Posted on 05/08/2013 8:03:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In one of my first essays for NRO back in 2005 (“Are You an Originalist?”), I selected the Constitution’s “natural born Citizen” criterion for eligibility to be president—a provision that then seemed at the time to be beyond the distorting effects of political bias—to illustrate that everyone intuitively recognizes the common-sense principle at the heart of the interpretive methodology of originalism: namely, that the meaning of a constitutional provision is to be determined in accordance with the meaning that it bore at the time that it was adopted. The public debate in 2008 over whether John McCain, having been born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone to parents who were American citizens, was a “natural born Citizen” ratified my point, as virtually all commentators purported to undertake an originalist inquiry.
I hadn’t seen any reason to comment on the left-wing “birther” attacks on Senator Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president. Cruz was born in Canada in 1970 to a mother who was then an American citizen. Under the laws then in place, he was an American citizen by virtue of his birth.
As this Congressional Research Service report sums it up (p. 25; see also pp. 16-21), the “overwhelming evidence of historical intent, general understandings [in 18th-century America], and common law principles underlying American jurisprudence thus indicate[s] that the most reasonable interpretation of ‘natural born’ citizens would include those who are considered U.S. citizens ‘at birth’ or ‘by birth,’ … under existing federal statutory law incorporating long-standing concepts of jus sanguinis, the law of descent.” In other words, there is strong originalist material to support the semantic signal that “natural born Citizen” identifies someone who is a citizen by virtue of the circumstances of his birth—as distinguished from someone who is naturalized later in life as a citizen. (In McCain’s case, the dispute turned on whether he was indeed an American citizen by virtue of his birth—or was instead naturalized a citizen under a law enacted when he was eleven months old. For more, see law professor Gabriel Chin’s lengthy article making the case against McCain.)
To my surprise, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber tries to argue that Cruz’s embrace of constitutional originalism somehow means that Cruz can’t determine that he is a “natural born Citizen.” But the only evidence that Scheiber offers for this position is the assertion (which Scheiber mischaracterizes as a concession) by a non-originalist law professor in an MSNBC interview that the proposition that a person is a “natural born Citizen” if he is a citizen by virtue of his birth “isn’t really clear cut if you limit yourself to the actual wording of the Constitution” (that’s Scheiber’s paraphrase) but instead depends on “how our understandings have evolved over time.” Scheiber both overlooks the powerful originalist evidence in support of Cruz’s status as a “natural born Citizen” and misunderstands how originalist methodology operates. (In public-meaning originalism, you don’t “limit yourself to the actual wording of the Constitution,” and you don’t find yourself lost simply because the Constitution “never defines what ‘natural born’ means.” You instead look to the public meaning of the term at the time it was adopted.)
My point here isn’t to contend that the originalist evidence points entirely in one direction. As law professor Michael Ramsey observes in a post that I’ve run across while finalizing this post (a post that also takes issue with Scheiber), there are originalist scholars who don’t “find the argument entirely conclusive.” But Scheiber’s piece is a cheap whack at Cruz as well as a cheap whack at originalism.
No, you can't. In fact, I don't think you can name even one, and show, factually, that it's a fallacious argument.
I just counted the number of pages in my notes. So far, I'm up to about 90 pages.
If you want to know why I haven't posted the debunking of all of the BS fallacious arguments made by birthers yet, it's that I haven't had time to go through and edit 90 pages.
And actually, it'll expand beyond that by the time I'm done.
In every single case (and I'm up to about 45 instances so far) I can identify, clearly, exactly where the fallacy is, or where the argument collapses.
Every case.
It doesn't matter if you deny the truth. Your denial still doesn't make it true. Your desire to engage in a fantasy doesn't make the fantasy anything other than a fantasy.
Fantasies are nice. I can imagine that it's nice to pretend that Charlize Theron is your girlfriend.
Continuing to insist that fantasies are real isn't healthy.
I frankly don't care if I convince you or other birthers. In my estimation, you're beyond hope. Your desire to engage in fantasy, and for whatever reason, to pretend that it takes birth on US soil plus two citizen parents for a person to be a natural born citizen, is so intense I'm sure you'll never give it up.
But any reasonable person who reads these threads can see, clearly, that fantasy is all it is.
The fact is, a natural born citizen is a person born in a country to two citizen parents because he/she can be nothing else.
This is your fundamental error. You want "natural born citizen" to mean "a person born in a country to two citizen parents." So you say, "Well, NATURAL. That MUST mean, blah, blah, blah."
But a legal term doesn't mean what you or I WANT it to mean. It means what it means.
And we can only know what it means by looking at how people have always defined it, in history and in law.
And in history and in law, "natural born" meant that you were BORN INTO A COUNTRY. Period. And it didn't require that your parents were citizens of that country. It only required that you were born there.
The idea was that God has divided the world up into kingdoms and countries.
