Posted on 05/01/2012 11:22:15 PM PDT by Seizethecarp
Prominent Fox News Channel anchor Bret Baier has posted an explanation on the network’s website of why he believes Barack Obama is eligible to be president.
However, Harvard-educated Jerome Corsi, author of Where’s the Birth Certificate? says Baier isn’t quite on track yet.
“Baier incorrectly interprets that 8 USC Section 1401 was written to define ‘natural born citizen,’ as specified in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution,” he said. “The purpose of 8 USC Section 1401 is to define ‘nationals’ and ‘citizens’ of the United States ‘at birth.’”
Corsi explained that citizens at birth are not “natural born citizens” under the meaning of Article 2, Section 1.
“Nowhere in 8 USC Section 1401 does Congress make any mention of the term ‘natural born citizen’ or to Article 2, Section 1,” Corsi said.
“To novices, the distinction between ‘citizen at birth’ and ‘natural born citizen’ may be trivial. Under law, the distinction is meaningful and important. A mother who takes advantage of ‘birth tourism’ to fly from Turkey or China (or any other foreign country) to have a baby born in the United States might arguably give birth to a ‘citizen at birth,’ under the meaning of the 14th Amendment, extended by 8 USC Section 1401,” he said.
He continued, “‘Natural Born Citizen’ is a term of natural law — it specifies that a child must be born in the USA to two parents who were U.S. citizens at birth.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
And why would you be reading Corsi's book? Opposition research?
Leo credits you for finding that newspaper article. It is EXCELLENT evidence. It summarizes the argument in a nutshell, and demonstrates that it was the common thinking of the time.
You are to be commended for finding this. I think it is currently one of the bests proofs available. The Obots really have no means of refuting it.
Again, thank you for your efforts in the service of our country.
From The Rights of Man, Applying Principle to Practice, Chapter 4 — Of Constitutions, Part 2 of 2:
If there is any government where prerogatives might with apparent safety be entrusted to any individual, it is in the federal government of America. The president of the United States of America is elected only for four years. He is not only responsible in the general sense of the word, but a particular mode is laid down in the constitution for trying him. He cannot be elected under thirty-five years of age; and he must be a native of the country.Yes, Paine did use the term "native of the country." Does this mean "native born" instead of "natural born?" We have to look at the following statements to answer that question.In a comparison of these cases with the Government of England, the difference when applied to the latter amounts to an absurdity. In England the person who exercises prerogative is often a foreigner; always half a foreigner, and always married to a foreigner. He is never in full natural or political connection with the country, is not responsible for anything, and becomes of age at eighteen years; yet such a person is permitted to form foreign alliances, without even the knowledge of the nation, and to make war and peace without its consent.
But this is not all. Though such a person cannot dispose of the government in the manner of a testator, he dictates the marriage connections, which, in effect, accomplish a great part of the same end. He cannot directly bequeath half the government to Prussia, but he can form a marriage partnership that will produce almost the same thing. Under such circumstances, it is happy for England that she is not situated on the Continent, or she might, like Holland, fall under the dictatorship of Prussia. Holland, by marriage, is as effectually governed by Prussia, as if the old tyranny of bequeathing the government had been the means.
The presidency in America (or, as it is sometimes called, the executive) is the only office from which a foreigner is excluded, and in England it is the only one to which he is admitted. A foreigner cannot be a member of Parliament, but he may be what is called a king. If there is any reason for excluding foreigners, it ought to be from those offices where mischief can most be acted, and where, by uniting every bias of interest and attachment, the trust is best secured. But as nations proceed in the great business of forming constitutions, they will examine with more precision into the nature and business of that department which is called the executive. What the legislative and judicial departments are every one can see; but with respect to what, in Europe, is called the executive, as distinct from those two, it is either a political superfluity or a chaos of unknown things.
