St. George Tucker, One of Early America's Most Important Legal Experts
“Birther” lawyer Mario Apuzzo has repeatedly claimed that early American legal expert St. George Tucker supports his well-debunked assertion that it takes two citizen parents at the time of birth for a person to be a “natural born citizen” and therefore eligible to be President.
This seems to be about the only significant claim Mario has left that hasn’t been shredded like the upholstery in a free-range cattery. And I describe the claim as “significant” because Mario is right about at least one thing.
St. George Tucker was arguably the most important legal expert to emerge in early America after the establishment of the Constitution.
Tucker’s Contribution to American Law
St. George Tucker was a student of George Wythe, America’s first law professor, at the College of William and Mary. He eventually succeeded Wythe as our first law school’s second professor of law.
But it wasn’t just the prestige of our first law school that gave Tucker his place in history. It was the way he extended his teaching to the public at large.
The foundational text for the training of lawyers in early America was Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.
“[Blackstone’s Commentaries] exerted a tremendous influence on the American bar, both because of their intrinsic value and because they were the only treatises readily available during that period of U.S. history. The Commentaries were the primary reference tools for lawyers and judges until the nineteenth century… Blackstone’s books, which were periodically updated by American editors, constituted a major source of law for approximately fifty years after the American Revolution.” — West’s Encyclopedia of American Law (2008)
The relationship between American law and the English common law was a bit complex. The “birthers” are right in saying that the English common law was not incorporated wholesale into our national law. George Mason, one of our Founding Fathers and the “Father of the Bill of Rights,” complained that the new Constitution did not provide for the people to “be secured even in the enjoyment of the benefit of the common law.”
But incorporating the English common law into our national law simply was never a workable idea, because of too many monarchical provisions, and the number of exceptions that would have had to be made.
Nonetheless — and this is the point that the “birthers” downplay or deny — the English common law still gave us our legal vocabulary and most of our legal world view — including the general meaning of terms used in the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, in a discussion of the meanings of Constitutional terms having to do with taxation, noted, “where so important a distinction in the Constitution is to be realized, it is fair to seek the meaning of terms in the statutory language of that country from which our jurisprudence is derived.” The common law also provided many principles and precedents to help guide American law, and was considered to apply to varying degrees in many of our States.
Tucker's Edition of Blacktone's Commentaries Quickly Became a Leading Law Text in Early America
For such reasons, Blackstone was the foundational textbook for the law school at William and Mary under both George Wythe and St. George Tucker.
Tucker, however, found himself collecting notes on the exceptions that our new nation (and the Commonwealth of Virginia) made to certain provisions of the common law.
And as a result, in 1803, Tucker published a new edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, incorporating notes from his law school lectures and additional commentary into the work.
This new edition — Blackstone modified for America — quickly became a leading law text and has since been cited (including recently) in numerous cases by the US Supreme Court, when the Court has sought the original intent of our Constitution’s meaning.
“Birther” Lawyer Apuzzo Uses Contorted Logic to Try and “Prove” Tucker’s Support
“Birther” lawyer Mario Apuzzo claimed at his blog that St. George Tucker supports his claim that it takes two citizen parents to make a natural born citizen. And he has repeated this claim many times since.
Now the first odd thing I noticed was that the footnote in the article referenced didn’t contain any actual quote from St. George Tucker — only some biographical notes. And when I searched Tucker’s writings back in March, I was unable to find any such support at all.
Mr. Apuzzo has been asked roughly a dozen times (perhaps more) to produce his supposed quote from St. George Tucker backing up his position, and never has, in spite of promising to do so.
Recently, I finally located what Apuzzo has reference to. It’s not one single quote. Rather, Mr. Apuzzo (according to his usual pattern) has taken a series of quotes from Tucker on peripheral matters, and twisted them to try and make Tucker say something he never said. Apuzzo’s argument is contained in the brief he filed in Tisdale v Obama, and the core of it runs as follows:
Tucker also specifically addressed what a “natural born Citizen” was by informing who had the “civil right” to be elected President. He explained that the right to be elected President was one of the most important “civil rights”, “civil rights” were only possessed by citizens who either inherited or acquired rights, and while naturalized citizens acquired “civil rights,” only a person born to citizen parents inherited them. He said that naturalized citizens were forever barred from possessing the right to be elected President. Hence, the “civil right” to be elected President could only be inherited and not acquired. Since only a child born to citizen parents inherited civil rights and the right to be elected President could only be inherited, the civil right to be elected President belonged only to a child who was born to citizen parents. So only a person born to citizen parents became a citizen not by naturalization. And only a person born to citizen parents was a “natural born Citizen” and therefore eligible to be President. In his discussion on naturalization, Tucker explained that a child born to alien parents, no matter where born, is an alien and becomes a “citizen of the United States” by law when his parents naturalize if done before the age of majority or by his own right if done thereafter. This is the same rule that our early Congresses used when they wrote the Naturalization Acts of 1790, 1795, and 1802. From Tucker’s explanation as to who possessed the “civil right” to be elected President, we arrive at the inescapable conclusion that a “natural born Citizen” could only be a child born to citizen parents.
Are you dizzy yet? If not, then you may not have gotten his argument.
Now it only takes one fallacy or incorrect assumption to create a false claim, and several fallacies and assumptions are obvious.
First, Tucker classified ALL participation in government short of the actual exercise of the power of a political office — voting, serving as an elector, running for and being elected to any position — as “civil rights.” So “civil rights” were far from unique to the Presidency. Secondly, Tucker never stated that “ONLY” the children of citizens “inherited” civil rights. He doesn’t tell us how he thinks the children born on US soil of non-citizen parents gain their civil rights, because he simply doesn’t mention their case in this passage. In fact, he may have considered children born on US soil of alien parents to have “inherited” their civil rights simply by virtue of being born in the dominions of the United States.
Nor does Tucker ever state that one must “inherit” their civil rights — as opposed to “acquiring” them otherwise — in order to become President. He only states the obvious — that naturalized citizens cannot be elected as President.
When he states that children of citizens “inherit” civil rights, that obviously has reference to children who may be born of American parents either in the United States or overseas — just as was also the case in English law. The English passed specific laws in order to ensure that children born overseas of English parents enjoyed rights in England — particularly, the right to inherit property.
The actual quote from Tucker that Apuzzo alludes to here is as follows:
These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.
The distinction between “inherited” civil rights and otherwise “acquired” civil rights, in fact, does not seem to be very important. But Apuzzo has to read into Tucker’s quote things that he does not say, and attach non-existent importance to words that are merely descriptive, in order to twist the quote to “support” the claim that two citizen parents are required for a person to be a natural-born citizen.
Mr. Apuzzo also makes an outright false statement when he says that “In his discussion on naturalization, Tucker explained that a child born to alien parents, no matter where born, is an alien and becomes a ‘citizen of the United States’ by law when his parents naturalize if done before the age of majority or by his own right if done thereafter.”
Because the plain fact is, Tucker never said any such thing. (Actually, as we will see later, he clearly says the direct opposite!!) All Tucker does in his naturalization discussion is quote the law, which makes provision for children who are already born but under 21 years of age:
The children of persons naturalized under any former law of the United States, or under the laws of any state, previous to the passing of any law of congress upon the subject, being under twenty-one years of age, at the time of the parents naturalization, if dwelling in the United States, shall be considered as citizens; and the children of citizens of the United States, wheresoever born, shall also be considered as citizens. But the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never resided within the United States.
It’s been shown elsewhere that Apuzzo’s claim regarding the Naturalization Acts is also entirely false.
What St. George Tucker Actually Said About Natural-Born Citizenship and Presidential Eligibility
As with other authorities, Apuzzo has twisted peripheral comments while selectively ignoring the more explicit and directly on-topic comments that disprove his point. We will mention four specific comments by Tucker. The first three have been mentioned before. The fourth is entirely new to current writing on the subject. And although concise, it will prove to be the most devastating of all.
Quote One: Tucker Says Natural Born Citizens Were Distinguished by Their Place of Birth — With No Mention Whatsoever of Citizen Parents.
Colonel George Nicholas As a Young Man (Circa 1774)
“A very respectable political writer makes the following pertinent remarks upon this subject. ‘Prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people inhabiting the different states might be divided into two classes: natural born citizens, or those born within the state, and aliens, or such as were born out of it.’”
Nicholas’ original quote occurs in a fairly well-known (at the time) letter to some unnamed “friends in Virginia,” dated November of 1798.
The reasonable question that comes to mind is: “Okay, that was before the Constitution was adopted. What about after?”
Colonel Nicholas goes on to say that he is going to next consider the changes that were made in American law following the adoption of the Constitution (which at the time of his letter is a time span of less than 10 years). He then continues with a long discussion of the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, arguing that they are unconstitutional.
The entire letter, to the degree it touches on citizenship, has to do with our treatment of immigrants, born outside of the United States. Nowhere does Col. Nicholas EVER indicate that any change has been made in the principle that those born within any State of the Union — with no reference to the citizenship of their parents — were natural born citizens.
Quote Two: Tucker Says the Constitutional Provision Is that the President Must Be “Native-Born.”
In the following quote, Tucker discusses Presidential eligibility:
That provision in the constitution which requires that the president shall be a native-born citizen (unless he were a citizen of the United States when the constitution was adopted,) is a happy means of security against foreign influence, which, wherever it is capable of being exerted, is to be dreaded more than the plague. The admission of foreigners into our councils, consequently, cannot be too much guarded against; their total exclusion from a station to which foreign nations have been accustomed to, attach ideas of sovereign power, sacredness of character, and hereditary right, is a measure of the most consummate policy and wisdom. It was by means of foreign connections that the stadtholder of Holland, whose powers at first were probably not equal to those of a president of the United States, became a sovereign hereditary prince before the late revolution in that country. Nor is it with levity that I remark, that the very title of our first magistrate, in some measure exempts us from the danger of those calamities by which European nations are almost perpetually visited. The title of king, prince, emperor, or czar, without the smallest addition to his powers, would have rendered him a member of the fraternity of crowned heads: their common cause has more than once threatened the desolation of Europe. To have added a member to this sacred family in America, would have invited and perpetuated among us all the evils of Pandora’s Box.
Birthers are quick to focus on Tucker’s clear opposition to “foreign influence” — without rightly noting exactly who Tucker considers “foreigners” to be, or what kind of foreign influence he’s talking about.
Like our Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution, nowhere does Tucker mention any fear of “foreign influence” at all stemming from a Presidential candidate having had non-citizen parents.
And Tucker makes it abundantly clear that being “native-born” (which is and always has been generally understood to mean “born within a country”) qualifies a person for the Presidency.
Quote Three: Tucker Tells Us Precisely Who “Aliens” Are.
