Citizen By Natural Law
An Insight into Natural Born Citizenship OK
The legitimacy of the Presidency of Barack Obama rests on the flimsy premise that since he was born in Hawaii he is therefore a US citizen, and since he is a citizen he is therefore also “a natural born citizen” and thus eligible for the Presidency. But the reasoning behind this view is flawed because the meaning of “natural born citizen” is, and has been, misunderstood and over simplified.
To say that the president must be a natural born citizen is the same as saying that the President must be born a natural citizen. A natural citizen is not the same as a “native-born” citizen because there is a fundamental difference between the two. The essence of the difference is the fact that one relates to geography, while the other relates to parentage.
“Native born” relates to one’s place of birth, native soil, land of one’s ancestors, governmental jurisdiction and national boundaries.
“Natural born” relates to one’s blood, one’s genealogy, one’s genetics, one’s parentage.
What is conveyed by one’s place of birth is nothing that’s real and tangible, but rather, it’s merely something that is assigned. Namely, citizenship -if the law grants it.
Whereas what is conveyed by virtue of being “natural born” is something non-dependent on the will, wishes, assignment, or laws of others, but is intrinsic, unchangeable, unerasable, unloseable, inalienable, and permanent because it is part and parcel of ones very nature. It is conveyed from the parents to the off-spring -like one’s race or genetic attributes. To be, for example, a “natural born African” is to be born black, born of African parents, even though their location might be on a plantation in the South That’s something that no one, -and no government, had the ability to change because it is natural, by nature, rather than by geography .
To be a natural born American is to be born to American parents, regardless of the geography, whether it be on the land, on (or above) an ocean, on (or above) Antarctic ice, or in outer space. The framers of the Constitution used the term not as an official legal term, but as a “common law” term.
An excellent illustration of this point can be made by expanding the phrase “native born” to read “native born Eskimo”. What is a “native born Eskimo”? The phrase is nonsense since any attempt to link the Eskimo (Inuit) people to geography or political boundary is folly because they lived on the polar ice of the frozen Arctic sea. But one could refer to “a natural born Eskimo” -which would simply mean that said person was born of Eskimo parents.
The same relationship exists between the terms used to classify citizenship. “Natural born” refers solely to people born to American parents, whereas “native born” could pertain to people born of foreigners, slaves, and American Indians, (who were excluded from the presidency, along with women, even though it wasn’t spelled out in the Constitution, -it didn’t need to be stated because it was a given).
The framers of The Constitution thought about two important issues in regard to the qualifications for the presidency. Aside from the obvious need for someone of maturity who was a resident of the country for a considerable length of time, they thought about the issues of; (a) “who can be trusted?” and (b); “who can not be trusted?”. With those two issues foremost in their minds, they required that the president be “a natural born citizen” (i.e. that he be born a citizen, -naturally so, by virtue of being the off-spring of American citizens). The purpose of such a limitation was to insure that the citizenship of the president was not a result of geography, but of nature. That would prevent any loyalist English subject from having a son on American soil, who, if he were to be considered a U.S. citizen, might nevertheless be raised in England to be loyal to the Crown, a believer in the right of Kings, and later return to the U.S. to eventually run for and win the office of the President. Such a person could do enormous damage to the country.
To put it in a modern context, imagine, that during the Muriel boat-lift exodus from Cuba, that Castro’s pregnant wife traveled to the US, gave birth to a son here, then returned to Cuba to raise her American-born child with his father Fidel. He is raised and educated to believe in the superiority of Marxism. When he turns 21 he returns to the land of his birth to fulfill his secret dream of bringing Marxism to America. Fourteen years later he runs for president and wins. Is such a situation really something that the founding fathers meant to endorse? No! Rather, it would be the kind of thing they wished to prevent.
The framers of the Constitution were not stupid nor ignorant. They were aware of such a possibility because they knew that spies and traitors could be hiding in plain sight, and no doubt were. That’s a lesson experienced the hard way not long ago, when following the end of WWII it was discovered that numerous British “Manhattan Project” scientists were also Soviet spies who gave the Russians the secrets to the Atomic and Hydrogen bombs.