Paine refers to Engish examples in order to define this. Paine cites "foreigner" and "half a foreigner" as the oppposite to "full natural" connection to the country. So, what is "half a foreigner?"
It seems to me that "half a foreigner" is a person with one parent who is a citizen and one parent who is not. This person does not have have a "full natural... connection with the country."
Paine wrote plainly of why the Framers did not want "half-foreigners" to be president, and why only people with a "full natural... connection with the country" were allowed to become President.
Paine was widely recognized as the most influential writer of the time of Independence because of his plain writing style that resonated with the common person.
Paine's description of the meaning of Article II was written in 1791, and I take it to be reflective of the common understanding of the time. If Paine said that natural born citizens meant both parents were citizens, then that was the plain meaning.
Having reread it yesterday, I wonder why the SCOTUS never referred to it when they felt challenged to "look elsewhere" for the meaning of natural-born citizen. The portion I cited makes it clear that the Natural-Born clause was intended to keep "half-foreigners" from becoming president, and only allow those with "full natural connection with the country" to the highest office. Someone who reads that entire chapter that I excerpted from cannot help but see that the Framers were very well aware of what the governments of England and France were like, due to centuries of the politics of inter-marriage between royal familes and its impact on divided loyalties amongst the citizens.
-PJ
“Paine wrote plainly of why the Framers did not want ‘half-foreigners’ to be president, and why only people with a ‘full natural... connection with the country’ were allowed to become President.”
I love that! Great passage from Paine.
"Natural allegiance is such as is due from all men born within the king's dominions immediately upon their birth. For, immediately upon their birth, they are under the king's protection; at a time too, when (during their infancy) they are incapable of protecting themselves. Natural allegiance is therefore a debt of gratitude; which cannot be forfeited, cancelled, or altered, by any change of time, place, or circumstance, nor by any thing but the united concurrence of the legislature. An Englishman who removes to France, or to China, owes the same allegiance to the king of England there as at home, and twenty years hence as well as now. For it is a principle of universal law, that the natural-born subject of one prince cannot by any act of his own, no, not by swearing allegiance to another, put off or discharge his natural allegiance to the former: for this natural allegiance was intrinsic, and primitive, and antecedent to the other; and cannot be devested without the concurrent act of that prince to whom it was first due. Indeed the natural-born subject of one prince, to whom he owes allegiance, may be entangled by subjecting himself absolutely to another; but it is his own act that brings him into these straits and difficulties, of owing service to two masters; and it is unreasonable that, by such voluntary act of his own, he should be able at pleasure to unloose those bands, by which he is connected to his natural prince."William Blackstone, Commentaries 1:354, 357--58, 361--62
However, natural law (Law of Nations) tells us that "man" has a right to quit his country and become a member of another.
If the founders had adhered to the English version of Common Law, they could not have quit their allegience to the King...and be recognized internationally.
Lest we forget, the father of the Constitution and the father of the Bill of rights said (during the ratification period):
October 18, 1787 - James Madison wrote to George Washington, N. York
"Since the Revolution every State has made great inroads & with great propriety in many instances on this monarchical code.[Edit: Englands "Common Law"] The "revisal of the laws" by a Committe of wch. Col. Mason [Edit: George Mason] was a member, though not an acting one, abounds with such innovations. The abolition of the right of primogeniture, which I am sure Col. Mason does not disapprove, falls under this head.. What could the Convention have done? If they had in general terms declared the Common law to be in force, they would have broken in upon the legal Code of every State in the most material points: they wd. have done more, they would have brought over from G.B. a thousand heterogeneous & anti-republican doctrines, and even the ecclesiastical Hierarchy itself, for that is a part of the Common law."
June 18, 1788 - George Mason, In Convention, Richmond (Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution), states:
"We have it in our power to secure our liberties and happiness on the most unshaken, firm, and permanent basis. We can establish what government we please. But by that paper we are consolidating the United States into one great government, and trusting to constructive security. You will find no such thing in the English government. The common law of England is not the common law of these states."
