...Political status [citizenship] is a legal term of art which means, “membership in a nation, and nothing more”. Presidential eligibility refers to municipal status. The holding [Minor v. Happersett {1874)] not only determined Virginia Minor’s citizenship, it directly defined “citizen”, and that definition remains the law of the land today.
First, on pgs. 165-166 [SCOTUS case Minor v. Happersett (1874)], the Court defined the meaning of the word “citizen”. Then, on pgs. 167-168, the court defined the class of “natural-born citizens”. The Court left open the issue of who were “citizens” under the 14th Amendment, which the Court wisely avoided by exercising judicial constraint. Instead, the Court construed Article 2 Section 1, Clause 5, the natural-born citizen clause. In doing so, they defined and closed that class to persons born in the country to parents who are citizens.
The Minor Court’s unanimous opinion and definition of natural-born citizen have never been overruled or even questioned. In fact, the very passage defining the natural-born citizen class was re-stated in Justice Gray’s opinion from Wong Kim Ark. Had he intended to take issue with that definition, or to expand it, then his opinion would certainly contain something like this:
Wong Kim Ark is a natural-born citizen eligible to be President.
But no such statement exists. It’s also important to remember at all times that the Court in Minor specifically avoided construction of the 14th Amendment, thereby defining the class of natural-born citizens and identifying Virginia Minor as a member of that class. Virginia Minor directly petitioned the Court to determine that she was a citizen under the 14th Amendment. But the Minor Court declined to construe the 14th Amendment, and thereafter set about defining the class of persons who were natural-born citizens of the United States in determining that she was a citizen.
In 1996, the US Supreme Court’s majority opinion by Justice Breyer in Ogilvie Et Al., Minors v. United States, 519 U.S. 79 (1996), stated that when the Court discusses a certain reason as an independent ground in support of their decision, then that reason is not simply dictum:
“Although we gave other reasons for our holding in Schleier as well, we explicitly labeled this reason an ‘independent’ ground in support of our decision, id., at 334. We cannot accept petitioners’ claim that it was simply a dictum.”
The Minor Court’s construction of Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5, of the United States Constitution was the independent ground by which the Court avoided construing the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause.
Therefore, such construction is precedent, not dicta, despite POTUS eligibility not being an issue. The Court determined it was necessary to define the class of natural-born citizens, and the definition is current legal precedent.
Had the Court in Wong Kim Ark identified him as a natural-born citizen, there would have been no need to construe the 14th Amendment, just as it wasn’t necessary to construe it to determine Virginia Minor’s citizenship. But Wong Kim Ark was not natural-born, and therefore the Court was required to construe the 14th Amendment to determine his citizenship status...
...The same is true for the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Minor v. Happersett. Had the court intended to say – Some authorities go further and include as natural-born citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of the parents – then that is exactly what the US Supreme Court would have said. But they didn’t.
The above quote is from: http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/minor-v-happersett-revisited-2/
It’s the law, Kabar. Fuss all you want, but you are spreading lies and disinformation on Free Republic.