While in this day and age it would be politically correct to think that US citizenship could be conveyed to off-spring that were born to an American woman and a foreign man, it was not the case in that day because the male, the husband, the father had all the legal rights and the woman/wife had very few, being, in effect, a type of property, so his citizenship would be the primary citizenship for their child. But it is possible, if not probable, that a foreign father and American mother could convey dual-citizenship to their off-spring. The wording that the framers used in the Constitution was deliberate, and meant to prevent such off-spring from occupying the office of the president because his loyalty solely to the United States could not be assumed. And the stakes were too high to place such enormous trust in a person who might be loyal to a foreign power, namely, England, the oppressor and attacker of the American colonies. The founders had learned a bitter lesson about betrayal and shifting loyalties thanks to the trusted but traitorous General Benedict Arnold. They didn’t want there to be any possibility of someone with a secret foreign allegiance or divided loyalty to occupy that office because such a person could do far more damage to the country than Arnold did.
So while an American with dual citizenship would have all the rights and protections of U.S. citizenship, he would not be eligible for the Presidency -even though he was a “native born” citizen, because he would not have been born a natural American citizen since his father was not an American. *
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Is Obama ineligible to be president? The Constitution doesn’t require that he be born in the U.S., it requires that he be born to U.S. citizens, that he be a natural citizen by reason of birth to citizens. Anyone who is more than a citizen, i.e. -a hyphenated citizen, -a dual-citizen, is prohibited because their citizenship is passed from father to son, and a foreign father is a subject of a foreign power, along with his off-spring. Obama senior was a subject of the British Empire, as was his off-spring who is thereby eliminated from eligibility for the presidency, (though he can serve in any and every other capacity, even Supreme Court Chief Justice, but he cannot serve as Commander-In-Chief). If it becomes known that his dual-citizenship at birth disqualifies him from the Presidency, he will not be certifiable by the certifying committees of the Democratic Party in each of the 50 states and will have to withdraw from the race, being replaced perhaps by Hillary Clinton. He could serve as her Vice-President though. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Natural Law and Unnatural Duality
The use of the word “natural” in the Presidential eligibility clause has its derivation in natural law. Natural Law has its origin in the the account of creation in the book of Genesis where it’s stated that each species reproduces after its own kind. That means each species is a world unto itself and only mates with its own kind, forever perpetuating its own unique nature. That is possible by and because of the principle of UNIFORMITY. Uniformity is the principle behind natural law as it relates to reproduction, i.e. birth. Birth that is natural is birth that follows the principle of uniformity. Whenever duality (dualformity) occurs, the result is unnatural. Consider the Nectarine. It’s a hybrid of a peach and a plum. It is in no way inferior to them but it is in no way natural since it’s man-made. It embodies the principle of duality instead of uniformity. It’s a hybrid, a “half-breed”, a mixture of disparate natures. Seedless watermelons are similar. How can you grow them if there are no seeds to grow them with? Cross-polination I assume, which is unnatural.
In animal husbandry, an equivalent would be a donkey or an ass, which are cross-bred horse-and-mule hybrids. They are as healthy as horses and mules but they are not natural because of the violation of the principle of uniformity. As a result, they are sterile.
In the human realm, an analogy would be inter-racial reproduction, -not in a genetic sense (though that was widely assumed before DNA revealed that all humans descended from about 1,000 individuals of 70,000 years ago), but in an esthetic sense that is principally only skin deep. When a white woman gives birth to a dark negro child, or vice versa, it doesn’t appear natural to the mind. The principle of duality has displaced the principle of uniformity, resulting in something that is not normal. Racial bigotry has historically attached the idea of inferiority to abnormality due to prejudice and ignorance, (but inferiority is not necessarily a result of abnormality).
Abnormality that results from duality is different from what is normal, and what is normal is essentially the description of what is natural. That which is natural is the norm. That which is unnatural is not the norm.
In the citizenship realm, Uniformity is the norm and is what is inescapeably described as that which is natural. Anything outside of uniformity is therefore not natural. Hence duality of citizenship is a condition that is not normal, and thus not natural. Without uniformity of citizenship carried by the parents, the resulting off-spring will not be a product of uniformity, but of duality, and therefore will be outside the realm of what is normal and natural regarding his citizenship. A citizen is a “natural” citizen by birth only if both of his parents are of the same kind, and not a combination of disparate citizenships. Duality in parental citizenship results is a hybrid citizen with dual citizenship, which is not normal, and hence not natural because it violates the uniformity principle.
