What is a "natural-born citizen"?
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Has the phrase natural-born citizen lost its meaning? New
Jersey Administrative Law Judge Jeff S. Masin implied that when he
dismissed the latest Obama eligibility case (Purpura & Moran v. Obama, STE 4534-12). But a closer look at the precedents he cites, says no. To infer anything else is to show how wrong it is to regard the United States Constitution as “a living document” and thus allow courts to change the meaning of its words at will.
Natural-born citizen in the Obama eligibility context
Nick Purpura and Ted Moran argued that the name of Barack H. Obama should not appear on a New Jersey Democratic primary ballot, for two reasons:
- No one can say for certain who “Barack H. Obama” is, where he was born, or even when he was born.
- Even if he was born in Honolulu, HI, as he says, his father was a British colonial subject. So Obama cannot be a natural-born citizen.
That last phrase is key. Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the US Constitution reads in part:
No person, except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of
the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution,
shall be eligible to the office of President.
Most Obama eligibility cases focus on the disputed Obama birth
certificate. That document did not even figure in this case. Obama’s
campaign never offered it to the New Jersey Secretary of State, in any
form, hard-copy or soft-. Judge Masin even asked his lawyer, Alexandra
Hill, to concede that point, and she did.
Judge Masin concluded that Obama need not produce anything. More than that, he offered this exact conclusion:
the petitioners have failed to meet their burden to
[show] that Barak Obama failed in any obligation to prove to the
Secretary of State that he [qualifies] to hold the Presidency and that
he is a “natural born Citizen” of the United States of America, as
required by the United States Constitution.
Many bloggers, sympathetic to Mr. Obama, have construed that to say that Judge Masin has somehow “ruled” that Barack H. Obama is
a natural-born citizen. That’s not necessarily what that sentence
means. The sparing way that Masin punctuated that sentence makes it say
that Purpura and Moran did not prove that Obama had failed in any duty he might have to prove that:
- He qualifies for the office of President, and
- He is a natural-born citizen.
The Hon. Jeff Masin presides at the latest Obama eligibility hearing. Photo: CNAV
Masin mentions three federal cases in trying to decide what a natural-born citizen is. Purpura and Moran mentioned one: Minor v. Happersett, 88 US 162 (1875). Masin, quoting an Indiana case (Ankeny v. Gov. Ind., 916 N.E.2d 678 (Ind. Ct. App. 2009)), mentioned the other two: US v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 US 649 (1898), and US v Rhodes, 1 Abbott, US 28 (Cir, Ct. Kentucky, 1966), that another blogger quotes here. (Judge Masin mis-quoted the year of the Rhodes case; he lists it as 1860, not 1866. Tellingly, the bloggers who triumphantly quote his decision never catch the mistake. From this, CNAV concludes that they are not doing their own research.)
The Minor case defines “natural-born citizen” better than any other case.
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. Some authorities
go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction
without reference to the citizenship of their 168*168 parents. As
to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For
the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts.
Note the sentences that CNAV emphasizes. The Minor court said: Any person born in-country to citizen parents is a natural-born citizen. Whether a person born in-country to two parents, one or both of whom might not be a citizen, is a citizen himself, is still in doubt. And the Minor case never sought to resolve that. And where did the Minor court get its definition? From Emmerich de Vattel’s Law of Nations. It reads in relevant part:
The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound
to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they
equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born
citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As
the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the
children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition
of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is
supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own
preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each
citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of
becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that of
the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit
consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of
discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the
society in which they were born. I say, that, in order to be of the
country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a
citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the
place of his birth, and not his country.
The defendant/respondent Wong Kim Ark came to the Supreme Court after the government tried to expel him for his Chinese nationality.
His parents were temporary railroad workers, and were not Chinese
diplomats. By any reasonable standard, Wong Kim Ark was born in the
United States and was subject to its jurisdiction. That made him a citizen.