Here’s how St. George Tucker defines “aliens”:
Aliens, in the United States, are at present of two kinds. Aliens by birth, and aliens by election…
“Aliens by election” are those who give up US citizenship, so they don’t matter here. Tucker continues:
1. Aliens by birth, are all persons born out of the dominions of the United States, since the fourth day of July, 1776, on which day they declared themselves an independent and sovereign nation, with some few exceptions…
So Tucker begins by saying that aliens are those who are born outside of the US, and then lists 4 exceptions. These exceptions describe persons who are NOT aliens, so they simply add more people to the list of those who are citizens.
Or, to put it another way — since all people may be divided up only into US citizens and aliens — the group of people who are US citizens begins with all persons born in the country. And it continues with the addition of certain people born outside of it. Such additions generally include children born outside of the US to American parents, persons who have been naturalized as citizens, and the minor children the latter group of people had when they were naturalized.
It is therefore clear from his detailed description of who “aliens” are, that NO person born within the dominions of the United States was counted by St. George Tucker to be in the category of “aliens.” All such persons were citizens, and they were citizens from the moment of birth.
Quote Four: Tucker Compares the Law of England With the Laws of the United States and Virginia.
Tucker’s fourth quote is so matter-of-fact and so concisely worded that I almost missed it. And yet, it is the most devastating of all.
The comment occurs in a footnote he wrote to his famous 1803 edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England.
The passage from Blackstone that Tucker is commenting on is as follows. (Although the formatting isn’t great yet, it’s available from this page.)
“The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.10 In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.”
Did you notice the little “10?” The “10” is a reference to what St. George Tucker had to say on this passage of Blackstone.
Remember that Tucker’s purpose in publishing this work was to compare the laws of England with the laws of the United States, drawing distinctions where they existed.
St. George Tucker’s footnote is as follows:
“10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28. accordant.”
What does this somewhat cryptic note mean? Well, it contains abbreviated references to three American laws —
- L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110.
- L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3.
- and [L. U. S.] 7 Cong c. 28.
— and then it says “accordant.”
It turns out that it is possible, more than 200 years after Tucker wrote these cryptic legal references, using the key to his abbreviations, to decipher and track them down. They are as follows:
- The Laws of Virginia, as referenced in the 1794 Edition of Pleasants and Pace, ch. 110;
- The Law of the United States, passed by the 1st Congress, chapter 3;
- and the Law of the United States, passed by the 7th Congress, chapter 28.
And these all turn out to be laws that we have dealt with before. They are:
- The 1783 version of the citizenship law for the Commonwealth of Virginia that Thomas Jefferson originally wrote in 1779.
- The 1790 United States Naturalization Act.
- And the 1802 Naturalization Act.
So what does St. George Tucker say about the laws of both the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States of America, in his footnote to the principle that the children of aliens were always “natural born subjects”? In comparing our American position with that of the English common law, he says that all of these American laws are “accordant.”
The meaning of “accordant” is “agreeing; conforming; harmonious.”
But did it mean the same thing 200 years ago? From Webster’s 1828 Dictionary:
ACCORD’ANT, a. Corresponding; consonant; agreeable.
And “consonant,” in turn, means:
1. Agreeing; according; congruous; consistent; followed generally by to; sometimes by with; as, this rule is consonant to scripture and reason.
And the definition of related words:
CONSONANTLY, adv. Consistently; in agreement.
CONSONANTNESS, n. Agreeableness; consistency.
Tucker thus says — clearly — that all the important citizenship laws of both Virginia and the entire United States are agreeing, conforming, harmonious, consistent with the principle in English common law whereby the children of aliens were natural-born subjects.
Perhaps even better is the word “corresponding.” In America, a “citizen” was the corresponding term for what was called a “subject” in England.
And all of this is precisely what honest and accurate commentators on this subject have been saying all along.
Now Mario Apuzzo will doubtless try to find some pretext on which to explain away this clear footnote of St. George Tucker (and Tucker’s other quotes as well). That’s his pattern. It’s what he does.
He might desperately claim that the footnote only means these laws agreed that the children of aliens were “natural born subjects” over in England (which is obvious nonsense that would never have gotten a footnote), or that it means these three laws are in agreement with each other (which of course is equally nonsense), or that it means the children born in the United States of alien parents were “natural born subjects” of the United States, but not “natural born citizens” of the United States.
Nonetheless, whatever excuse Mr. Apuzzo might try to produce — or whether he simply ignores the evidence — it is abundantly and absolutely clear that early American legal expert St. George Tucker (just like virtually every other authority who has ever said anything at all on the subject) considered children born on American soil of alien parents to be natural born citizens of the US — just as much as children born on English soil of alien parents were always natural born subjects of England.
The Original St. George Slew the Dragon. This One Drives a Stake Through the Heart of the Two-Citizen-Parent Claim.
Excellent research and analysis Mr. Woodman.
The birthers and Mario are like baseball players that get up to bat, and strike out every time they are at the plate and claim that there is a conspiracy against them. When the truth is they should have never been allowed at the plate. They don’t have the ability. (In this case, the legal or mental ability.) However under our system, they were allowed to get up there and strike out. Pretty soon though they might have to run laps (sanctions) for their ineptitude.
Thanks, JRC.
There’s a reason why they “strike out every time they are at the plate.”
Their claim is wrong.
That’s it. It’s pretty simple, really.
Yeah, it is pretty much that simple.
By the way, since virtually all of the “natural born citizen” claims have been thoroughly addressed at this point, this will be one of my final articles on the subject. I will very soon be retiring from the issue again, hopefully this time for good.
You’ll be missed John, at least until the CCP releases its “bombshell” later this month. Thanks for all your hard work, appreciate it!
😉
I’m sure it’ll be tempting to jump back in. But I really do have other fish to fry.
Thanks John, you have done an excellent job at bringing reason and logic to the debate. That your site has resulted in a lot of embarrassment to foolish people like Mario is educational for those who continue to believe in the two parent argument. Certainly the courts have consistently rejected Mario’s follies.
Here is a modest proposal. You are a smart guy, John Woodman, and you have done a lot of dedicated work on this problem. But there are more pressing problems that need to be addressed now. For example, the current president and his “kill list”.
We have now had three presidents in a row who have indulged in drugs–cocaine for one and marijuana. Apparently Obama did a great deal of the latter in high school and college. Now I think it has been amply demonstrated that marijuana has genuine medical value. Excessive use may not be the best thing though. It does interfere with formation of long term memory. For example, if a person spends three hours studying Spanish and then smokes some pot, the three hours have been largely wasted (you will probably want to dispute this; a professor of medicine at Duke discovered this). For me this accounts for Obama being empty headed though maybe he was born that way.
I have not picked out Obama to especially to detest. Apart from Kennedy I have not been fond of any president since WWII. Nixon was not as bad as he was characterized as. Johnson was worse. Etc. Reagan might have been a good president but was overshadowed by Bush and the attempted and clearly inside assassination attempt. You need to keep in mind that to be an American president one needs dirty hands. Or, another way of putting it, a gangster mentality. The same goes for most high political positions. A big part of the job is being a convincing liar with a knack for plausible deniability. For this reason the big guys are in a different legal stratum where there are rarely indictments unless a big guy really steps down hard on a bigger guy’s toes. But that is fairly rare. Who did Edwards offend?
So, unless the Supreme Court someday offers a probably arbitrary and political decision, the matter of “natural born citizen” will simply go to seed. It makes sense that Apuzzo might continue indefinitely as it is his element. But clearly not yours.
As a patriot why not shift to something more vitally important as suggested above. Do you agree that Obama has the right to indefinitely detain American citizens– and even execute them with out due process? He claims he does. And so does his Attorney General. I see this as having more serious consequences at this point. What about you. If you are sure you are right, why continue to argue away? Even if you are wrong, who really cares? Your kids? A few friends? No one? Perhaps not even you anymore. It seems like this has become an obsession with some people. Given the current economy and reckless government we may all be waiting in line to get food in the not distant future. Maybe you would like to start a survival site. Good luck on some new venture.
I got as far as long term memory and 3 hours. Sorry John B, that is short term memory. Seems you might have a problem with long term memory unless you just read that by the Duke professor.
I’ll read the rest of your post at some point, but the constant errors in most of what you write on here is exhausting.
*sorry when you said mostly wasted…I might have misinterpreted what your point was by the bad context…..because it wasn’t mostly wasted if he passed the test he was studying for, however if you are saying that 20 years from that time he might not remember the information he studied, then yeah that may be legit to a point.*
First of all, I’d like to cast my vote with Reality Check: “Paragraphs are our friends.”
Secondly, as you’ve noted, it’s about time for me to exit from the stage on this particular issue. Having gotten involved in it, I wanted to follow through to the point of wrapping it up well. There is a lot more that I could write on the subject — but why? There’s about enough information out there to allow people to come to an accurate conclusion. Those who refuse to accept reality will continue to refuse to accept reality; and those who want to push meritless legal theories will doubtlessly continue to push them. I’ll do at least one more post; but am now in wrap-up mode.
Or, as might be said in a court of law: “closing arguments.”
Birthers and paragraphs do not seem to be on speaking terms. It is one of the mysteries of life.
How do you manage day to day when everything appears to you as a collection of giant conspiracies? As you obsess over all these great conspiracies that rule your life, life has passed you by. While you lament the current and future loss of freedom and liberty, it was already taken from you, by your own paranoia.
“Do you agree that Obama has the right to indefinitely detain American citizens– and even execute them with out due process? He claims he does.”
No he doesn’t; There was poison pill amendments put into a routine bill to fund the military, that Obama had to sign of leave the entire Military with zero funding for the nest 2 years. He issued a signing statement that said he disagreed with them, he said he would work to repeal those parts of the bill, and on Feb 29th he issued a waiver that repealed the power to detain anyone, least of all American citizens. And he is fully backing several bills to repeal the whole sorry lot in their entirety.
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2012/02/initial-comments-on-the-implementing-procedures-for-ndaa-section-1022/
Bottom line: The President has—rightly in my view—read this law virtually out of existence. This is not a breach of faith with Congress, which in negotiations with the administration, so watered the provision down that, as signed, it reasonably lends itself to this reading. In fact, the provision—as Bobby has shown in earlier posts—would actually bear a more aggressive reading than President Obama has given it here.
Here’s what Obama has done:
First, he has read his authority to waive the provision very broadly. He has both made clear that officials have the authority to waive it at any time with respect to individual detainees and has prospectively waived it himself with respect to several whole categories of suspects. Some of these categories are quite broad—including, for example, any situation in which transferring someone to military custody might impair efforts to secure his cooperation or garner his confession. Offhand, it’s actually a little hard for me to imagine too many cases that wouldn’t fit comfortably within at least one of the preemptive waivers the president has already issued. I suspect that isn’t an accident.
