Posted on 07/19/2023 6:26:48 PM PDT by CDR Kerchner
(Jul. 17, 2023) — Well, faithful P&E readers, here we go again. As another “exploratory” candidate for president appears on the scene – Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai –, it may be prudent to once again revisit the Supreme Court’s 1875 decision in Minor v. Happersett.
While the major holding of the case (i.e., that Missouri’s denial of suffrage to women did not violate the 14th Amendment) was abrogated 45 years later in 1920 by the 19th Amendment, the question remains as to whether the decision’s other “observations” and “comments” remain viable and relevant to the “natural born Citizen” (“nbC”) presidential eligibility question.
The answer to that question, in turn, may impact not only Ayyadurai’s candidacy – competently explored here – but may in addition cast useful light on the questionable presidential candidacies and bona-fides of many others, including Vivek Ramaswamy; Nikki Haley; Kamala Harris; and, of course, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. A subsequent offering will address Dr. Ayyadurai’s eligibility arguments.
Turning specifically therefore to the decision in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S.162 (1875) – and totally apart from the now-abrogated women’s suffrage issue addressed by the Court in ruling against Virginia Minor – the relevance of the surviving, non-suffrage and non-abrogated portions of the opinion to the nbC issue remains. Those portions relate to the Court’s following observations, found at 88 U.S. 162, 167-168: ... continue reading at: https://www.thepostemail.com/2023/07/17/revisiting-minor-v-happersett/
(Excerpt) Read more at thepostemail.com ...
"Being subject to a country's jurisdiction" and "Being the citizen of a country" are two different things.
In general, if you are subject to a given entity's jurisdiction, then that entity has the right to exert judicial and legal control against your person, and make you subject to their laws. Thus, if you are subject to a country's jurisdiction, you are subject to that country's laws.
That is an entirely different question from citizenship, as the determination of who is and is not a citizen is up to that country to decide. (For example, a given country could, hypothetically, say that only men of a certain age who own property or have completed some level of civic/military service are citizens.)
Traveling in another country does not change your citizenship
Of course it doesn't. I have not claimed this.
you are still at a loss to explain why aliens traveling here are entitled to birthright US citizenship just because they are obeying our laws.
Please kindly point out where I said anything remotely approaching this.
Aliens (who are not already immune from our jurisdiction, such as by virtue of being a diplomat) cannot obtain birthright citizenship because they've already been born; their only option is naturalization.
However, if their children happen to be born within the sovereign territory of the United States, then said children are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. Hence, their children would be considered natural-born citizens.
This has been the consistent interpretation of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment ("All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."), and is still the binding precedent as of 'United States vs. Wong Kim Ark'.
If you are concerned that this interpretation of the 14th Amendment was somehow contrary to the understanding of who natural-born citizens were prior to its ratification, then the surrounding facts and/or findings in the Antebellum cases of "McCreery's Lessee v. Somerville" (SCOTUS, 1824), "Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor" (SCOTUS, 1830), and "Lynch v. Clarke" (New York, 1844) should suffice to prove that children born of aliens (even those temporarily present in our sovereign territory) were nonetheless still considered natural-born citizens of the United States, as traced to what was then the common understanding of "citizenship by birth" inherited from the English Common Law.
Yes!
If the United States can detain you, confiscate your possessions, and put you on a plane, bus, or train and forcibly relocate you to Honduras or wherever, you are MOST CERTAINLY "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
I would say that is fairly accurate. From what I have read, the most important reason why England wanted people to owe them allegiance for just being born there is so that they could dragoon them into the British army.
They did *NOT* declare Wong Kim Ark to be a "natural born citizen." They declared him to be a "citizen."
It is only people who want the two to be equated that continue to make the mistake of thinking that the Wong Kim Ark decision had anything to do with the requirements for the presidency.
Through the process of mass naturalization by the law of the 14th amendment.
We know this process is outside "natural born citizen", because they had those in 1776, long before the 14th amendment came along.