Obama eligibility apologists have repeated ad nauseam that the Wong court not only said that Mr. Wong could stay in America, but that someday he could run for President. That is utterly unfounded. Not one word in the majority opinion in Wong says, or implies, that “Wong Kim Ark for President!” would have been a legitimate campaign slogan.
(As an aside, the Wong ruling applies to one born in-country of lawful residents. So the “anchor baby syndrome” has an instant remedy: read the opinion, and stop reading into it. The Wong court would not have held that the children of illegal aliens
were themselves citizens by sole reason of location of birth. Neither
might they have held that a “birth tourist,” typically a foreign-born
woman staying at an American hotel, going into labor, and riding in an
American ambulance to an American hospital for admission to an American
labor-and-delivery suite, could ever confer American citizenship on her baby by so acting.)
The other case that Judge Masin cited was US v. Rhodes. The linked quote is, as the Webmaster admits, incomplete. Whether the Court in that case correctly used the word citizen interchangeably with the phrase natural-born citizen is impossible to determine. The reason: the quoted text lays no foundation for conflating those two terms.
So where do the Obama eligibility apologists stand? Either the Supreme Court still
defines a natural-born citizen as a special class of persons born
in-country to citizen parents, or it does not. And if not, then it can
only have re-defined that phrase through the sort of “penumbras” of which Justice William O. Douglas was so fond in Roe v. Wade.
Here, then, is the danger of regarding the US Constitution as “a living
document.” To say that is to say that the Constitution means whatever the Supreme Court of the United States says it means, the last time it said it in any specific context.
That Judge Masin stands on this “living document” belief is clear from
his remarks, in the below-embedded video, to Mario Apuzzo, counsel for
the petitioners. He briefly acknowledges Vattel, and other Supreme Court
case law, including Minor. And then he sets that aside as of no moment in construing the Wong case as:
- Conflating the terms “citizen” and “natural-born citizen,” and
- Defining, or re-defining, “natural-born citizen” as one born in-country whether the parents were citizens or non-citizens, so long as they were both lawful residents.
Even that is a very slender reed. Barack Obama, Senior, did not live at the same address as did Stanley Ann Dunham Obama. He lived in a “bachelor pad” in downtown Honolulu. Nor has anyone shown that Obama, Senior was a lawfully domiciled resident at the time.
Or else the Constitution, as Thomas Jefferson warned after the Supreme Court’s decision in McCullough v. Maryland,
is now become a thing of wax, which the Court may shape and mold as it pleases.
J. B. Williams (Canada Free Press) warned
the American people against just this mind-set nearly two years ago. He
bluntly said that if we cannot preserve the office of President from
foreign influence, nothing else matters. More to the point, if we cannot
rely on a word or phrase to mean the same thing today as it meant when James Madison and his colleagues wrote it, we have no Constitution. We ignore that warning at our peril.
Read More: http://www.conservativenewsandviews.com/2012/04/12...
Top Opinion
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One born in-country to TWO citizen parents
+12It takes two. That is what the Framers understood, and that's the way they wanted it. They sought to avoid exactly the sort of spectacle we have today: someone gets elected President of the USA who is more interested in being "President of Earth" and handing over the United States to a United Earth government. Or if they never anticipated this outcome, they certainly sought to avoid any influence over the United States government from a foreign power. This was an era in which kings often married foreign princesses, and sometimes those princesses had an influence that changed the whole country.
Your second point I agree, if the mother is illegal.
Of these three classifications only one the Natural Born is allowed to become President. Yes it is elitist but the founders felt only an American brought up with American values would be the best person to look out for American interests.
I am of Gernan extraction; second generation American. My grandparents spoke only limited English at first, they never spoke German in town, only at home. That does not mean that they didn't follow their own traditions and stop loving Germany. They did adopt America because they wanted to be Americans, they wanted their children to be Americans. They worked hard to assimilate into their new country and learn the language and they did not expect hand outs..