Second, Obama has set up a process for determining whether transfer to the military is required that will all-but-guarantee that it never is. Here’s how it works: Section 1022 only covers a narrow range of people to begin with, so if there’s probable cause to believe that someone arrested is covered and not subject to any of the blanket waivers, the attorney general—in consultation with other senior national security officials—then has to determine whether there is clear and convincing evidence that the person is covered by 1022. If there isn’t clear and convincing evidence, there’s no transfer. If the officials discover that one of the waivers applies after all, there’s no transfer. And if they feel like issuing a new waiver just to make sure, there’s no transfer. If, for some reason, there is a transfer, the FBI has to make sure that it doesn’t interfere with any ongoing interrogation or compromise any investigation, and if there’s any chance of either, the transfer has to wait. And the procedures are clear that an “interrogation” here is not limited to a single session but, rather, “extends until the interrogating agency or agencies determine that all necessary intelligence gathering efforts have been exhausted.” The procedures further make clear that the agency with custody of a suspect—presumably the bureau—shall operate normally in accordance with standard procedures until a transfer is required and can be effectuated without harm. They also reiterate that the FBI remains the lead agency with respect to investigating terrorist threats inside the United States.
Get it?
Have a read of the rest. Its quite clear
I’m sorry you missed those little facts. Of course the probability is that you haven’t but you are lying your ass off in a frankly pathetic attempt to get John to start ranting about Obama. We all know where John stands on Obama. Its his right to disagree on the Presidents policies. It is nobody’s right to lie about the presidents birthplace,, The president himself, the law of the land and the Presidents policies. like you do.
This is not a difference of opinion on raw facts or a discussion on philosophy. There is the truth, and there is lies. And in ever post you have posted on this blog you have lied. And I counted about 6 lies in what you posted above I just focused on one to show the BS.
John Woodman,
Here is more evidence that the new nation did not adopt the jus soli English common law rule to define the new national citizenship. The proof is found right in St. George Tucker’s 1803 publication of a five-volume edition, Blackstone’s Commentaries: with Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government of the United States and of The Commonwealth of Virginia (1803) (Philadelphia: published by William Young Birch and Abraham Small; Robert Carter, Printer, 1803), http://constitution.org/tb/tb2.htm .
I have cited Tucker in my briefs to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the New Jersey Appellate Division. I show that Tucker considered only a child born to citizen parents to be a “natural born Citizen.” I have explained that for Tucker, only children born to citizen parents could inherit the “civil right” to be elected President. This means that a “natural born Citizen” had to be born to citizen parents.
Tucker provides more evidence. He quotes William Blackstone thus: “The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.10 In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.c”
10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28. accordant.
You argue here that this quote and footnote show that Tucker agreed with the jus soli English common law rule and that he informed that the rule prevailed in the United States. But Tucker did not say any such thing.
Tucker quotes William Blackstone’s jus soli English “common law” on “natural born subject” and Blackstone’s explanation that France’s constitution followed jus sanguinis rather than jus soli. But when he compares that English “common law” to American law, he does not cite to American “common law.” Rather, he compares that English “common law” to the 1783 Virginia statute on citizenship and Congress’s Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1802. You say that this shows that Tucker read these statutes to be consistent with the jus soli English common law. But in earlier arguments, you have maintained that these statutes only naturalized children born abroad and that they did not address any child born in the United States. You have all along maintained that the English jus soli common law rule existed in “common law.” But now you maintain that these statutes confirm that any child born in the United States was a “natural born Citizen.” Your two arguments are contradictory.
On the contrary, here is what Tucker really meant by his footnote 10. What is critical to understand here is that Tucker did not cite any American “common law” but rather statutes. This means that there was no American “common law” that was comparable to the jus soli English “common law.” If the American “common law” was the same as that of Great Britain like Wong Kim Ark said in 1898, Tucker would have cited and quoted that “common law” and explained that the United States had adopted the English common law rule of jus soli on the matter. But Tucker made no such statement. Rather, he cites to Jefferson’s and Congress’s statutes which on their face do not agree with the jus soli English “common law.” Tucker also tells us that the Act of 1802 was “accordant” (in agreement) with the Virginia 1783 citizenship statutes and Act of 1790.
Tucker tells us that the Virginia statute of 1783, which was basically the same as that of 1779, and the 1790 and 1802 Congressional Acts, were all in agreement. We learn from the James McClure citizenship case that the 1802 act provided that any child born in the United States to alien parents was an alien and became a “citizen” when his or her parents naturalized if done before the child’s age of majority or on his or her own naturalization petition if done thereafter. This is the jus sanguinis rule. Hence, Tucker tells us that all three statutes followed the jus sanguinis rule and not the jus soli English “common law” rule. This is solid evidence that the Founders and Framers did not allow a child that was born in the United States to alien parents to be a “natural born Citizen.” Rather, they required birth in the United States to citizen parents.
As I have told you, I have a full essay on St. George Tucker which I hope to publish soon.
Mario,
I predicted you would attempt to explain away St. George Tucker’s clear and unambiguous words; and you do not disappoint.
You have all along maintained that the English jus soli common law rule existed in “common law.”
It did; just as the Court in US v Wong Kim Ark stated.
But now you maintain that these statutes confirm that any child born in the United States was a “natural born Citizen.” Your two arguments are contradictory.
I have not stated, nor do I maintain, any such thing.
What I have said is exactly what St. George Tucker said — that the only important citizenship laws for Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States were ACCORDANT — that is, in full harmony — with the English common law.
And this is EXPLICITLY what St. George Tucker stated.
The fact that the naturalization laws of both Virginia and the United States did not define or affect the status of children born on US soil — and it is a fact, and has clearly been shown to be such — is entirely in harmony with the fact that when subjects became citizens, “natural born subject” became “natural born citizen;” and the same rule regarding the children born in the country of alien parents (as the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark explicitly stated) continued to prevail.
And there’s no contradiction there at all.
What is critical to understand here is that Tucker did not cite any American “common law” but rather statutes. This means that there was no American “common law” that was comparable to the jus soli English “common law.” If the American “common law” was the same as that of Great Britain like Wong Kim Ark said in 1898, Tucker would have cited and quoted that “common law” and explained that the United States had adopted the English common law rule of jus soli on the matter.
There was no “American common law” that was any different than “English common law” on this matter. That’s why Tucker simply stated that our US laws were accordant with the English common law.
Tucker also told us that Act of 1802 was “accordant” (in agreement) with the Virginia 1783 citizenship statutes and Act of 1790.
In fact, they were. But that was not the point of Tucker’s footnote. The point of Tucker’s footnote was that all three laws were accordant with the English common law — as that law and our American laws were what he was comparing and contrasting throughout the entire work.
First Mario yammers for ages that American common law was totally different to English common law, now he says that there was no American common law at all. What the heck is he drinking?
A few additional observations from the peanut gallery.
Re: Mr. Apuzzo’s statement: “If the American “common law” was the same as that of Great Britain like Wong Kim Ark said in 1898 . . .”
While perhaps the phrase “like Wong Kim Ark said” will get explained away as not intended as written, as written it is both true and also fatal to the birther claims.
Indeed, the WKA court stated the English common law jus soli rule had been followed in the U.S. at the time of adoption of our Constitution and had continued in effect through the passing of the 14th Amendment. (That is, the rule as to children born within the nation; the case of foreign-born children of citizens not being a matter the WKA court had before it). Justice Gray analyzes the meaning of “natural born citizen” under the common law and the application of “born . . . in the United States, and subject to jurisdiction thereof . . .” to Mr. Wong as presenting the same question. That’s why it’s clear under the WKA analysis that Mr. Wong was at once a “natural born citizen” and a person “born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” because Justice Gray didn’t distinguish these two concepts, but rather treated them together within a single analytical framework.
It’s remarkable how the Birther advocates attempt to argue their cases from a “bottom up” perspective of authority. Every law student learns that there is a hierarchy of authority. At the top, there is SCOTUS authority. And the more a case is on “all fours” as far as presenting the same question from the same litigation posture, the more authoritative it is. In this regard, the Birther position that the Minor case (which didn’t involve the question of a person born of alien parents and for which citizenship wasn’t even a question in dispute) somehow has more authority as to President Obama’s citizenship status than Wong Kim Ark (which DID involve a person born of alien parents and which DID involve extensive discussion of “natual born citizen”) starts from a fundamental “bass-ackwards” posture.
Next, in line of authority are either i) cases from the governing Federal Circuit (if a federal case) or ii) cases from the highest state appellate division (if a state case). And, again, the “all fours” test impacts the degree of authority.
From there, one goes to other Federal circuits or down to lower state appellate divisions (respectively, depending on the federal/state distinction), and from there perhaps to Federal district courts or state trial court decisions.
If the case involves a statute, further down the pecking order is the text of the staute itself (it being understood such is the best expression of intent of the body which issued it).
Even further down on levels of authority are such things as legislative history and what are termed “learned treatises.”
What is utterly bizarre about Birther advocacy is the degree to which it brings to the forefront of the argument this lowest rung of authority, spending countless pages over things like letters from John Jay, opinions of people like Tucker, or treatises from Vattel, while either disregarding Supreme Court cases and Federal Circuit courts case (and there are several that speak to “NBC” in their opinions) entirely, or relegating them to an almost after-the-fact position. The Arkeny case (where the appellate opinion notes WKA wasn’t even mentioned by the appellant) and Tisdale (where Mr. Apuzzo’s brief first gets to WKA about page 30, after discussion of Vattell, Tucker and others) are stellar examples of the problem.
Which illustrates why the Birther cases are going to continue to flounder. When your opponent can look at the Court and say simply “if you read WKA, you’ll see that Justice Gray provides extensive discussion of how the jus soli rule of the English “natural born subject” colors the Framers’ understanding of the jus soli “natural born citizenship” rule,” and it requires 9 or more pages of meandering prose to try to make it seem that WKA didn’t really make that direct, clear comparision, your case has problems. When, furthermore, after you’ve gone through that, your opponent can say “yes, Appellant is arguing many of the same points raised by Justice Fuller in DISSENT,” your case has problems.
Though, I harbor no illusions having read many of these threads that any of the Birther/Vattel advocates are ever going to acknowledge this.
Hell, sometimes they contratict themselves. This is from the Apuzzo blog
js said…
Its strange.
SC decisions tend to be detailed, filled with findings of fact, or documenting those facts when they are given substantial grounds they disagree with.
These appeals involving Obama are short, and give absolutely no explanation, just, we agree. The facts are irrelevant at this point, and it is sufficient to say that the appeals court is substantially incapable of documenting its choices. I do believe that they are chosing the path of least resistance for whatever reason or rhyme they may have, but I see that the entire chain of legal authority ignore a substantial quantity of case law that they should address, analyze and use to establish the purpose and cause/effect of thier decision.
Its missing, completely, and thier failure breaches the professional conduct that we expect from them.