Except for the HOT info babes Fox doesn’t seem much different than the other news outlets. News sources in Europe and of course Free Republic seem to have better data. JMHO.
Born in the USA” Bill Takes Another Step Forward
WE NEED HELP FROM ALL WHO READ THIS! PLEASE TELL YOUR MISSOURI FRIENDS AND FAMILY TO CONTACT THEIR STATE SENATOR AND REPRESENTATIVE AND PERSUADE THEM TO SUPPORT THIS BILL.
WE NEED TO FLOOD THE MISSOURI LEGISLATURE WITH LETTERS SUPPORTING HB 1046……..
Born in the USA” Bill Takes Another Step Forward
Cole Karr, KMOX Capitol Bureau
JEFFERSON CITY, MO. (KMOX) – The so-called “Birther Bill” to require presidential nominees prove their citizenship to be on the Missouri ballot moves on one last time to the Senate.
If passed, presidential candidates would have to provide an official record of birth and citizenship when filing with the Missouri Secretary of State’s office.
The office would keep the document for public record. Senate Elections Committee Chairman Republican Kevin Engler says with only three weeks remaining, the bill may not be taken up for debate stating he would be very surprised if it did.
Republican Senator Luann Ridgeway supports the bill, and she is also unsure if the bill will make it.
”I completely understand the concerns of people who want to make sure that our Constitution is willing to be obeyed. Our president is supposed to be born in the United States. But, I just don’t know if there are enough people out there that are willing to stand up in opposition to it.”
Democratic Senator Robin Wright-Jones is upset over the so-called birther bill’s 4-to-1 passage out of a Senate committee.
CONTINUED HERE: http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2012/05/01/born-in-the-usa-bill-takes-another-step-forward
~ ~ ~ ~
Sponsor: Rowland, Lyle (143)
Proposed Effective Date: 8/28/2012
LR Number: 4081L.01P
Last Action: 4/30/2012 – Executive Session Held (S) - VOTED DO PASS
Bill String: HB 1046
Next Hearing: Hearing not scheduled
Calendar: Bill currently not on a House calendar
http://house.mo.gov/BillSummaryPrn.aspx?bill=HB1046&year=2012&code=R
Find your Legislators simply by entering your full nine-digit zipcode.….
http://www.senate.mo.gov/llookup/leg_lookup.aspx
And the only citizenship laws that the federal government can make are those pertaining to naturalization per Article I, Section 8, Clause 4.
The State of Missouri is trying to lie to it's own Citizens.
@SECOND REGULAR SESSION
[PERFECTED]
HOUSE BILL NO. 1046
8 USC governs Aliens and Naturalization and is exactly what is being spoken about in this article.
How can you support such a lie Jonah Vark?
This is based on 8 U.S.C. which covers ALIENS AND NATIONALITY and is positive law, not natural law. March 28, 2012
You deserve every bit of condemnation you get Jonah Vark.
I see I've missed the opportunity to comment on a couple of your other posts were you posted the same thing.
To all of you that I've pinged I would like you to know that if you didn't bother reading the link provided to you by Jonah Vark regarding HB 1046 in Missouri you are being urged to support a horrible bill.
For a link to the full text of the bill and some snippets look at reply 51 above.
Do not accept being lied to. Do not accept that the bill is worthy of your support.
Warn your friends and neighbors how bad that bill actually is.
Absolutely! I cite that often. A Feudal law based system is incompatible with the needs of a nation of Free men.
And this is a point that so many people simply do not comprehend. Congress has no power to change the meaning of Constitutional terms. Congress' power regarding citizenship extends ONLY to "naturalization". (Adopted Citizens.)
It is astonishing how ignorant people are in regards to the limitations of congress.
Thanks for reposting this. It’s Eligibility dynamite, and cannot be posted often enough.
