No, trust Constitutional scholars who wouldn't lose their business if they honestly addressed the issue like Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who wrote the Minor v. Happersett decision, or Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who, in 1939, wrote the decision which clarified that Marie Elg, born to immigrant citizen parents in New York, but taken back to Sweden and raised there, could return to the US because she was born on our soil to citizen parents, and her form of citizenship, unlike a child born to one or more non-citizens, could not be taken away by Congress; it was given by nature. Or, while our pundits, including Obama, act as if Chief Justice John Marshall didn't really understand what he was talking about when he cited 'Law of Nations' in The Venus, and clarified the common-law for natural born citizen, or when he established the primacy of Judicial Review in Marbury.
But do give Levin credit for explaining, in Liberty and Tyranny, p37, that our framers intentionally left definitions of terms out of the Constitution, as Madison explained in a letter, the meanings of words change over time. As Justice Waite pointed out in Minor, “At common-law, and in the language understood by our framers...”.
Jindal, Rubio, and Obama are all ineligible, but only for the presidency. The reason Obama was not vetted was the McCain too was ineligible, but for a very different reason, written about extensively beginning with McCain's 2000 campaign. That is why Democrats to such pains to try to cover for McCain, by sponsoring two actions, S.2678. Feb 2008, by Obama and McCaskill, “A Bill To Make Foreign Born Children of Military Citizens Natural Born Citizens”, and Senate Resolution 511. Apr 2008, which rested upon McCain's two citizen parents and did handwaving about what our framers might have meant, and passed in 1790, repealing in the 1795 Nationality Act, a bill to make natural born citizens of the foreign born children of Citizens. S.2678, in Feb failed to leave the Senate.
There were at least twelve other actions to attempt to amend Article II Section 1 between 2003 and 2008, three alone by John Conyer, and one by Orrin Hatch, whose bill was aimed at making Schwarzenegger eligible. Conyer’s efforts seem likely to have been aimed at laying the groundwork for Obama, but never got out of Congress.
Most people on FR know these facts, but for those who don't, we are all learning the realities of an independent judiciary, and how much the Constitution really means when people's incomes/power are at stake.
Precedent, and Leo Donofrio explained to us lay people, is nonbinding. Minor v. Happersett made common law into positive law, but that wouldn't prevent the court from redefining it. Their approach has been to ignore the law, both common and precedent.
Word meanings do change over time and a word generally has more than one meaning so context is very important but in this age meanings seem to depend on who is using the word to a large extent. Sometimes the slang usage takes over and usurps the traditional meaning as in “gay”. Forty six years ago I briefly dated a woman who referred to herself as a gay divorcee. No she was not a lesbian but the word could still be used to mean happy in those days, now no heterosexual woman or especially no heterosexual man would ever use the word gay in a self description.
Cool is another word which seems to be gradually losing its original meaning. Young people never seem to use it to refer to temperature any longer, back in the fifties “cool cat” was already the description most young men wanted to hear used to describe them but now cool is so often used to describe people who would have been considered the epitome of uncool back then that I hate to hear the word anymore.
First, it was spot-on, secondly there was a link back to FR and finally and most importantly, it capped off a smarm-laced exchange, and nobody dared attempt to rebut it.
I don't know who MDWC is, but they're likely a FReeper, and they nailed it pretty well, methinks.
Hopefully a goodly number of readers followed the link back to the FR post and discussion.