Since Barack Obama is the off-spring of such a union, he is outside the description of what a natural born citizen is. It is on that basis that his eligibility for the office of President is found to be lacking.
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paraleaglenm said:
“The child is born out of wedlock which is a stateless condition only when the father officially abandons the family. ” I believe there’s a logic error in that statement. One can’t abandon a relationship that never existed, and I have no idea how one who had a relationship could “officially” abandon it. Any thing “official” is kind of oxymoronic to the character of abandonment.
“…the law of the time Article II was written. It is that law we must harken back to in interpreting Article II.” That makes perfect sense, but the fly in the ointment is that the commonly accepted description of “natural born citizen” was never written in stone. If one disputes the possibility of very real legitimate exceptions to the general rule, then how does one argue against this one:
A decorated US soldier by the name of George Washington, namesake of his ancestor (the man most responsible for the existence of the United States) meets and marries a female veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who’s ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. She becomes pregnant, but the day before her baby is born, he husband is killed sacrificing himself to save his fellow soldiers.
paraleaglenm said:
“If born in the U.S. to a U.S. mother, the child has no alienage, i.e., is under U.S. jurisdiction, and is born a citizen, but without a U.S. citizen father he is not a natural born citizen. ”
The baby has no American male parent at birth. Thus it doesn’t fit the general description of a n-b-c. 36 years later the child wants to run for President but is told that’s prohibited because of the lack of a male US parent at birth. Who in their right mind is going to make such an argument against him? What judge would rule that he is correct because of the GENERAL description of a natural born citizen being born to citizen parents (plural) in their own land. Common sense would argue that it is not an absolute rule that a n-b-c MUST be born on native soil, rather it is merely a description of fact that 99.999% are. Similarly, it is not an absolute rule that a n-b-c MUST have a LIVING American legal male parent (meaning being married to the mother and not simply being the biological father). No Supreme Court judge doesn’t want to avoid ever having to rule against the legitimacy of the exceptions to the general description and thus would have to choose between what the general description implied (about there being a LIVING American male parent ) and what that implied meaning didn’t take into account regarding possible variations to the general description, such as a case like I’ve described.
In the end it comes down to a case of whether or not Obama’s parents were married or not. If they were married, then their son is not by any description of a natural born citizen eligible to be President. But if they were unmarried -in every sense, and never cohabited, then nothing about the father (who would have never been a parent) has any impact on the woman that bore a child by him, nor her off-spring. Thus there would be no dual-citizenship to deal with. The nationality of an irrelevant father is irrelevant, whether he be domestic or foreign. That is the reality of today and would weigh very heavily in deciding whether or not the off-spring of a single/widowed American woman is legally definable as a natural born citizen.
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The Nature of being Natural Born
Native birth refers to place of birth, land of birth, geography and borders. Natural birth refers to biology, the biology of ones parentage and what that conveys to the off-spring in terms of culture, religion, personal values, loyalties, and political values. It has absolutely nothing to do with geography. The phrase “natural born citizen” is an adaptation from natural science. Natural born citizenship is something conveyed in the legal realm that is the human-law equivalent of that which is conveyed in the biological realm. A natural citizen is one born to citizens, as creatures are naturally born of like creatures. Tigers give birth to tigers. Baby tigers are natural born tigers. But if a male lion mates with a female tiger it does not result in a natural born tiger, but in a liger. Also, if a male tiger mates with a female lion they do not produce a natural born lion, but a tigon. If a horse mates with a mule, it does not produce a natural born horse or mule, but a donkey -which is not natural, and is sterile and unable to reproduce. So it is with race and nationality. A black father and Caucasian mother do not produce an natural born Caucasian, nor a natural born African or black, they produce a hybrid, because of the duality of their genetics. A Russian father and Chinese mother do not produce a natural born Russian, nor Chinese, child. Russians give birth to Russians, Germans give birth to Germans, Eskimos gave birth to Eskimos, and Vikings gave birth to Vikings, regardless of where they found themselves.