A moments thought brings out the Ankeny V Daniels appeals court ruling. Which many other courts reference. Can’t think why this genius is ignoring that.
And of course the time that Mario challenged me to show where the court had judged his account frivolous, and I simply provided a link to his own legal defense against sanctions from his own scribd account. Where he stated that the court called his action frivolous.
Oddly Mario had no reply to that.
The level of their not-getting-it-ness is quite remarkable.
Its strange.
SC decisions tend to be detailed, filled with findings of fact, or documenting those facts when they are given substantial grounds they disagree with.
These appeals involving Obama are short, and give absolutely no explanation, just, we agree.
Well, yeah, when there’s a Supreme Court case on point, lower courts usually will just cite to that as controlling without any need to reinvent the wheel.
The facts are irrelevant at this point, and it is sufficient to say that the appeals court is substantially incapable of documenting its choices.
When ruling on a question of law (like “NBC”), facts usually are not the issue. That’s why it’s called a question of law.
And citing to controlling SCOTUS authority is sufficient to document the court’s choice and decision.
I do believe that they are chosing the path of least resistance for whatever reason or rhyme
The reason is Wong Kim Ark controls the decision and lower courts follow SCOTUS precedent and reasoning. Lower courts usually don’t go out of their way to get reversed.
they may have, but I see that the entire chain of legal authority ignore a substantial quantity of case law
Except that Birthers scarcely cite case law, other than the misplaced appeal to Minor (and in effect tracking points made by the dissent in WKA).
And of course the time that Mario challenged me to show where the court had judged his account frivolous, and I simply provided a link to his own legal defense against sanctions from his own scribd account. Where he stated that the court called his action frivolous.
Oddly Mario had no reply to that.
Rotfl.
John Woodman,
(1) What is ironic is that Obama’s enablers have always maintained that the Founders and Framers got their definition of a “natural born Citizen” from William Blackstone. We’ll as I have shown in my briefs to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the New Jersey Appellate Division, they are correct except it is not England’s William Blackstone, but rather America’s William Blackstone, St. George Tucker.
I see you finally found my arguments on the great St. George Tucker and have taken a stab at trying to shake my logic and prove me wrong. Well, you wont’ be able to do it.
I am happy to see that you agree with me that St. George Tucker is early America’s greatest legal authority. What this means is that we must both accept what St. George Tucker says as very convincing on the meaning of a “natural born Citizen.” So either Tucker says what I say he says or he says what you say he says. As you see, the stakes are very high when it comes to Tucker. Now let us examine what Tucker did say about a “natural born Citizen.”
Tucker said:
3. Civil rights, taken in a strict and confined sense, as contradistinguished from natural and social rights, are such as appertain to a man as a citizen or subject, of this, or that, particular state or country; in his private and individual capacity as a free agent, and member of the body politic or state, in respect to the state or body politic; and contradistinguished from such as might be due to him as a magistrate, legislator, judge, or other public agent, character, or functionary. The right of electing, and being elected to, any public office or trust, may be considered as among the most important of these rights.
These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.
***
Persons naturalized according to these acts, are entitled to all the rights of natural born citizens, except, first, that they cannot be elected as representatives in congress until seven years, thereafter. Secondly, nor can they be elected senators of the United States, until nine years thereafter. Thirdly, they are forever incapable of being chosen to the office of president of the United States. Persons naturalized before the adoption of the constitution, it is presumed, have all the capacities of natural born citizens. See C. U. S. Art. 1, 2.
What do these quotes mean?
The right to be elected President is a “civil right.”
Only citizens may possess “civil rights.”
Hence, only a “citizen” may be elected President.
A “naturalized” citizen” is forever barred from being eligible to be elected President.
“Civil rights” may either be inherited or acquired.
“Civil rights” are inherited by a person who is born to “citizen” parents.
“Civil rights” are acquired by a person upon becoming a “naturalized citizen.”
A child born to alien parents, not being born to “citizen” parents, cannot inherit “civil rights.”
A child born to alien parents, upon becoming a “naturalized citizen,” cannot acquire “civil rights.”
A “natural born Citizen” has the “civil right” to be elected president.
A “natural born Citizen” is therefore not a “naturalized citizen.”
Not being a “naturalized citizen,” a “natural born Citizen” had to have inherited his/her “civil right” to be elected President.
A “natural born Citizen” to have inherited his/her “civil right” to be elected President had to be born to “citizen” parents.
Hence, a “natural born Citizen” is a child born to citizen parents.
(2) During the Founding and under the law of nations, “natives, or natural-born citizens” meant the same thing, i.e., “those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” Vattel, Section 212, The Law of Nations. Hence, when Tucker said “native-born citizen,” he did not mean in the sense of “native born.” Tucker explains: “Aliens, women, children under the age of discretion, ideots, and lunatics, during their state of insanity, and negroes and mulattoes, though natives of the state, and born free, have no civil rights in Virginia, taken in this strict and limited sense.” We can see that he even used “native” to describe “aliens” and “children under the age discretion.” These persons were clearly not eligible to be elected President. “Native-born citizen” also meant “natural-born citizen.” Note that he says in his famous quote about Pandora’s Box foreign influence: “native-born citizen (unless he were a citizen of the United States when the constitution was adopted).” This almost sounds like Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 except he used “native-born citizen” rather than “natural born Citizen.”
(3) “A very respectable political writer makes the following pertinent remarks upon this subject. ‘Prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people inhabiting the different states might be divided into two classes: natural born citizens, or those born within the state, and aliens, or such as were born out of it.’” Obama’s enablers have so abused this quote. Tucker’s was only making reference to what Colonel George Nicholas (if he is the reference as you contend) thought about citizenship. They always left out the first part of the quote which shows that it was not Tucker’s position that he was stating, but rather only that of Nicholas. Only after I called them on it do they now start to give the full quote. We can see from how Tucker defined citizenship, he did not approve of what Colonel George Nicholas said. He only repeated what Nicholas believed. Just like Tucker did not approve of Blackstone’s take on indelibility of allegiance. But he still states what Blackstone’s view was and then showed how Blackstone was wrong.
(4) Footnote 10 does not support you. First, either the Virginia law and naturalization acts concerned children born in the United States or they did not. You cannot have it both ways. Your trying to tell us that Tucker said that those laws were consistent with jus soli English common law means that those laws would have to address birth in the United States. You have painted yourself into a contradictory position from which you cannot escape. Second, “accordant” means that the Virginia and U.S. statutes were in agreement with each other, not that those laws were in agreement with the English common law. Your position just makes no sense given that Tucker says: “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.” Here Tucker is telling us that all those persons who were “citizens” but were not born to “citizen” parents were necessarily “naturalized” and that only those persons born to “citizen” parents were “natural born Citizens.” This is simply not the English common law. But it is a law that is consistent with the Virginia citizenship law and the early naturalization acts of Congress. Third, Tucker wrote his commentaries on Blackstone, not to show how American law was similar to the English common law, but rather to show how it was different.
(5) So, John Woodman, here we have one of the most important figures in America after the adoption of the Constitution informing us that a “natural born Citizen” is a child born to citizen parents. By the way, if you will recall I also brought to your attention that the same thing was said by Emer de Vattel in 1758, Thomas Jefferson in 1779, Founder and historian David Ramsay in 1789, our early Congress starting in 1790, U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Wilson in 1791, the James Madison Administration in 1811, Chief Justice John Marshall concurring in The Venus, 12 U.S. 8 Cranch 253, 289 (1814); Speaker of the House Landon Cheves in 1814; the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in Inglis v. Sailors’ Snug Harbor, 28 U.S. 99 (1830); the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court with Justice Story in Shanks v. Dupont, 28 U.S. 242, 245 (1830); Justice Daniels in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1856); the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162, 167 (1875); Ex parte Reynolds, 20 F.Cas. 582, 5 Dill. 394, No. 11,719 (C.C.W.D.Ark 1879); the majority and dissent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 679-80 (1898).
Things are not looking good for you.
Mario Apuzzo, Esq. says: “Things are not looking good for you.”
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Ain’t you soooooo funny Mario! I think the Judge said basically the same thing about your hogwash…something about your arguments having no “merit”? President Obama will be on all the ballots in all the states come November, and there isn’t one thing you can do about it.
Speaking of Vattel
§ 215. Children of citizens born in a foreign country.
It is asked whether the children born of citizens in a foreign country are citizens? The laws have decided this question in several countries, and their regulations must be followed. By the law of nature alone, children follow the condition of their fathers, and enter into all their rights (§ 212); the place of birth produces no change in this particular, and cannot, of itself, furnish any reason for taking from a child what nature has given him; I say “of itself,” for, civil or political laws may, for particular reasons, ordain otherwise. But I suppose that the father has not entirely quitted his country in order to settle elsewhere. If he has fixed his abode in a foreign country, he is become a member of another society, at least as a perpetual inhabitant; and his children will be members of it also.
Who knew that Vattel stated that the children born of domiciled Aliens would be “members” of the country where they were born. And as we have seen Vattel regarded indignes as members of the civil society. Therefore according to Vattel the children of Aliens would be… natural born citizens, even if their parents had not naturalized…
What a shock. It also means that Chester Arthur was an “NBC” according to Vattel.
Its funny how Mario’s arguments tend to blow apart when you read another 2 paragraphs. Or 3, in this case.
You are correct Mario; things are not looking good for us; they are looking great! Yesterday I decided to research your record in Birther cases where you have either represented clients or filed something on behalf of a pro se plaintiff. As Donald Trump said (paraphrased) “You will never believe what we found!”
Mario Apuzzo’s Amazing Birther Legal Adventures
Zero for seven and soon to be zero for eight. Straight “F”‘s on the card is not only bad, it reeks.
Are you still falsely defaming Professor Rockwell?
Mario is now 0 for 8 in the courts.
Not a very good report card, although I’ll admit he does get high marks for attendance and class participation.
Suranis,
You are so right. One does have to read on. But sometimes one also has to read back.
Vattel said in Section 215: “If he has fixed his abode in a foreign country, he is become a member of another society, at least as a perpetual inhabitant; and his children will be members of it also.”
In Section 213, Vattel defines what a “perpetual inhabitant” is. He states that “[t]he inhabitants, as distinguished from citizens, are foreigners, who are permitted to settle and stay in the country.” Hence, being born to a “perpetual inhabitant” is not the equivalent to being born to a “citizen.”
“[t]he inhabitants, as distinguished from citizens, are foreigners, who are permitted to settle and stay in the country.”
What, like Barack Obama Senior? 😀
And 215 states that the children of “perpetual inhabitants” are as much members of the civil society as people born of citizens. Its right there in the quote. 🙂
Suranis,
Vattel explains that membership in a society is that of “citizen” or “inhabitant.” See Sections 212 and 213.