At the same time, I have to ask why it takes Paine to inject a note of sanity into this debate? Liberals I can understand. All they ever cared about was protecting Obama, and no claim is too absurd for them to make on his behalf. I’ve read the comments they make about him. It’s scary/creepy, how worshipful they are. The crime of selling the USA out to our worst enemies is a pleasant one for Obots, if it means validating their Number One Hero. Besides, they *want* to ‘fundamentally change’ the USA, so it’s all good for them.
But conservatives??? How on earth have they bought into this ‘dirt only’ twaddle??? It’s not merely insanity—it’s brainless insanity.
Try this. Have an American gal go to China and give birth. Bring the baby back to the USA and raise/indoctrinate him/her to hate, w a burning, unquenchable passion, not only communism but the Chinese people themselves. In due time send the born-on-Chinese-soil individual back to China and let him/her live there a couple of decades.
Then say to the Chinese leaders, ‘This is a natural born Chinese citizen; accept him/or into the highest ranks of your government.’
Ha ha. Oh yes, they will welcome this ‘NBC’ w open arms. They will be delighted to establish him or her in the upper echelons of Chinese power brokerage.
An Iranian was quoted recently scoffing at the idea that being born on Iranian soil makes a person an Iranian. This is because, dark and twisted as Islam is, it nevertheless leaves a person free to reject pure, mindnumbingly stupid twaddle, at least when it comes to Natural Born Iranian Citizenship.
Only in America, where liberals rule and have ruled for so many decades, is this kind and level of stupidity accepted. Liberals salivate at the idea of putting one of America’s most rabid half-foreign enemies [i.e.: Barack Hussein Obama] in a position to destroy the Republic as we know it, and as the Framers established it. Anybody w any kind of grasp of modern liberalism knows this.
But why would conservatives jump onboard? How can they look in the mirror and claim they’re seeing the face of a sane individual??? They believe a couple of Red Chinese can birth a Natural Born American Citizen, simply by arranging for the child to be born on a particular patch of dirt. That is not mere stupidity—it is psychotic.
I have said before and I say it again, it can only be explained by a desire to look smart and sophisticated in the eyes of liberals. I.e.: some conservatives are so intellectually insecure, they’re willing to embrace bizarrely stupid ideas, merely so as to be able to say, ‘I’m not one of those wingnut birthers’.
If that is not the explanation, then what is it? I ask because I am trying to understand. Some of my fellow conservatives embrace a suicidal, uber-modern-lib/Obot-inspired ‘interpretation’ of NBC.
Why???
The flaw in this thinking is two-fold:
1. If they let this one go by, what's to stop someone from ignoring, say, the 4-year term limit for president? We've already seen the Article I power of Congress to determine when it is in recess be ignored, as well as the Senate's advice and consent power subverted with unconfirmed "czars." What's next? Suspend habieus corpus? Eliminate Amendment 5 rights of due process?
2. Ignoring the natural-born requirement may not affect the current status of elites, but it will affect the posterity of the nation. That is why I also post the Preamble, because a nation's posterity is its natural-born children. They are the next generation who carries forward the culture that defines being an American. When the Framers said that they established the Constitution to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to... our posterity," they meant to create a nation that can be handed down to their children, and their children's children.
Today, the only "blessing" that our elites (liberal and Republican) are "securing" for our "posterity" is the burden of massive debt that is being accumulated by the elites in order to sustain the high station of the elites.
They see how willing the elites are to twist plain-language meanings of the law, as well as to use fear and intimidation against those who call out their abuse of constitutional powers. They figure that if the law won't apply to the elites, then why should it be applied to them?
What we are seeing with the Occupy protesters is the beginnings of a push-back because they see that the behaviors of the elites is hand-cuffing the next generation from being able to exercise the same freedoms to pursue their own interests that the elites enjoyed when they became of-age.