Similarly, a native citizen and a foreign citizen do not produce a natural born native nor a natural born foreigner but a combination, resulting in dual citizenship (and divided loyalty) if the circumstances don’t counter it (such as abandonment or death). Natural born citizenship is automatically or naturally conveyed to the off-spring regardless of location, although for the vast majority of people their birth location is the land of their parents’ citizenship. Those who are born to citizens are citizens by birth. Those who are born to foreigners are foreigners by birth, and those who are off-spring of both are neither, but rather they’re both, (making them dual citizens) But with humans loyalty can be ingrained not only from ones parents and group, but also from the land that one is raised on and the nation that inhabits that land. Dual-citizens are no more natural born citizens than ligers are natural born lions or tigers. Therefore to doubly insure loyalty to the United States, the founders went with the conventional meaning of natural birth which was a native citizen born to American citizen parents.
There are 5 categories of citizens: 1. Natural Born 2 . Foreign born and Naturalized 3. Natives born to Naturalized parents, or to legal-resident aliens, 4. Natives born to non-resident aliens ( foreign visitors or diplomats) 5. Natural born, but abroad.
And in the last brain-dead century one has to include a 6th class: native born of illegal alien parents, -this being because of a very liberal and erroneous interpretation of the 14th amendment.
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Forgive me for splitting hairs but I’d like to expound on something said; “the Founders and Framers looked to natural law and the law of nations and not the English common law for their definition of a “natural born Citizen.” This is true but not in a literal sense. They didn’t look to anything because they didn’t really “look” at all. They KNEW what the phrase meant, not that it had a formal definition, but it had a definite description and that description is what they referred to. It was a description derived from natural law and the law of nations and their use of the word natural instead of native implied a transfer by nature from parent to child, not assignment in law or statute based on the political borders that a child was born within. There is nothing natural about ones citizenship assigned due to borders (rather than blood). Just as eagles give birth to eagles, so Americans give birth to Americans. That’s natural law. Land does not give birth to citizens, citizens do. AN
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h2ooflife 
Posted by su359115 on May 15, 2011 07:56
Excellent research, ch22240
It is clear that only diseased minds . . . specifically: biased, short-sighted, of questionable intelligence and education, ‘anglophiliacs,’ Carried a Torch for the old law from when the states were mere colonies/vassals of the British Empire.
These sick people, jurists, and politicians worship that English law making ‘place of birth’ within the dominion of the Lord of the Castle, to whom all issue coming forth from land, seed, and womb (animal and human) belonged to the Lord. All owed permanent allegiance, and to them he allowed what so much of their production as to keep them alive . . . oh, sounds like Obama’s economic plan.
Of course, forget that the holy law of the King in the 1700’s (specifically codified in 1772) included ‘citizenship by descent,’ i.e., jus sanguinis, in the law of England. Jus solis was categorized under ‘citizenship otherwise than by descent,’ clearly a secondary level.
Posted by Atticus Finch on May 15, 2011 10:26
Despite the rhetoric from the Vattelities there is a reason why our legal system is referred to as Anglo-American jurisprudence instead of Roman-American jurisprudence or Franco-American jurisprudence. Since the founding of our nation, courts have acknowledged our common law heritage that is rooted in the English common law.
Justice Thomas in his concurring opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago 561 U.S. ____ (2010) observed: ”After declaring their independence, the newly formed States replaced their colonial charters with constitutions and state bills of rights, almost all of which guaranteed the same fundamental rights that the former colonists previously had claimed by virtue of their English heritage.. . . . .. Several years later, the Founders amended the Constitution to expressly protect many of the same fundamental rights against interference by the Federal Government. Consistent with their English heritage, the founding generation generally did not consider many of the rights identified in these amendments as new entitlements, but as inalienable rights of all men, given legal effect by their codification in the Constitution’s text. “
Furthermore, courts have acknowledged that the common law was a barrier to arbitrary power of the government. ”Those who emigrated to this country from England brought with them this great privilege “as their birthright and inheritance, as a part of that admirable common law which had fenced around and interposed barriers on every side against the approaches of arbitrary power.” Thompson v. Utah, 170 US 343, 349-350 (1898) quoting 2 Story’s Const. § 1779
Moreover, “When it is said that we have in this country adopted the common law of England, it is not meant that we have adopted any mere formal rules, or any written code, or the mere verbiage in which the common law is expressed. It is aptly termed the unwritten law of England; and we have adopted it as a constantly improving science, rather than as an art; as a system of legal logic, rather than as a code of rules. In short, in adopting the common law, we have adopted its fundamental principles and modes of reasoning, and the substance of its rules as illustrated by the reasons on which they are based, rather than by the mere words in which they are expressed.’ Fung Dai Kim Ah Leong v. Lau Ah Leong, 27 F. 2d 582, 584 (9th Cir. 1928 ) (internal citation omitted)
Posted by su359115 on May 15, 2011 13:16
You make a serious error conflating the ‘system’ of common law with the common law application of precedent.