Section 215 clearly says that his membership is that of a “perpetual inhabitant.” It does not say the membership is that of a “citizen.”
Today in the U.S. we have green card holders, called “legal permanent residents” (“LPR”). While they enjoy the many rights and protections enjoyed by “citizens,” they do not enjoy the full list of them. These persons would fall into Vattel’s “perpetual inhabitant” category. They are not “citizens.” If they commit an enumerated criminal offense, not only do they get punished criminally, but they also get kicked out (“removed) from our country after serving their sentence.
Vattel also informs in Section 213 that if a child is born to a father (parents) who is a “perpetual inhabitant,” the child follows the condition of the father (parents) and would be himself or herself a “perpetual inhabitant,” but not a “citizen.” Our early naturalization acts (pre Wong Kim Ark) followed this model.
Vattel also informs in Section 213 that if a child is born to a father (parents) who is a “perpetual inhabitant,” the child follows the condition of the father (parents) and would be himself or herself a “perpetual inhabitant,” but not a “citizen.” Our early naturalization acts (pre Wong Kim Ark) followed this model.
This is why all persons born on US soil before 1898 who had 8 great-grandparents who were non-citizen immigrants, were never themselves United States citizens, but were only non-citizen inhabitants — even though they, both of their parents and all four of their grandparents had all been born in the United States and had never lived anywhere else.
Right, Mario?
Nope. Look at what he says
“If he has fixed his abode in a foreign country, he is become a member of another society, at least as a perpetual inhabitant; and his children will be members of it also”
So, as 212 says
“Citizens are members of a civil society and are linked to said society by certain duties and since they subject to its authorities, they enjoy some of its rewards. ”
That means that the children of aliens are citizens, as a citizen is a member of the society.
Now since we have a proper translation of Vattel from a French Laywer available lets look at that
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/bookmarks/fact-checking-and-debunking/the-translation-of-vattel-from-the-french/
Natives or indigenes (2) are those born in that country from blood relatives (3) who are already citizens. (4) A society being only able to survive and perpetuate itself through the children of its citizens, said children inherit the status of their parents and all their rights and obligations. (5) A society is supposed to want this as a consequence of its own desire for self-perpetuation and one shall assume that each citizen who becomes a member of said society will by right bequeath that same status to his or her own children. (6) It follows that the homeland (7) of the parents (8) will therefore also be that of their children, and they become citizens in turn by simple tacit consent. We shall see later if, when they reach their majority, they can renounce their rights and what then they owe to the society in which they were born. I say that to belong to a homeland, one must be born of parents who are citizens. (9) For if you are born of a foreigner, then that country is your place of birth without being your homeland.(10)
Gosh, it seems that Vattel considered being a Native or indigenes as being a simple matter of consent, to be one, and if you had blood relatives in the country (Obama did) and if you rejected the homeland of his father (Obama did) then he became a native or indignes of the land of his mother, since the children of aliens were as much citizens as the citizens of those with both parents being citizens.
This is enjoyable, isn’t it? But since only one of Vattel’s parents was Swiss (the other was Prussian) and I think it was his mother, I seriously doubt he would have believed anything else.
John Woodman,
You said: “This is why all persons born on US soil before 1898 who had 8 great-grandparents who were non-citizen immigrants, were never themselves United States citizens, but were only non-citizen inhabitants — even though they, both of their parents and all four of their grandparents had all been born in the United States and had never lived anywhere else.
Right, Mario?”
Why do you not cite for us all here one U.S. Supreme Court opinion prior to Wong Kim Ark (1898) which says that a child born in the United States to alien parents was a “Citizen of the United States.”
After you are done with that task, cite for us all here one U.S. Supreme Court opinion prior to Wong Kim Ark (1898) and after which says that a child born in the United States to one or two alien parents was (is) a “natural born Citizen.”
Justice Curtis, dissenting, Dredd Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).
“The Constitution itself does not make the citizens, (it is. in fact,made by them.) It only intends and recognizes such of them as are natural—home-born—and provides for the naturalization of such of them as were alien—foreign-born—making the latter, as far as nature will allow, like the former. …”
And I’m going to quote a comment by Atticus Finch listing some compelling arguments citing… you know… actual case law.
http://nativeborncitizen.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/recent-rulings-definition-natural-born-citizen/#comment-30617
The court in Smith v. Alabama, 124 U. S. 465, 478 (1888) stated in clear and concise language the common law’s influence in the Constitution:
“The interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is necessarily influenced by the fact that its provisions are framed in the language of the English common law, and are to be read in the light of its history.”
That at the time of the drafting of the Constitution the drafters were acquainted with Blackstone’s Commentaries including his definition of natural born subjects. Justice Stone observed: “It is noteworthy that Blackstone’s Commentaries, more read in America before the Revolution than any other law book.” CJ Hendry Co. v. Moore, 318 US 133 , 151-152 (1943) . Similarly, the court in United States v. Green, 140 F. Supp. 117, 120 (SD NY 1956) noted: “ Blackstone, whose Commentaries probably did much to influence the thinking of American lawyers at and before the time of the framing of the Federal Constitution.”
Moreover, “Blackstone’s Commentaries had a wide circulation in America at the time of the Constitutional Convention. It is said that sixteen signers of the Declaration of Independence knew the book cover to cover. A source book of legal science, a landmark in law and literature. It is safe to say that it contents were familiar to every American lawyer in public life in 1789 and 1791. Sunray Oil Corp. v.Allbritton, 187 F.2d 475,478 (5th Cir. 1951)
As such, it is inconceivable for the framers of the Constitution to “import” a foreign idea of citizenship based on the bloodline of fathers and not based on the Jus Soli doctrine as enunciated by Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case and reaffirmed by Blackstone in his Commentaries whose book was required reading by lawyers in colonial America.
And of course he can all think of a case where the Supreme court REJECTED a claim that 2 parents were needed. Kerchner V Obama.
Suranis,
So it looks like you were not able to find one U.S. Supreme Court case pre Wong that said that a child born in the U.S. to one or two alien parents was a “Citizen of the United States,” let alone a “natural born Citizen.”
Also, the courts never reached the merits of the Kerchner case. It was dismissed on standing. The Supreme Court denied cert. without comment. Your citing the case as support for your position is not only disingenuous, but also shows that you have no authority to support your position.
What about Lynch v Clarke, 1844?
“Upon principle, therefore, I can entertain no doubt, but that by the law of the United States every person born within the dominion and allegiance of the United States, whatever were the situation of his parents, is a natural born citizen.”
What you mean is that the “doubts” expressed in the minor case were not sufficiently serious for someone to appeal the issue all the way to the supreme court. The lower courts dealt with the issue just fine. Boo hiss and all that. But then you can’t find a case which states that an Alien needs 2 parents, so its a false dichotomy.In any case, the dissent in Dred Scott V Sandford stated what the law had been since the founding. Just like the dissent in Wong Kim Ark correctly stated that the decision meant that Wong was eligible for the presidency. As you have been told 100 times by Lawyers who actually win their cases. Ever wonder what that feels like?
Oh and by denying cert the supreme court affirmed the lower courts ruling in its entirety. You know, including the one where they stated your appeal was frivolous. In other words, please state where the Supreme court said they dismissed it just on standing and not on your whole brief. You most certainly did not appeal it based on standing, and you don’t have a telepathic link to the Justices minds when they stamped your appeal with a big fat no.
Ah – ah – ah, Mario.
The point was that according to your legal theory:
If James and Sarah, Sean and Mary, Ian and Shauna, Patrick and Iona, all immigrated to America in the year 1794, all at age 22, and without naturalizing as citizens all had children in America in the year 1816 —
And if James and Sarah’s son Robert married Sean and Mary’s daughter Katherine, and Ian and Shauna’s son Bill married Patrick and Iona’s daughter Susannah,
And if Robert and Katherine, and Bill and Susannah all had children in 1856 —
And if Robert and Katherine’s son Joe married Bill and Susanna’s daughter Rosemary,
And if they had Jimmy in 1896 and Betty in 1897 —
then according to your claim, neither Jimmy nor Betty would be United States citizens, even though both of them, both of their parents, and all four of their grandparents had been born in America, lived their entire lives in America, and had never even traveled outside of the United States; and even though no member of their family had even visited Ireland or had any connection whatsoever with Ireland or any country other than America for more than 100 years.
Still they would not be American citizens.
In fact, except for the ruling in US v Wong Kim Ark, according to your claim, we could extend that an infinite number of generations.
Is this what Apuzzo is saying in Purpura vs. Obama? If a child born in this country to parents who were not citizens and never became citizens, then there would be no concern among anyone in regards to these children ever becoming citizens because they wouldn’t be considered a citizen, either natural born or naturalized, due to their parents standing or lack of standing as aliens. According to what Appuzo appears to be saying, they would be reliant upon their parents seeking naturalization for themselves in order for their child, despite being born on U.S. soil, to ever be considered a citizen by any definition of the word.
However, if what he is attempting to translate as law were actually valid, there would have been no concern among anyone in Congress with their repeated attempts to make changes to the 14th amendment in regards to the “anchor baby” situation that they find so difficult to accept. Obviously the majority of Congress already disagrees with Apuzzo as they have said the 14th amendment will stand as is currently and children of aliens born on U.S. soil will continue to be natural born citizens.
I find it amusing that there are more than a few attorneys in this country who believe they are better-informed regarding our legal system than those sitting on the Supreme Court. With each complaint filed alleging that President Obama is not eligible to be President, these same attorneys are admitting they believe SC Chief Justice Roberts ignorantly swore into office, Barack Obama, a man who may not legally be President of the United States. Then there is the even more ridiculous notion that they knowingly violated what Apuzzo and other publicity seeking attorneys would have us believe is the law and swore President Obama into office because it was a vast conspiracy theory, requiring hundreds, if not thousands of people to be in on the game.
Hi Kate, and welcome.
Is this what Apuzzo is saying in Purpura vs. Obama?
He claims this was the situation in the United States up until the Supreme Court’s decision in US v Wong Kim Ark (1898).
Mario seems to just make stuff up to suit the occasion. The other day he was claiming that “citizen of the United States,” as used in the Constitution, means naturalized citizens, as opposed to natural born citizens. Now he seems to have changed that claim to something more reasonable.
His claim regarding US v Wong Kim Ark is that the Supreme Court “only found Wong to be a citizen, not a natural born citizen.” The claim is false. He has no response to any reasonable analysis which shows that the Court did, in fact, find that Wong Kim Ark was a natural born citizen, except to continue asserting the debunked claim.
Oh, and yes — Mr. Apuzzo is 0 for 8 in his birther cases, in a variety of courts — but he’s much smarter than our Supreme Court Justices.
I’m surprised someone hasn’t appointed him to the high Court. Maybe Obama’s successor?