"Natural citizen" has nothing to do with the 14th amendment, and I would go so far as to point out that anyone requiring the 14th amendment to qualify them as a citizen, is *NOT* a natural citizen.
Natural law was a real thing in the late part of the 18th century.
There are only two options: either Wong Kim Ark was a naturalized citizen, or he was a natural-born citizen (i.e. a citizen of America by birth).
Are you arguing that Wong Kim Ark was a naturalized citizen? (I'm sure you're not, because the surrounding facts of the case precluded Wong Kim Ark from naturalization altogether.)
The Court's ruling that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen due to the circumstances of his birth means that the Court ruled Wong Kim Ark was a natural-born citizen. They were quite explicit about it: "Upon the facts agreed in this case, the American citizenship which Wong Kim Ark acquired by birth within the United States has not been lost or taken away by anything happening since his birth..."
"Natural citizen" is not a legal term. (Did you mean to say "natural-born citizen"?)
Nor does "natural law" (which is a broader term corresponding to unchanging moral principles intrinsic to human nature, and is thus inherently separate from civil law per se) have anything to do with questions of what it means to be a citizen of a country, or what it means to be subject to the jurisdiction of a country (which are all questions of positive law, quite separate from the natural law).
Actually, you [sic] are merely subject to the judicial laws of the country they invaded. They and their kids don't get amnesty and US citizenship for their kids by breaking our laws.
Jurisdiction has 2 components; sovereignty among nations (citizenship), and legal governance (legislation, judicial) among its people and visitors, within its borders. Treaties fall in between (Executive, Legislative).
Au contraire mon frere. It may be "irrelevant" to the way the ridiculously pompous legal system views things, but those of us who are interested in real and actual truth can point out it's relevancy with ease.
It informs us that the Justices were aware there were two different standards, and that the one standard was certainly correct, while about the other there was doubt.
As information it is quite beneficial. They were not exhibiting the modern legal malady of undeserved certainty.
Being born a citizen is the definition of a natural born citizen.
I forget. Have I shown you Rogers v. Bellei yet?
You seem to be conflating the matter of citizenship for the alien parents (who can only acquire citizenship by naturalization) and for citizenship for their children if born within the sovereign territory of the United States. Citizenship attained by birth for the children does not therefore mean alien parents automatically become citizens as well (which no one is arguing).
Jurisdiction has 2 components; sovereignty among nations (citizenship), and legal governance (legislation, judicial) among its people and visitors, within its borders.
It flatly does not, insofar as America is concerned. You can see this just be looking at the citizenship clause and how it is worded: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
If citizenship is a component of jurisdiction (as you assert), then the 14th Amendment would be nonsensical, because it flatly states that American citizenship is dependent upon jurisdiction. Jurisdiction cannot be dependent upon citizenship if citizenship is likewise dependent upon jurisdiction: it would be self-referential, a circular definition.
Thus, since the 14th Amendment of the Constitution outweighs your opinion, your understanding of jurisdiction is erroneous.
I am given to understand that the legal system does not approve of hearsay. Was Justice Miller and Justice Field present at the Constitutional convention, or did they perhaps get their information from someone else?
Maybe I am looking at this wrong. When I hear people speak of "authorities", I generally take them to mean someone who knows what they are talking about on a particular subject. Perhaps Justice Waite is referring to his comrades, but I don't consider sources to be credible unless they are primary sources. (A trait I think the legal system generally shares.)
Also, I don't think the context of that statement about "authorities" was regarding jurisdiction, but was instead about whether there was any doubt that a person born to citizen parents was a citizen. They said there was no doubt, but for people born here of parents who were not citizens, there are doubts.
I know William Rawle spread the false notion that American citizenship was based on British Common law, even though he had been corrected on this particular point by the legal authorities of his own time period, but I was wondering if there were any other prominent "authorities" who had written law books where they also made this claim.
From past discussions I seem to remember that there were. Not many, but I remember there were some.
Exactly. It is merely the declared opinion of those who voted for it, and it changes any facts regarding his birth not at all.
