Replies

That is 100% incorrect, there IS a US Supreme Court case that construed the term of art 'Natural Born Citizen', the case is Minor vs Happersett.

Virginia Minor was a lawyer from Missouri, who claimed that the newly ratified 14th Amendment gave her the right to vote, and she sued the Missouri registrar of voters Happersett for not registering her. She claimed that in not allowing women to vote, Missouri was not granting her full citizenship, and thereby under the 14th Amendment, which made her a citizen, she should now be allowed to vote.

As the main component of this case, the Supreme Court stated that Missouri was not denying her citizenship by not allowing her to vote, because it could not deny her citizenship, because the US Constitution explicitly granted it to her. They construed the term-of-art 'Natural Born Citizen' to do this.

This is from the opinion - "The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.".

The court decided that Minor was already a Citizen, because since she was born in the US, to US citizen parents, then she was a 'Natural Born Citizen'.

This case was also cited as precedent in numerous cases, most notably, Lockwood, Ex Parte. In that case the court state the following:

"In Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, this court held that the word 'citizen' is often used to convey the idea of membership in a nation, and, in that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution as since; but that the right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, and that amendment did not add to these privileges and immunities. Hence, that a provision in a state constitution which confined the right of voting to male citizens of the United States was no violation of the federal constitution.".

Minor v Happersett was a 14th Amendment/women’s suffrage appeal.
Attempts to apply its holding to Obama have consistently failed.
For example: Allen v Obama, Arizona Superior Court Judge Richard E. Gordon: “Arizona courts are bound by United States Supreme Court precedent in construing the United States Constitution, and this precedent fully supports that President Obama is a natural born citizen under the Constitution and thus qualified to hold the office of President. Contrary to Plaintiff’s assertion, Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874), does not hold otherwise.”—Pima County Superior Court, Tuscon, Arizona, March 7, 2012
http://www.scribd.com/doc/84531299/AZ-2012-03-07-Allen-v-Obama-C20121317-ORDER-Dismissing-Complaint

That is 100% incorrect, there IS a US Supreme Court case that construed the term of art 'Natural Born Citizen', the case is Minor vs Happersett.

If that case were applicable, then why wasn't it cited by somebody> as disqualifying Obama from the Presidency?

After all, it was no secret that his father was a British national. He even wrote of it in his "autobiography".

Yet, nobody raised the question once Obama announced for the Presidency. Not a single politician (most of whom are lawyers), not a single lawyer, not a single jurist, not a single political official of any stripe. In other words, among the thousands and thousands of people who would've a.) been in a position to know he wasn't eligible and b.) had a stake in the election results, nary a soul bothered to raise a peep.

If Happersett was operative, how could that be?