Your comment is only illustrative of your error, and mistake in undermining the 1790 Act, et seq . . . and Horace Gray’s similar horrible misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Posted by ch22240 on May 15, 2011 14:46
In ‘The Law of Nations as a Constitutional Obligation by Michael D. Ramsey’
The following is stated “The eighteenth-century view was more complex. The period lacked the commitment to positivism that characterized the next century and drove the foundation of nineteenth-century international law upon tacit consent. As Vattel put it, “the law of nations is originally no other than the law of Nature applied to Nations.” Blackstone had said that the law of nations “depends upon the rules of natural law, or upon mutual compacts, treaties, leagues and agreements between these several communities.” Leading law-of-nations treatises identified its principles with natural law in their very titles; Burlamaqui’s main work was “Principles of Natural and Politic Law,” and Vattel subtitled his Law of Nations “or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns”
Later on “Blackstone echoed a long line of Enlightenment writers such as Vattel, Bynkershoek, Wolff, Burlamaqui, Pufendorf, Grotius, and Rutherforth, among others, who described the legal relationships among nations and were well-known in eighteenth-century America. Some of these writers, including Vattel and Wolff, explicitly called their subject “the law of nations,” and even those that did not use the phrase were commonly described as treating that subject. Vattel’s Law of Nations (1758) “was unrivaled among such treatises in its influence on the American founders.” According to Vattel, “The Law of Nations is the science which teaches the rights subsisting between nations or states, and the obligations correspondent to those rights.”
As an initial step, we may conclude that the constitutional generation in America generally acknowledged a set of international rights and duties called “the law of nations” that arose outside U.S. law and regulated nations’ “mutual intercourse,” as Blackstone put it. We can be satisfied that the Framers of the Constitution believed that compliance with this law was a duty of the nation and a key to successful foreign policy – notably absent from the Framers’ discourse is any sustained appeal to what we would call “realism” in international relations as a value superseding the requirements of the law of nations. Their challenge, obviously, was to achieve an integration of the law of nations – written and unwritten – into the constitution of the new federal government that had eluded the drafters of the Articles.
Posted by Atticus Finch on May 15, 2011 23:12
The Constitution was written in common law terms. “The language of the Constitution cannot be interpreted safely except by reference to the common law and British institutions as they were when the instrument was framed and adopted. The statesmen and lawyers of the Convention who submitted it to the ratification of the Conventions of the thirteen States, were born and brought up in the atmosphere of the common law, and thought and spoke in its vocabulary. They were familiar with other forms of government, recent and ancient, and indicated in their discussions earnest study and consideration of many of them, but when they came to put their conclusions into the form of fundamental law in a compact draft, they expressed them in terms of the common law, confident that they could be shortly and easily understood.” Ex Parte Grossman, 267 U.S. 76, 108-09 (1925)
Moreover, the Constitution can only be interpreted by common law terms. “The principles and history of the common law were well known to the framers of the Constitution and the members of the First Congress; it was from that system that their terminology was derived; and the provisions of the Constitution and contemporaneous legislation must be interpreted accordingly. Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, 244 US 205 , 230 (1917) (Pitney, J. dissenting)
Coming full circle, we arrive back at the issue of how the common law viewed the transmission of citizenship. Was it from the soil or was it from the father? I can’t believe that men of the time would have thought that if an American and wife visited Mexico or Canada and she gave birth there, her child would be a citizen of a foreign country based on jus soli (which some would claim was the common law of the time) rather than being a natural American citizen by reason of birth to an American father.