Suranis,
I take it then if the dissent in Dred Scott was correct, then the dissent in Wong was correct. Since Wong is after Dred Scott, I win.
Your comments on Kerchner are as pathetic as everything else you write.
Have you actually read the dissent in Wong? Its basically “the ruling makes Wong eligible for the presidency, and here is 5 reasons why that’s a bad idea” And then goes off about international treaties and how could anyone think that the framers would have wanted Chinese people as president, etc etc. He doesn’t even really attack the legal reasoning of Grey, because he can’t.
And unlike you, I make no claims to be a lawyer. I’m not even in America nor an American citizen. However, I think I’d be able to put together a better legal brief than you as I’d be able to cite cases and opinions rather than look at unrelated crap and look at what he said about other subjects and twist that to say the opposite of what the author said when talking about the subject at hand.
And really, I was just amusing myself with the waffle about Vattel, as we all know that whatever Vattel said had jack and all to do with the United States. But one thing really is certain, he still would have regarded Barack Obama as an Indignes, as much as Vattel himself was an indegnes of Switzerland with just one citizen parent. LOL
I was frankly surprised on reading Fuller’s dissent how flat-out ill-founded and fallacious and weak it seemed to be. At one point I started an article analyzing the known fallacies in the dissent, which of course I never finished.
It’s all an interesting subject. If someone would pay me a good full-time wage to do it, I’d be tempted to write a lot more on the subject. I’m sure I could write at least as much as I’ve already written, although I’d say the writing done to this point has already hit all the key points; the building is basically complete and any additional writing at this point would only be interior decoration.
Since no rich person has lined up to do that (and it would be kind of a waste of money anyway as we know from the readily available information what the meaning of NBC was and is), I’m gonna move on with other, more important stuff.
Mr. Woodman
You’re 10 times better a lawyer than Apuzzo, and from what I understand, you didn’t go to law school.
Apuzzo’s attempts to argue obscure authorities and tertiary sources are not only a poor way to challenge precedent, but even that authority seems always to be against Apuzzo when it is examined and word mining is eschewed.
Apuzzo is an intellectually dishonest lawyer with an agenda and a client who wants a specific result.
It will never happen but Apuzzo will continue to entertain. Buffoons usually do.
From a recent post by Mr. Apuzzo on his blog:
Hence, Quintilianus’ work which was translated from the Latin to the English provided the clause “natural born citizen” and the word “native” and the translators used the words interchangeably to mean the same thing.
So if “natural” and “native” are interchangeable terms (and reference to any dictionary would confirm the overlap in meaning), then what does this portend as to Justice Gray’s affirmation in Wong Kim Ark?
Or are they merely interchangeable if one is looking back to ancient Latin texts, but not if one is looking to the English common law for the semantic underpinning as the WKA opinion indicated was the correct methodology?
[I recall there is a thread somewhere which references Quintillianus or other ancient texts. Might be appropriate to move this comment there.]
Or are they merely interchangeable if one is looking back to ancient Latin texts, but not if one is looking to the English common law for the semantic underpinning as the WKA opinion indicated was the correct methodology?
You’ve got it! Precisely!
Or, to put it more accurately: They are interchangeable if such interchangeability favors birthers. If such interchangeability favors anti-birthers — why, how dare you suggest that the two are interchangeable! 😆
Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” used both terms interchangeably.
Mario Apuzzo is now a perfect 0 for 8. The dismissal in Tisdale v Obama by Judge Gibney in the lower court was affirmed by the 4th Circuit today. http://www.scribd.com/doc/96080052/VA-2012-06-05-TISDALE-Appellate-Court-Affirmance-That-Obama-is-NBC
(This appeal affirmed the lower court decision that President Obama is a natural born citizen.)
I noted the summary dismissal of all of his claims by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in my final post over at Mario’s blog. 😆
Oh and since Mario was clinging to the fact that Tisdale V Obama, the case ruled on eligibility in Federal court had been appealed and therefore didn’t count in Mariolaw, well, sorry dude.
Hot off the presses from the 4th court of appeals.
PER CURIAM:
Charles Tisdale appeals the district court’s order denying relief on his 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (2006) complaint and motion for an injunction. We have reviewed the record and find no reversible error. Accordingly, we affirm for the reasons stated by the district court. Tisdale v. Obama, No. 3:12-cv-00036-JAG (E.D. Va. Jan. 23, 2012). We deny Tisdale’s motions to expedite the appeal and for an injunction, and to recuse Judges Davis, Keenan, Wynn, Diaz, and Floyd. We grant the motion to file an amicus curiae brief and file it out of time. We deny all other pending motions filed by Tisdale. We dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal contentions are adequately presented in the materials before the court and argument would not aid the decisional process.
AFFIRMED
http://www.scribd.com/doc/96080052/VA-2012-06-05-TISDALE-Appellate-Court-Affirmance-That-Obama-is-NBC
This is worth cross-posting from Mario’s blog:
4zoltan has left a new comment on the post “Purpura and Moran File Their Brief and Appendix in…”:
Mr Apuzzo,
From the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decsion affirming the lower court ruling,
“We grant the motion to file an amicus curiae brief and file it out of time. [i.e., Mario’s brief.] We deny all other pending motions filed by Tisdale. We dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal contentions are adequately presented in the materials before the court and argument would not aid the decisional process.”
Oral arguments would not aid the “decisional process.”
Is this another hit for the two citizen parent theory?
rotfl.
Let me test if I have the Birther spin-and-denial routine down. Something like:
“The 4th Circuit never dealt with my arguments, and it certainly didn’t say that Obama is a Natural Born Citizen. Furthermore, the opinion says it has no precedential value. So even the Court says the opinion makes no argument. So I win!”
Something like that no doubt is forthcoming.
You’re getting really good at that, Brian.
Now if you’re unimpeded by any scruples, you might be able to make a few bucks off of it. The eager audiences await!
And for the record, I note my comment was posted at 7:04, which beats a similar comment by Tarrant at Fogbow by 2 minutes. I claim precedent. 🙂
Speaking of precedent, can any of the exceptional legal minds tell me if the inauguration of Chester Arthur and his subsequent carrying out the duties of the Presidency of the United States would set a precedent for President Obama, if it were necessary for there to be one? I understand there were some who questioned Arthur’s ability to be President based upon his natural born citizen status but all records indicate he was a legally elected President of the United States having served in the office from 1881 to 1885 with all laws passed and signed by him remaining in effect. Did his Presidency set a precedent that an individual born on U.S. soil to a father who was an alien at birth and a mother who was a citizen by birth is legally eligible to be President?
I’m not a lawyer, Kate, but I can tell you without fear of contradiction — except of course by Mr. Apuzzo and his ilk — that clear and binding precedent (and there is one) was set by the US Supreme Court in United States v Wong Kim Ark, in 1898.
In that case, the Court examined the question of citizenship thoroughly, and concluded that Wong Kim Ark, born in the United States of two parents who were not and never could become US citizens, was a “citizen” — and was also “natural born.” They stated that the same rule had always applied, first in England, then in the Colonies, then in the United States after the establishment of the Constitution.
And although Arthur’s Presidency came first, and does in that sense serve as a precedent, US v Wong Kim Ark is probably more important legally. That is the controlling United States law regarding the children born on US soil of non-citizen parents.
There’s now an abundance of articles — and discussion as well — here on the meaning of “natural born citizen.”
President Arthur actually was never elected President. He was asked to be James Garfield’s Vice-Presidential running mate. His local New York Senator, who strongly disliked Garfield, urged Arthur to reject the request, saying that any Garfield ticket was going to lose anyway. Arthur refused, saying that for him, even to be nominated as Vice-Presidential running mate on a losing ticket would be a wonderful honor.
It’s clear that Arthur never aspired to anything more than, or wanted anything more than a do-nothing Vice-Presidency. For him, that was the capstone of his career, a fabulous honor, and far more than he would ever have aspired to.
When President Garfield was shot, Arthur was horrified. He followed news of the President’s health anxiously and daily as the President lingered near death for months. As Vice-President, he refused to assume command. On the day that Garfield died, Chester Arthur locked himself in his New York apartment, hid from reporters, and “sobbed uncontrollably.”
This is the guy birther lawyer Leo Donofrio characterized as a “usurper.”
Of course, in fairness, Donofrio’s point was that Arthur supposedly concealed that his father was not a US citizen at the time of Arthur’s birth in order to become Vice-President. But although Arthur does appear to have lied about his age, there seems to be no legitimate suggestion that this was the case. Everybody knew Arthur’s father was an Irish immigrant; the fact appeared quite clearly in multiple biographies of Arthur published and distributed before he became Vice-President. And there was in fact a great push on the part of political opponents to have Arthur found ineligible — but this took the form of his opponents first claiming that he had been born in Ireland, and then when that was shown to be quite false, they insisted that he had been born not in Fairfield, Vermont (as claimed) but over the border in Canada.
So although they exerted massive efforts to convince people that Arthur was ineligible, somehow it never occurred to them to insist the was ineligible by virtue of having been born to a non-citizen father. (I wonder why?)
Having become President against, apparently, everybody’s wishes including his own, Arthur tried to simply do a good job. By the end of his Presidency, he was in poor health, mounted only a feeble attempt at reelection, left office after one term, and died a year and a half after leaving office.
I like Chester Arthur, and I love the Wikipedia final summation of his Presidency:
As journalist Alexander McClure would later write, “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur, and no one ever retired … more generally respected, alike by political friend and foe.” Although his failing health and political temperament combined to make his administration less active than a modern presidency, he earned praise among contemporaries for his solid performance in office. The New York World summed up Arthur’s presidency at his death in 1886: “No duty was neglected in his administration, and no adventurous project alarmed the nation.” 😆
Thanks, John, for your replies to both of my questions. I should have acknowledged that when I said Arthur was legally elected, I did mean to the Vice Presidency, but we have to hold our V.P. candidates to the same standard as the President in regards to eligibility due to their main reason for existence, being ready, willing and able to take over for the President if he should become incapacitated or die. Too bad not everyone was so concerned about ALL ASPECTS of eligibility in ’08 when it came to the possible Vice President.
“So although they exerted massive efforts to convince people that Arthur was ineligible, somehow it never occurred to them to insist the was ineligible by virtue of having been born to a non-citizen father. (I wonder why?)” Makes me wonder why, too, John, that the birthers of today, when they initially began their conspiracy theories about President Obama, used the argument of his having been born overseas, not in Hawaii. Only after it became clear that there was far more proof positive that President Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 as he said, birthers began to insist, that in order to be a NBC, you must have two citizen parents.
As President Obama said, “there will be those for whom the b.c. is not enough” in reference to the LFBC. What I didn’t realize is that as soon as their most recent required burden of proof was met in one form or another, that the goalposts would be moved, yet again. They remind me of our new puppy who chases its tail continuously until it almost falls down in near collapse, only to begin this fun little game when she awakes. However, unlike the birthers, I know the puppy will grow out of this and recognize the futility of this exercise as it matures. Too bad I can’t say the same for the birthers.