McCain could not have been born in a CZ Naval Hospital in 1936. It was built in WW2. You have not seen the records for the non-existent hospital.
I may have done, but my recollection is it included the name of the doctor that delivered him and his mother's name. The reporter that did the story said he verified everything he could about the record he had found, and it was inherently consistent.
If it was fake, it was a d@mn good fake.
I have posted links to the article somewhere in my vast history of commentary on Free Republic, but I have no idea how to find it. You are good at searching, perhaps you have a trick to pull it out of the pile?
It appears the question is whether one born an alien can become a natural born U.S citizen retroactively.
Retroactively declaring someone a "natural citizen" is a lot like declaring a man is a "woman."
You can't change reality by law.
Have you ever heard of the fallacy of false choice? You are flirting with it very closely here, but in this particular case I assert he was a naturalized citizen, naturalized en masse by the 14th amendment.
You cannot pass a law to make someone a natural citizen. You can only naturalize them.
The Court's ruling that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen due to the circumstances of his birth means that the Court ruled Wong Kim Ark was a natural-born citizen.
No it doesn't. That's what you are pushing us to accept, and I don't accept it. His family still owed allegiance to China, and China regarded him as one of theirs. China still does that today, in case you didn't know. They are very gene-o-centric.
They were quite explicit about it:
They were quite explicit in ommitting the words "natural born". We cannot believe this is an accident.
If they believed as you claim, they would have just said so. That they refrained from making that specific declaration indicates that they didn't consider it appropriate.
That the legal system has not deigned to embrace it signifies nothing to me. It is a plain and simple description that gets the point across, and indeed, is far clearer in purpose from having left off the "born" part of it. All people are "born" so it is just redundant.
Nor does "natural law" (which is a broader term corresponding to unchanging moral principles intrinsic to human nature, and is thus inherently separate from civil law per se) have anything to do with questions of what it means to be a citizen of a country,
To the contrary. Without the "natural law" foundation for our independence, we are "subjects", not "citizens."
"Citizen" does in no way derive from English common law. The understood meaning of the word "Citizen" in 1770s England was "Dweller in a City."
Their proper word for someone owing allegiance to a nation was "Subject."
The word "Citizen", in our understanding of the term, does not come from England.
https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1287&context=lawreview
"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." George Orwell
And you should read the gyrations he went through before he seized on the final verbiage, which is effectively worse than what they started with.
The Bingham quote in your tagline has nothing to do with th 14th Amendment. It pertains to the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
If you say so. I'm not going to look it up because I no longer have the zeal I used to have. I *DO* recall that he said things along the very same lines in the debate on the 14th amendment. I used to quote them a lot.
Obviously, John Bingham was talking about a bill and not about the Fourteenth Amendment which was not even introduced for consideration until several months later.
Be that as it may, the part you quoted from him is absolutely correct, and contrary to your understanding of citizenship. If you are saying he is wrong, where did he get the notion that parents cannot have allegiance to a foreign sovereignty?
Something I try to get people on your side of the debate to understand is that if you were correct, there would be *NO EVIDENCE* to the contrary. We would not be able to cite "authorities" which contradict your claims. They would not exist.
We would not have that book from Pennsylvania declaring that the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania rejects English Common law as the basis of citizenship and declares American Citizenship law comes from Vattel.
It wouldn't exist!
"Les naturels, ou indigenes, sont ceux qui sont nes dans le pays, de parens citoyens"
He used the word "Citoyen", which is the word we still use, rather than the English "Subject."
How did we switch? Why did we switch?
Could it be that when we abandoned "Subject", with all it's "perpetual allegiance" connotations, we embraced the source of law that uses the term "Citizen"?
"Citizen" is barely referenced in English Law of that era, and it did not utilize the meaning we use today.
"Vattel was by far the most quoted legal source in pleadings in American cases, by almost a factor of 4, between 1790 and 1820. (Nussbaums Concise History of the Law of Nations, 1962)."
It would be helpful if you condensed your points down to a few important ones that people can more easily digest.
Also makes the thread more readable.
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