The simplistic mind might grasp at the first thought that comes to mind, “I’m an American ’cause I was born in America!” but there is no thought behind such knee-jerk “logic” and I sure wouldn’t want to accuse our founders of being such feeble-minded simpletons that they also would have thought that way. Natural inheritance by blood is what natural citizenship boils down to. No other kind of citizenship fits the word “natural”. The only way to dispute this fact is to be ignorant of what the word means.
And the arguments need not be detoured by talk of laws and interpretations of how citizenship is acquired when none of that is pertinent to this topic, which is only focused on the issue of the assurance of loyalty of the US President. That was viewed as being assured only by a candidate being the son of US citizens, having been born and raised in the US. That common law description of a natural born citizen includes the essence of BOTH jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship background.
But the way this relates to Obama is only definitely pertinent to any future Supreme Court decision if he can be shown to NOT be the legal (by marriage) son of Obama Sr. Then they could rule that his citizenship was derived solely from his mother and that her citizenship alone was sufficient to confer American citizenship of the “natural” variety. So again I ask; “Where’s the marriage license and the divorce decree?” Without them he could be ruled to be a natural born citizen -although it would be by today’s standard, not that of the paternalistic past. A.N.
reply to PhoxarRed
Your conclusions have no basis in logic. You are saying that the framers of the Constitution would have had the same superficial “outsider” view as the common man, when instead they had a unique view because it was on their shoulders that the security of the country rested when they were deciding the criteria for the Presidentcy. NO ONE ELSE’S view is relevant.
Your view ignores that fact the “everyone” can be wrong, especially in the use of terms that are almost interchangeable being as 99.99% of citizens were both native and natural born. You want to argue that “they all
can’t be wrong!”? “Well Gee, Mr. Columbus, are you mad! Everyone knows if you sail West without ceasing, you’ll fall off the edge of the earth!”
What ever existed that would have prevented people from conflating the two when it comes so naturally to do so?
Your assertion that all those hundreds of quotes relate to the Art.II “natural born citizen” phrase is unbelievable for the simple reason that there was essentially zero reason to ever even think about it until the appearance of Barack Obama. I know that I never did until a couple months ago. So tell me why it would have ever come up since a real discourse about Presidential eligibility was never necessary. I’ll bet that essentially none of those numerous quotes have anything to do with the Presidency nor the fears the framers rightly had that the son of a loyal British subject would be born on our soil, be raised in Britain, return to the land of his “native birth” as a citizen, run for and win the position of Commander in Chief off all the military forces of the United States, and then use them against the republic. How can you be so blind as to not see that that is precisely what they intended to prevent. The son of an alien was not to be trusted with all the military force of the US government. Period. Britain was STILL the enemy and hostile to the United States and even tried to destroy it a second time a few years later. Boyhood dreams are ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT to what the framers intended. It wasn’t the fulfillment of dreams they had in mind, it was the protection of the state by requiring the maximum degree of loyalty that circumstances could assure, and that included both native birth AND citizen parents. Anything less is
***LESS!!!***. Less is not what they had in mind.
Your distorted and inadequate view due to conflating native with natural essentially means that they wanted there to be no difference between the citizenship requirements for the President and those for everyone else, except he couldn’t be a naturalized citizen.
You chose to base your conclusions on the opinions of others when there is an actual foundation of truth you aren’t willing to consult, and that is the underlying FACT that words have actual set meanings, and the intellectually sloppy misconstruence of terms has no place in understand the meaning and intent of the words the framers chose.
“…making Obama a 14th Amendment citizen and by John Bingham’s definition, a Natural Born Citizen”
Who died and made John Bingham God? His definition is only his own opinion and nothing more. What Supreme Court justice would give deference to his opinion over their own? They can’t trust that anybody that opined on the subject didn’t engage in a biased contortion of either logic or the facts regarding the implied meaning of the word “natural”.
Don’t quote some revered figure as being the final word on the subject when the other side can cite just as many authorities or more.