There’s been some discussion over at Mario Apuzzo’s blog. I’ve said my bit (which of course no one over there can either refute or accept) and left it to them. My most relevant comments begin almost at the very bottom of the first page of comments.
Anyway, Mario’s response to this article was sooooo predictable that I have to repost it here. I’ll add a few comments along the way.
You continue to misrepresent St. George Tucker’s position on the meaning of a “natural born Citizen.” You continue to say that in Footnote 10, Tucker indicated that the law of Virginia and the United States was in agreement (“accordant”) with the English common law.
Um… perhaps that’s because in Footnote 10, Tucker clearly indicated that the law of Virginia and the United States was in agreement (“accordant”) with the English common law? 😆 It’s hardly ambiguous. There’s really no other honest way to read the footnote.
Your interpretation of that footnote fails for more than one reason.
Please enlighten us. 😉
First, Tucker told us that naturalized children “acquired” their “civil rights” and that such children were forever barred from having any right to be elected President. He said that the children born to “citizen” parents “inherited” their “civil rights” which included the “civil right” to be elected President. This clearly shows that only the children born to “citizen” parents could be “natural born Citizens,” who were the “citizens” who under Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 are the only “citizens” who are eligible to be elected President. The English common law did not require “citizen” parents for a child born in the King’s dominions to be declared a “natural born subject.” Clearly, Tucker did not agree with the English common law when he required “citizen” parents for a child to be born a “natural born Citizen.”
So… in other words, Mario’s convoluted logic applied to ambiguous and incomplete statements Tucker made regarding peripheral matters — note that I already pointed out Mario’s logic is ridden with several different fallacies, all of which he has refused to acknowledge or address — supposedly takes precedence over a clear, unambiguous, on-topic statement by Tucker.
And why? Simply because Mario says so. His word on a matter rules, because… well, because he’s Mario. He’s special. He’s not subject to the piffling kinds of things the rest of us are subject to… like facts. Or reality.
Second, the laws of Virginia (as applied first to “infants” and later to “children”) and the early naturalization acts (as applied to “children”) were jus sanguinis based, not jus soli based.
The law of Virginia wasn’t “jus sanguinis” (“law of blood”) based! Like pretty much all of our citizenship laws, it gave consideration to BOTH the law of blood and the law of the soil. Its very FIRST provision was that ALL WHITE PERSONS BORN IN THE TERRITORY OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA, without any regard to parentage whatsoever, were citizens.
Mario’s claims regarding this law have been shown to be unequivocally false. He, of course, still refuses to address or even acknowledge this. Typical.
In addition, as noted here and elsewhere many times, Mario has also made documented false claims regarding the Naturalization Acts; and those Acts NEVER said anything to regulate the citizenship status of children born on United States soil.
So much for point two.
Third, “accordant” in Footnote 10 means that the early naturalization acts of Congress were in agreement with the citizenship laws of Virginia which is what I have always argued, not that those laws were in agreement with the English common law which I just showed in First that Tucker said no such thing.
And here we have yet another easily verifiable Mario Apuzzo lie, intended to prop up all of his many collapsing other false claims. The statement is easily seen to be completely false:
a) because the entire nature and purpose of Tucker’s work was not to state whether the laws of Virginia were in agreement with the laws of the United States — good grief, what else would you expect, irreconcilable conflict? — but to compare and contrast the laws of England with the laws of the United States,
b) because this is only one of literally DOZENS of occasions on which Tucker notes in his work that American laws are “accordant” with the English common law, and
c) quite a few of these references occur in referenct to ONLY ONE NAMED AMERICAN LAW!
In those instances, what is that law supposed to be “accordant” with, if not the passage that Tucker is footnoting? Accordant with itself?! 😆 😆 😆
The whole thing is a great illustration of the absolute depths of completely shameless lying and deception that Mr. Apuzzo is willing to sink to in order to attempt to prop up his bogus claims. No lie is too bold, no legal or Constitutional or historical claim too false, for Apuzzo to readily and publicly assert it in defense of all of his previous falsehoods.
And yet he has his followers, willing fools who would rather follow an obvious and demonstrated liar who tells them pretty tales, than simply acknowledge a truth or reality that they don’t happen to like.
In the end, they are the ones responsible for their own self-deception.
In addition, the law in Virginia in 1787 and when Tucker wrote his work contained only two limitations on holding office and neither had anything to do with aliens parents. The first was on people who “migrate into the state”
“and that all persons, other than alien enemies, who shall migrate into this state, and shall before some court of record give satisfactory proof by oath (or being quakers or menonists, by affirmation) that they intend to reside therein, and also take the legal oath, or affirmation, for giving assurance of fidelity to the commonwealth (which oaths, or affirmations, the clerk of the court shall enter on recorded, and give a certificate thereof to the person taking the same, for which he shall receive the fee of one dollar) shall be entitled to all the rights, privileges, and advantages of citizens, except that they shall not be capable of election or appointment to any office, legislative, executive, or judiciary, until an actual residence in the state of two years from the time of taking such oaths, or affirmations, as aforesaid, nor until they shall have evinced a permanent attachment to the state, by having intermarried with a citizen of this commonwealth, or a citizen of any other of the United States, or purchased lands to the value of one hundred pounds therein.”
The other limitation was on someone who had a foreign title or pension:
“That no person whatsoever, having or holding any place or pension from any foreign state or potentate, shall be eligible to any office, legislative, executive, or judiciary, within this commonwealth.”
So, in Tucker’s own state, there was no limitation based upon parentage. It is also interesting that such Virginia statutes only provided for naturalization for persons who “migrate into the state.” Under Mario’s interpretation, there is no naturalization for someone born in the state who is not a citizen. Of couse, that is because these statutes clearly state anyone born in the state is a citizen at least for people who can read English.
re: “He’s not subject to the piffling kinds of things the rest of us are subject to… like facts. Or reality.”
It’s a remarkable process to observe. His blog is truly an alter-reality world; very much a “Through the Looking Glass” experience. One should hang a sign: “Welcome to ‘All-Lies in Birtherland.'”
I can understand how a non-lawyer can take a flawed approach to Constitutional analysis. But it’s just bewildering to watch a someone who’s been through three years of case analysis in law school put the odd backspin he does on two Supreme Court cases. Even odder is the reaction of “but these [lower court] opinions are wrong in just citing to Wong Kim Ark without detailing why I’m wrong.” (Duh, pretty obvious they all disagree with your read on WKA. What more need they say?)
Yet one tries to explain the odd behavior.
Looking at the Birthers generally, there is, of course, the explanation of severe Obama antipathy and prejudice. That shows in part in their inconsistent “defense” of the Constitution. Natural Born Citizen is put front and center, but when Hawaii certifies it records, I hear nay a peep about the Full Faith and Credit clause.
But as to many Birthers, I think there’s also a good bit of what I dub “Tea Party Constitutional Restorationism.” That is, many seem to exhibit this view of an idealized, romantized, and (in many respects) fictionalized early “Constitutionally pure” society. Hence the fascination with skipping past case analysis (which would normally come first in a legal case) in favor of this foray into these early writers from close to the Constitutional period. As I noted in a prior post, “learned treatises” are pretty much way down the pecking order of authority in a legal case. Case law, especially SCOTUS case law, is King. But one notices that the article you (John) wrote on Wong Kim Ark has zero replies afterward. But write something on the likes of St. George Tucker (a person who gets but a single oblique reference in the dissent in WKA) and the follow-up comments by the Birthers are numerous.
They have in their minds a narrative as to what the Framers did and why, and they cherry-pick their sources to support that, disregarding any other parts that are contrary or even rejecting the need to read the source as a whole. They exhibit an incredible talent for self-innoculating against the process of cognitive dissonance that is operative in most reasoned, thinking minds.
Though I think the Birther problem goes beyond just that the case law isn’t much in their favor. I think what shows through in subtle (and at times, not-so-subtle) ways is an underlying suspicion and disrespect for the Courts. So what results is this upside down approach of wanting to argue first and foremost from historical sources, and relegating judicial case law to an almost after-the-fact position. It’s hard to tell if Mr. Apuzzo is trying to elevate the dissent and claim it was correct (while asserting Justice Gray’s opinion is tainted by virtue of the ‘conspiracy’ regarding Chester Arthur); or claim the majority supports his position; or do an “some parts I like, some parts I don’t like” take on the majority the way he’s done with some historical sources (a dubious position when it comes to SCOTUS precedent). He can’t seem to make up his mind. The result is the incoherent rambling on WKA seen in the Tisdale brief.
But, of course, the courts that looked at WKA in light of the Birther claims contra Pres. Obama have all quickly concluded the read Mr. Apuzzo and others put on the WKA case is nonsense. So all that’s left is to play the role of “The Black Knight” and claim invincibility in the Blogosphere.
Brian,
It is indeed “a remarkable process to observe… bewildering…”
As I noted in a prior post, “learned treatises” are pretty much way down the pecking order of authority in a legal case. Case law, especially SCOTUS case law, is King. But one notices that the article you (John) wrote on Wong Kim Ark has zero replies afterward.
Your point of pecking order is very relevant.
I myself was surprised at the lack of comments on the US v Wong Kim Ark article — as legally speaking, that’s the Big Kahuna, the Center of the Galaxy, the Binding Precedent of the issue.
Legally speaking, it’s the key issue and the only thing really needed. Yet here we have all this conversation on other things, and I myself have written about 20 articles on other issues.
Mario once noted that we weren’t in a court of law, we were in the court of public opinion. And that’s true. Mario can’t possibly win in the court system. He can’t even win in the broader court of public opinion. But there’s a little corner of eager-to-believe birthers for whom facts and reality really don’t matter. In that corner, it’s hard for him to lose. Because those folks will accept whatever he says, whether it makes any sense or not.
Outside of that little corner, among those who care more about facts and reality than about the Agenda, he’s lost — and devastatingly so. Among the broad population, who don’t care enough to do any research for themselves and who will believe whatever the nightly news tell them, he was never even in the running.
But among the diehard birthers, he’s golden. He can do no wrong, because he supports their fantasy, their vision of how they want the world and the Constitution to be.
They have in their minds a narrative as to what the Framers did and why, and they cherry-pick their sources to support that, disregarding any other parts that are contrary or even rejecting the need to read the source as a whole. They exhibit an incredible talent for self-innoculating against the process of cognitive dissonance that is operative in most reasoned, thinking minds.
Well said.
As far as Mario goes, it seems to me that he simply says whatever seems suitable for the occasion to prop up the myth. Does everything he says have to be self-consistent? Does it have to stand up to hard scrutiny? Does it have to pass muster in a court of law? Not really. It’s like a movie set. He has an eager audience, ready to suspend disbelief. They want to believe what he says and are prepared to look the other way any time something he says is shown to be false.
