“how 18 Supreme Court justices agreed on the definition of natural-born citizen: all children born in the country to parents who were its citizens.”
When were there ever 18 justices? Or are you conflating two different decisions? Then why only name Minor?
Byu the way, they didn’t exhaustively define natural born citizenship. They may have said children born to two citizen parents are natural born citizens, but I’m sure they didn’t say native borns aren’t.
I’d like to pose a couple of questions.
We should all be able to agree that someone born of two citizen parents in the United States is a natural born Citizen of the US.
Do we agree on this?
Since there are questions about anyone else (otherwise there wouldn’t be these long discussion threads) if a candidate did not meet this criteria, should it not be the candidate’s responsibility to prove conclusively that he/she is a natural born citizen also, as opposed to us having to prove they’re not?
We know what a natural born Citizen is. We just don’t seem to know what it’s not (at least some folks).
And to pose my other standard question, do you seriously believe that after 8 years of revolutionary war against Britain, that the Founders would put a requirement in the Constitution that would allow the son of a British subject to become President of the US and Commander-in-Chief of the US Military?
If there’s a “misunderstanding” of a definition, it’s our misunderstanding, not the Founders’ failure to “define” a term in the Constitution. The Founders knew exactly what they were writing. But, they were counting on an educated populace to enforce the Constitution. They didn’t realize how much we could be dumbed down.
In Minor v. Happersett and U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Both courts and ALL 18 justices voted on the same definition of natural-born citizen.
Byu the way, they didn’t exhaustively define natural born citizenship. They may have said children born to two citizen parents are natural born citizens, but I’m sure they didn’t say native borns aren’t.
Yes, actually they did, because they said the 14th amendment, which applies to "native borns" of resident aliens, does NOT say who shall be natural-born citizens. That definition comes from outside the Constitution in a self-limiting defintion ... "as distinguished from foreigners or aliens."