And if you were born in a country, that was your country. That was the country you owed your allegiance to. It wasn't your parents' country, or your grandparents' country, that you owed your allegiance to.
It was the one you were born in.
And so you were called a "natural born" citizen or subject of that country, and you were obligated to obey the laws of that country.
So in order to understand what a historical and legal term meant, you have to look at what it always meant. You can't just say, "Well, I know what that MUST mean," and assign it your own meaning.
Because it has HAD a meaning, for centuries.
And that meaning is absolutely clear.
It has NEVER meant what you claim.
If it had, I would be here talking about how it had always meant what you say it does.
But it doesn't. It just doesn't.
And never did.
Please point to the post where this claim is made.
I'm on my way out of town. You'll need to look it up for yourself. It shouldn't be that hard to trace back.
Once again, you spin absolute BS.
Nowhere was the claim made that only "sons of freeholders" are citizens.
You're an idiot.
Once again, you spin absolute BS.
Nowhere was the claim made that only "sons of freeholders" are citizens.
You're an idiot.
??????
What I SAID was:
Nowhere does it say that only "sons of freeholders" are citizens.
In other words, I said EXACTLY WHAT YOU JUST SAID. That the claim was never made that only "sons of freeholders" were citizens.
You then responded by asking me what I had reference to. At least, that was the way I understood it.
BECAUSE SURELY YOU WEREN'T STUPID ENOUGH TO ASK ME WHERE A CLAIM WAS MADE, THAT I HAD JUST SAID WAS NEVER MADE.
With all due respect: YOU, sir, are the idiot.
And that is shown by what you just posted.
Show the post where the claim was made “that only sons of freeholders are citizens”.
The Fact that it says "Son of a Freeholder" pretty much screws your argument. You see, according to YOUR theory, that passage shouldn't exist.No, it doesn't. Once again, you spin absolute BS.
Nowhere does it say that only "sons of freeholders" are citizens.
You're an idiot.
But I repeat myself.
The claim was made, by DiogenesLamp:
The Fact that it says "Son of a Freeholder" pretty much screws your argument. You see, according to YOUR theory, that passage shouldn't exist.
There is no incompatibility with the passage, and what the meaning of "natural born citizen" has always been.
NONE.
The straw man is bad enough, your incessant insults are juvenile.
And the way that there would BE incompatibility, would be if the passage had said that only the sons of freeholders were citizens.
But it doesn’t say that. I rightly pointed out that nowhere does it say that only the sons of freeholders are citizens.
I never said that he said that the source said only sons of freeholders were citizens.
He said that the passage killed “my argument” (by which he means the meaning that the phrase “natural born citizen” has always held in the United States.)
Since his statement would only have been correct if the passage had stated that only the sons of freeholders were citizens, I rightly pointed out that nowhere did the passage make that claim.
Therefore, HIS claim (”this screws your ‘argument’”) was BS.
And I didn’t make a straw man argument - YOU just did.
I wasn’t the person who first called someone else an idiot. YOU were.
So you’re guilty of both things you accuse me of.
You posted a strawman and then dished out insults.
Real class act.
What a laugh!!!!
80-90% of your posts are built from a boilerplate of insults. Anyone can read this thread or any other eligibility thread that you post to and see your non-stop insults.
Go here
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:jeffwinston/index?tab=comments;brevity=full;options=no-change
scan for “idiot”, one of your favorite insults.
Then go to the next page. And the next. And the next. Page after page after page.
I didn’t post a straw man.
I simply pointed out that the passage nowhere said that only the sons of freeholders were citizens.
That is what it would HAVE to have said, in order for DL’s claim to be true.
A straw man is when you claim that someone said something stupid other than what they actually said.
I never did that.
But YOU just did. You falsely claimed that I said DL said the passage said that only the sons of freeholders were citizens.
I NEVER MADE SUCH A CLAIM.
So when you falsely said that I said something I never said, YOU MADE A STRAW MAN ARGUMENT.
You then proceeded to call me an idiot. You called me an idiot before I called you one.
As for DiogenesLamp, his comment was IDIOTIC. So that is why I called HIM an idiot.
I hope we’re done now, because I won’t be posting for a while, because I am going to be on the road for a while.
Keep talking, you’re only digging a deeper hole.
Jeff - every time you have posted something, someone has posted something that shows the opposite interpretation and/or where you are wrong in your interpretation, or that the court system is fallible and can’t be trusted.
The fact that you so strongly believe you’re right and everyone else is wrong means that you live in a delusional world.
If you believe that ALL the court cases that you cite were decided correctly, I’m not the only one who is having fantasies.
“But a legal term doesn’t mean what you or I WANT it to mean. It means what it means.”
If “natural born” was a legal term you could look it up in a law dictionary and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
And you’re right, it means what it means - and Vattel defined it.
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