The Occupy protesters are misplaced in their anger against corporations and banks because of partisan political interests, but that also serves the interests of the elites to maintain their station. Instead of calling out Democrats for conspiring to hide the lack of Constitutional qualification for Obama, Republicans are being encouraged to make good on Obama's qualification by offering up equally unqualified candidates of their own, like Marco Rubio or Piyush Jindal. The Occupy protests are the pressure that Democrats are putting on Republicans to comply, with the unspoken threat of unleashing the "99%" with cries that Republicans hate women, or Republicans want dirty air, or Republicans are taking your jobs away.
In 20 years, Nancy Pelosi will be dead, Harry Reid will be dead, Mitch McConnell will be dead, but the Occupy protesters will be in their early 40's, with a good 40 more years to go.
The elites in the United States have squandered the posterity of this nation, and the posterity knows it. And it started with an abused definition of what it means to be "ourselves and our posterity" and how that weaves throughout our entire constitutional republic.
What Paine shows us is the honesty of the debate that took place in 1791, and is a reflection of the dishonesty of the same debate that is taking place today, 221 years later.
-PJ
That is an excellent reply. Thank you. I hadn’t considered that angle on the Occupy Movement. It makes a lot of sense. As for ignoring rules, isn’t that what the modern iteration of liberalism is all about? Ends justify the means, and if the means involve trampling rules, laws, customs and traditions, so be it. The sad part is that the GOP goes along, but you explained that in spades. I couldn’t agree w you more.
I used to imagine the Dems were in DC to represent liberals, and the GOP represented conservatives. Then came the Amnesty Debate, and the hours I spent on the phone to DC. I learned the hard way that my GOP Senators, Chambliss and Isakson, are there to represent themselves and the DC Ruling Class/Elite. They really resented my objecting to their wholesale sellout on Amnesty. Isakson’s office even lectured me on objecting to their direct line to the ‘hispanic’ community [it was the only line I could get through on; I had to endure a lot of spanish babble, but then Isakson’s office always picked right up]. I was lectured that English isn’t the official language. If I could have gone through the phone, the twit who told me that would have gotten an even more strident earful.
My congressman is, if possible, even more corrupt. When I wrote to him re: Obama’s Eligibility, Kingston took just enough time off funneling earmark $ to the improvement of his personal beachfront property to tell me to get lost. These people are insufferable.
So yes, it makes sense that the DC GOP would do anything necessary to avoid the Eligibility issue. On that we completely agree.
What I’m wondering, though, is about rank and file FReeper conservatives who buy the ‘patch of dirt’ nonsense. Sure, we have plenty of liberal trolls. They get banned by the dozen, but they brag on their own sites about how many screennames they have, and how they just keep signing back up to harass us indefinitely. You learn to spot them and deal w them accordingly, so it’s no big deal.
What I can’t fathom are actual conservatives who buy into the idea that the Framers wanted the half-foreign offspring of America-haters in the WH. (Because if they didn’t want that, they could easily have restricted the WH to the offspring of US citizens (which, surprise surprise, is EXACTLY what they did).) How can they contemplate the stupidity of such an idea on the part of the Framers and take it seriously??? It’s insane.
Conservatives can look at Obama, who is behaving exactly as any offspring of America’s haters would behave, and behold the wisdom of the Framers. Still they claim to believe he’s just what the Framers wanted. That’s where I’m hitting a brick wall. What’s up w these ‘conservatives’? Are they really that clueless...or is there something afoot that I’m not perceiving? It really makes no sense.
You don’t have to answer, PJ. You took a lot of time on your prior answer, and I really appreciate it. Maybe it’s just not possible for you or I to understand why conservatives go full metal liberal on this one issue. Maybe it’s something only they themselves will really ever understand...if even *they* fully understand it.
Meanwhile, your Paine discovery is just too good to be true. I cannot and will not stop thanking you. It was a game changer in the best sense of the phrase. Just keep posting it, please. It needs to be prominently placed on every Eligibility thread. Sooner or later, it will start to sink in.
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