The framers sought two thing; maturity, and loyalty. The first two requirements involve loyalty, -“maximum citizenship” (to coin a phrase) and residency. Maximum citizenship involved at least two things; American father, and native birth. An American mother was taken for granted as a given. Using the term “natural” implied a type of citizen that would exclude other types of citizens. An adopted son of a lesbian couple would not be considered “natural”. The union and children of a white mother and a negro father would not have been thought of as “natural”. The son of an American mother and a father that was a loyal subject of the King of England would not be seen as a “natural” American citizen, nor even a citizen at all.
reply to phoxarRed
“the more widespread such awareness of means alternative to jus soli existed in the minds of the new American people, the more necessary the Framers would have felt it, to have announced any intention to reverse the existing American tradition of jus soli birthright citizenship.”
A few baseless assumptions expressed there, like the idea that there was ANY thought about citizenship in the minds of the colonists. Why would there be except in regard to which colony/state they belonged to. They were all citizens automatically so why would the issue even arise? They didn’t travel abroad nor marry aliens. They were ALL British, later American, citizens.
How can a sane person argue with another sane person that their view is correct and the other is wrong when both sides are 99.999% correct simultaneously? All citizens were born “in country” to citizen parents, with a few rare exceptions, so it is ridiculous to assert that they all believed one way or an other when they couldn’t have cared less.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what anyone believed, rightly or wrongly. All that matters is what the English words mean, and hence, what they meant to the framers of the Constitution.
Even if the jus soli principle was the operating citizenship principle, that is irrelevant to the use of the word “natural” in describing certain citizens
regarding eligibility to the office of the POTUS.
As for: “the Framers would have … announced any intention to reverse the existing American tradition of jus soli birthright citizenship.” It wasn’t a “tradition” (except perhaps in regard to individual colonies) and it wasn’t being “reversed” by the Article II “natural born citizen” requirement which applied ONLY to the office of the President, and none other. So even if jus soli was operative in the new nation, it would be just one of two requirements for Art. II eligibility, the other being birth to citizen parents. Without that additional requirement a candidate for the Presidency would be like a para-glider with only one leg. The stability of his landing is compromised by missing one, just as the loyalty of a candidate might be compromised by missing one of the two legs of natural citizenship.
Namely; native birth to citizen parents. Now, “can’t we all just get along?”
PhoxarRed wrote:
“a person’s citizenship is an abstract idea – it has no physical substance.” Watch out, you’re straying into my way of thinking. Citizenship is more than an abstract idea when it is comprehensively delineated in Federal law. What IS an abstract idea is natural citizenship, which is from the same realm as the precepts of the Declaration of Independence. Its principle are based on natural law, just as natural citizenship also is. That is the reason it is not defined in the Constitution, because it is an abstract derived from a description of reality.
“The laws of other nations…imbue you with no legal aspect which corrupts your US citizenship or needs to be “removed” with nationality laws.”
That makes too much sense to dispute, except perhaps in a case in which an American citizen enlists in service to a foreign government and has
entered into a state of allegiance to that government. Then, if such a citizen is a natural born citizen who later wants to run for President, he (in a perfect world) would need a judge to declare that his previous state of divided or switched allegiance was ended and he was fully under the jurisdiction of the United States.
This is odd. Just a few month ago I read the rules for presidential eligibility. At that time the mother of Barack Obama had to have been a US citizen for 5 years from age 16 at the time of Barack’s birth. She was only 18 at the time of Barack’s birth. That made Barack ineligible for the presidential requirements. Now the rule has been conveniently changed to 2 years and 14 years old. How convenient for Barack. He is definitely above the law. ?????
The rules have changed via revisions to the national nationality statutes. When Obama was born it was 5 years residence from the age of 14. I believe it’s now 2 years residence from the age of 14. The rule today is irrelevant to Obama because he falls under the law as written when he was born. By it he is not a U.S. citizen if not born within U.S. borders, but would have become one only after his mother divorced his father. Then her citizenship would have been conveyed to him thanks to the naturalization statutes of modern history which began in the 1930s. The long-standing version was the Act of 1940. By it her child would have received derivative citizenship through his blood-connection to her. Where ever he was born, inside or outside of the U.S. would not have made him a natural born citizen because he’s a statutory citizen.