Illegal immigration should be treated as the crime that it is.
then we'll be fought on this .....
"The 14th Amendment followed suit three years later by establishing the basis by which a person may be considered a citizen of the United States. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads, "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." Anyone of African descent, including former slaves, were now citizens.
You are attempting to claim that there is a 3rd class of citizens, distinct from naturalized citizens and natural born citizens, which would be citizens of the U.S. who are not born of citizens. There is NO evidence that the framers ever intended such a distinction. So it is you who are twisting the words of the Constituti...
"The 14th Amendment followed suit three years later by establishing the basis by which a person may be considered a citizen of the United States. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads, "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." Anyone of African descent, including former slaves, were now citizens.
You are attempting to claim that there is a 3rd class of citizens, distinct from naturalized citizens and natural born citizens, which would be citizens of the U.S. who are not born of citizens. There is NO evidence that the framers ever intended such a distinction. So it is you who are twisting the words of the Constitution to interpret it in a way that results in the outcome you want.
Since the constitution itself (14th Amendment) defines ALL PERSONS BORN in the U.S. as citizens, the question is settled. Get over it.
Main article: Birthright citizenship in the United States
The provisions in Section 1 have been interpreted to the effect that children born on United States soil, with very few exceptions, are U.S. citizens. This type of guarantee—legally termed jus soli, or "right of the territory"— does not exist in most of Europe, Asia or the Middle East, although it is part of English common law and is common in the Americas. The phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" indicates that there are some exceptions to the universal rule that birth on U.S. soil automatically grants citizenship.[citation needed]
Two Supreme Court precedents were set by the cases of Elk v. Wilkins[21] and United States v. Wong Kim Ark.[4] Elk v. Wilkins established that Native American tribes represented independent political powers with no allegiance to the United States, and that their peoples were under a special jurisdiction of the United States. Children born to these Native American tribes therefore did not automatically receive citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment if they voluntarily left their tribe.[22] Indian tribes that paid taxes were exempt from this ruling; their peoples were already citizens by an earlier act of Congress, and all non-c...
Main article: Birthright citizenship in the United States
The provisions in Section 1 have been interpreted to the effect that children born on United States soil, with very few exceptions, are U.S. citizens. This type of guarantee—legally termed jus soli, or "right of the territory"— does not exist in most of Europe, Asia or the Middle East, although it is part of English common law and is common in the Americas. The phrase "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" indicates that there are some exceptions to the universal rule that birth on U.S. soil automatically grants citizenship.[citation needed]
Two Supreme Court precedents were set by the cases of Elk v. Wilkins[21] and United States v. Wong Kim Ark.[4] Elk v. Wilkins established that Native American tribes represented independent political powers with no allegiance to the United States, and that their peoples were under a special jurisdiction of the United States. Children born to these Native American tribes therefore did not automatically receive citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment if they voluntarily left their tribe.[22] Indian tribes that paid taxes were exempt from this ruling; their peoples were already citizens by an earlier act of Congress, and all non-citizen Native Americans (called "Indians") were subsequently made citizens by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
In Wong Kim Ark the Supreme Court held that under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a man born within the United States to foreigners (in that case, Chinese citizens) who have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States and are carrying on business in the United States[23] and who were not employed in a diplomatic or other official capacity by a foreign power, was a citizen of the United States.
Alexander Hamilton first proposed the idea of such a clause to James Madison during the Constitutional Convention to ensure only those "born a Citizen" were allowed to be President. The only difference between Hamilton's draft piece and the final version is that "born a Citizen" is changed to "natural born." Seeing as though there was no discussion during the Convention of the difference between those two versions, it stands to reason that they meant the exact same thing to the founders. Being born a citizen makes you natural born. In today's America, that means one of three things. 1) You were born on US Soil. 2) You were born to one US parent. 3) You were born to two US parents. Obama was 1) Born in Hawaii and 2) Born to an American Mother. Case Closed.