.”

Yes, but not everything that is voluntary is legal, right? Forget about guns to the head. Let’s say Obama held a national referendum on overhauling the Constitution, which people voted on like they vote for American Idol. Would that be legal under the Constitution? No, for it would violate the amendmnet process laid out in the document.

Likewise, the manner in which the Constitution was ratified violated the amendment process laid out by the Articles. It was illegal in the eyes of the Article government. The way to justify it is to say that the states did not sacrifice their sovereignty, and were free to replace the Articles with a different form of government if they saw fit. If with no other justification, this is the old Right of Revolution, as used in the recent past against Great Britain.

However, if the states asserted their sovereignty against the Articles, then the resulting new government was not the same nation as that under the Articles, was it? The same union of states, perhaps, with the same name. But not the same government, and not the same thing of which to be a citizen.


161 posted on 05/01/2012 2:19:47 PM PDT by Tublecane
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