So, you’re OK with anchor babies becoming President, and people like Obama, whom, with questionable birth status, might be American. THAT is what your acceptance of this bastardized definition allows.
Your definition of “Natural Born Citizen” is brand spanking new. Well, new since Obama.
Yes, lineage is no longer purely through the father, that’s why both father and mother need to be US citizens today. The issue creates more restrictions, it doesn’t open it to more people, and laws Congress passes can’t make someone a Natural Born Citizen no matter how much you or I might wish otherwise.
Of course not. You really haven't read what I wrote with any degree of care if you could come to that conclusion.
...and people like Obama, whom, with questionable birth status, might be American. THAT is what your acceptance of this bastardized definition allows.
I never said anything like that either. No one whose birth status is questionable can be assumed to be natural born citizen. It is up to every person to be able to demonstrate the circumstances of their birth through validated evidence. Certainly no one ought to be considered qualified for the Presidency with out complete and substantial vetting of all birth records and evidence.
Your definition of 'Natural Born Citizen' is brand spanking new. Well, new since Obama.
I don't think so. Although I didn't have the time to annotate and provide subnotes, my entire effort was and is aimed at preserving the meaning of natural born citizen as understood by the consensus of the Founders, such as it was.
Yes, lineage is no longer purely through the father, that's why both father and mother need to be US citizens today.
Who says so? There is literally no scholarship that supports that view.
The issue creates more restrictions, it doesn't open it to more people, and laws Congress passes can't make someone a Natural Born Citizen no matter how much you or I might wish otherwise.
Do you hear what you are saying? You are proposing the redefinition of "natural born citizen" to make it more restrictive. You do not have the right to do that. Neither does Congress have such a right to redefine "natural born citizen". What Congress does have the right to do, as the instrument of the sovereignty of We the People, is to establish the criteria by which natural born citizenship will be determined in our nation.
If you think the criteria are clear already, can you explain why there is so much contention and disagreement around the issue. I'll tell you. It is precisely because that IS no agreed set of criteria to determine natural born status.
Let's be real clear here, I am not proposing that Congress redefine what is meant by 'natural born citizen'. But what Congress can do, and ought to do, is to clarify the measures to be used to establish that status, by a judicious combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis standards.
First of all, the concept of sovereignty residing in the People is a relatively new concept in the world. A the time of the Founding, the fledgling United States was perhaps the only country in the world that formally placed its sovereignty squarely in the hands of its citizens. Everywhere else in the world sovereignty resided in a person: a king, a sultan, and emperor, a prince, a potentate: subjects, not citizens, owed their allegiance to their sovereign and the sovereign had a reciprocal duty of protection.
This arrangement was seen as natural. The English Common Law recognized Natural Born Subjects. These were those who were born into the protection of the king to whom they owed fealty, loyalty and duty. This status was primarily determined by where a child was born, and why? Because the King said so. And to some degree this status was also extended to the children of subjects born outside the realms of the king. Again, why? Because the King decreed it. if the King decreed it, it had to be natural because the king was naturally the king.
Different kingdoms, different rules. The fledgling United States did not want its people to be subjects of any monarch. The intention was that sovereignty was to reside with the people themselves.
This created a bit of a conundrum since without a monarch, how was anyone to know what the standards would be for the determination of citizenship of a people with no allegiance to a monarch?
On this matter there is a plethora of opinion. Many courts have simply tied to graft the British concept of a subject and how the King determined this status onto our laws despite the undeniable fact that we had abandoned the entire status of being as “subject”. Some courts have made reference to Continental tradition, most notably in the form of Vattel’s “The Law of Nations”.
The point here is that the founders decided to use the term “Natural Born Citizen” in the Constitutional requirements to serve as President without precisely defining the term. From later writings and scholarship on the subject, it is clear that even at the time of the Founding there wasn’t any unanimity of opinion as to the meaning of this term.
It is clear enough that intent was to define a class of citizen who acquired their citizenship as a natural consequence of the circumstances of their birth, as opposed to a voluntary adoption of citizenship later in life. The question was always how to define the terms of measurement and criteria for the determination of this “at birth” citizenship by the operation of natural law. This is covered in my comments in Post 32 and others above.
But there seems to be a reluctance by some to accept that our law making can have any influence or effect on our thinking about this subject. But that ignores the fact that our laws and statutes are the embodiment of our own sovereignty. When “We the People” speak, we speak much as a King. We choose our own laws, which so far as they comport with our basic law, the Constitution, are determinative.
As sovereign people we have every right, not to redefine the Constitution outside the Amendment process, not to redefine the meaning of Natural Born Citizen, but to clarify how we will determine which children are those whose circumstances of birth, taken as a whole, qualify them to be considered Natural Born Citizens within the broadly understood meaning of that term.
We cannot be held hostage to the whims and preferences of long dead kings and potentates.