About the time you posted your comment, this pitiful comment came through over at Mario’s blog:
Mario,
I have to say that I do not enjoy the posts on this blog by the obots. I have no desire to read their posts as they are usually full of it. But I can appreciate your desire to set the record straight.
Getting back to the case. Is the next step the NJ Supreme Ct and then the US Supreme CT ??
I hope you are receiving my monthly contributions for the case.
I thought you might enjoy the last four or five comments from mario’s blog. He doesn’t give an inch even when he admits he is wrong.
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7466841558189356289&postID=6534830423328518836&page=2&token=1339041997320
Yeah, the comments over there are pretty funny. 😉
John Woodman,
St. George Tucker states:
“Civil rights, taken in a strict and confined sense, as contradistinguished from natural and social rights, are such as appertain to a man as a citizen or subject, of this, or that, particular state or country; in his private and individual capacity as a free agent, and member of the body politic or state, in respect to the state or body politic; and contradistinguished from such as might be due to him as a magistrate, legislator, judge, or other public agent, character, or functionary. The right of electing, and being elected to, any public office or trust, may be considered as among the most important of these rights.
These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
In discussing the early naturalization acts (L. U. S. 1 Cong. 2 Sess. c. 3; L. U. S. 3 Cong. c. 85; L. U.S. 5 Cong. c. 71; L. U. S. 7 Cong. c. 28), Tucker said:
“Persons naturalized according to these acts, are entitled to all the rights of natural born citizens, except, first, that they cannot be elected as representatives in congress until seven years, thereafter. Secondly, nor can they be elected senators of the United States, until nine years thereafter. Thirdly, they are forever incapable of being chosen to the office of president of the United States. Persons naturalized before the adoption of the constitution, it is presumed, have all the capacities of natural born citizens. See C. U. S. Art. 1, 2.”
You have been unable to explain what Tucker meant when he wrote: “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
He states that “civil rights,” which included the right to be elected to public office (which included the office of President), are “inherited” by a child who is born to “citizen” parents. If any child was not born to “citizen” parents, at most he could “acquire” his/her rights which made the child a naturalized “citizen.” Hence, how can a child who was not born to “citizen” parents possess the right to be elected President if such child, being naturalized, was forever barred from being president? Such child could not. Rather, such child could “acquire” the “civil rights” through naturalization. But since that child was considered as having naturalized, such child was forever barred from being President. It only follows then that any child who is not born to “citizen” parents, being at most a naturalized “citizen” could not be a “natural born Citizen,” who alone had the “civil right” to be elected President.
So how a “citizen” obtained his/her “civil rights,” which included the right to be elected President, demonstrated if that “citizen” was either a “natural born citizen” or a naturalized “citizen.” If that “citizen” was born to “citizen” parents, he/she “inherited” his/her “civil rights” which showed that that “citizen” was a “natural born citizen.” But if that “citizen” was not born to “citizen” parents, then that “citizen” “acquired” his/her “civil rights” which showed that that “citizen” was a naturalized “citizen.” The inescapable conclusion is that only a child born to “citizen” parents, not being a naturalized “citizen,” could be a “natural born citizen.”
Note that James McClure was born in the United States in April 21, 1785 (after the Revolution) to a British father who naturalized almost one year after his son’s birth when his son was dwelling in the United States. The James Madison Administration found that James McClure was a naturalized “Citizen of the United States” under the Naturalization Act of 1802 (discussed by Tucker). Tucker said that anyone who may be naturalized under any of these naturalization acts is forever barred from being eligible to be elected President. This means that both James McClure and Barack Obama are at best naturalized “Citizens of the United States (the Fourteenth Amendment which would pertain to Obama if he was born in the United States, did not amend the “natural born Citizen” clause or convert a “citizen of the United States” from the moment of birth into a “natural born Citizen”) and not eligible to be elected President.
You have not been able to refute any of this in your articles. Do you want to try again?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Really.
Mario
Did you catch my show the other night where TollandTCR called in and chatted with me? That was a pretty good trick wasn’t it?
I see you made a fool of yourself (again) by assuming the verification that 4zoltan linked was the same one obtained by SoS Bennett in Arizona. Now you are covering your tracks and inventing legal nonsense about Alvin Onaka and the state of Hawaii. There is now a legal document on record that in one page negates the pages of nonsense produced by the so called experts who called the pdf a forgery.
Reality Check,
The only fool is you, having to high-tail it from my blog and plead for mercy after saying that I was sanctioned by the Third Circuit when it did no such thing.
As far as what the “experts” say, tell it to them not me.
I also note that you are not capable of making any legal arguments. Too bad all this stuff is over your head.
Mario
Are you, the attorney who is zero for eight in his cases actually pretending to lecture me? Are you the lying buffoon who think he knows who I am trying to lecture me? You are zero for eight I believe. So again how many cases have you won? Would that be zero? Now Mario (who is zero for eight ) jumped all over 4zoltan after he posted the new verification letter. You the great Mario Apuzzo, (who is zero for eight) didn’t even read it before you posted a bunch of lies. So Mario (who is zero for eight ) why don’t you come back when you are maybe are something other than zero for eight . Otherwise you are just a lying, bloviating zero for eight loser who files frivolous cases that are without merit. Did I mention you are zero for eight ?
And losing that many times makes him a super-loser. A spectacularly successful loser: an eight-time loser. There are damn few career criminals who ever make it to eight-time loser.
When a loser like Mario wakes up and looks in the mirror, the loser sees a loser. Because if you never win, and still act like a know-it-all who insults those who agree with the winners, you are even more of a loser. You are a loser out of the courtroom as well as a loser in the courtroom. A real-life loser and a legal-profession loser.
You can tell losers, because they claim to have won whenever they lose. Sound familiar, Mario? By these signs ye shall know them: a loser who never learns will remain a loser. On some level, a loser that dedicated must have chosen to be a loser, otherwise he’d learn. But not Mario. No way. He’ll claim that he will be beatified as a winner someday, but he won’t. That’s what most losers believe, but it never happens to true losers. That’s what makes them, like Mario, losers.
Have I overstated the point? About Mario being a loser?
>> “The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects,
>> and entitled to all the privileges of such.10
>> “10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28. accordant.”
“accordant.” was only referring to the previous quote ?!
{L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3.}
else I would have written:
agreeing: “10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28. ”
or in accordance with: “10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28.”
why even say “accordant”, when (10) was supposed to just give the source of the
made claim
it should be possible to figure out how Tucker had used these terms
in other footnotes.
It’s obvious how Tucker used the word “accordant” — he used it any time American law said the same thing that English law did, or operated in the same way English law did.
If American law was the same as the English law, Tucker used the word “accordant.”
He used it literally dozens of times. Most of those times he listed multiple American laws that were in agreement with the English law or principle referenced — as he did here. Quite a few times, however, he only referred to a SINGLE law which was “accordant” with the English law referenced.
Mario’s claim that Tucker only meant the American laws were in agreement with each other must be one of the most ridiculous claims ever made in the legal history of the United States. It is a clear sign that anyone who continues to believe anything Mario says is an absolute sucker.
Mario Apuzzo wrote:
> If any child was not born to “citizen” parents, at most he could “acquire” his/her rights which
> made the child a naturalized “citizen.”
I do not see this. You are not becoming a naturalized citizen by acquiring rights. It’s the other way round.
> Hence, how can a child who was not born to “citizen” parents possess the right to be
> elected President if such child, being naturalized, was forever barred from being president?
by acquiring the right through birth. Not inheriting it, since the parents didn’t have that right so they could not give it to the child. But if the child became a natural born subject it might acquire that right by birth. That’s what I’d conclude, provided Tucker agreed that children to foreigners were natural born subjects accordant with England law.
Mario never thinks anyone refutes him in his own mind. No matter how many court and people on the internet laugh at his arguments, he thinks he is right. When cornered, he simply re-defines terms or states unambiguous language means the opposite of what it really means. It is both comical and sad.
Mario thinks he has won the McClure argument by re-defining “Citizen of the United States” to mean something no one in history has ever said it meant. Why would someone do such a thing? It has been pointed out the terms was used in a multitude of early statutes and treaties in a context where t couldn’t possibly mean what he says it means. He has no answer but rather just keeps repeating he is right. It has been pointed out that his definition would mean that in the Constitution that natural born citizens were literally excluded from the Congressional eligilbity and the grandfather provisions. Such interpretation is silly and he needs to then infer additional language in order have it make any sense at all. In reality, no one ever said people born in the states prior to 1787 were naturalized as there was never any statute that naturalized them. in addition, when the Congressional eligiblity provisions were written there was no NBC clause and hence no difference between naturalized and natural born citizens so even reading in an “At minimum” makes no sense. Mario can’t answer any of this. And, of course, if McClure was natuarlized, no one would have said that proof of his place of birth was sufficient to make him a citizen since place of birth would have been irrelevant. You really can’t make this stuff up.
And John has done a great job refuting Mario’s Tucker claims. John points out that when actually talking about who is natural born or eligible to be president, Tucker refutes Mario. Notice that Mario thinks it doesn’t count that Tucker approvingly quoted someone on the definition of Natural born citizen. When Marshall quoted Vattel solely on th issue of domicile, it somehow meant he was approving of Vattel’s definition of natural born. Howver, here, where Tucker is quoting someone on who is natuarl born, it doesn’t count. The dishonesty is breathtaking. And Tucker is clear the President must a native born citizen and he uses native and alien throughout his treatise when talking about both English and American law clearly indicating they meant the same think. And if Mario was right, Tucker would define “alien” to include children of aliens when in fact he defines it only with respect to place of birth. Mario has never been able to find a single person that has said anyone born in the US is an alien, but he will go to his grave saying such was the law.
Not necessarily. I now believe Mario knows the flavor, strength and consistency of the guano he spreads, and is being paid to do what lawyers do: advocate for a side, no matter what the facts actually are. His services are being bought by someone to do so, exactly like a prostitute… to claim what he claims for partisan political reasons, and never concede a single point no matter how well it is refuted, period.
What Mario is doing is sophistry for hire, precisely.
It is a Swift Boat Liars-style attack, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Corsi is the one paying him, or whoever is paying Corsi is also paying Apuzzo. Jerome Corsi makes Mario look like a choir boy; read up on him a bit: he is among the most soulless, vile human beings in America.
So it is in fact possible that Mario will not “go to his grave saying such was the law.” He will say such only until the checks stop coming.
Notice that when Mario has been asked repeatedly to put his money where his mouth is and take up your wager he conveniently ignores it. He is not going to sacrifice $1000 of his own money to the Birther cause. He will stick will filing frivolous cases as long as others pay the filing fees and bloviating on blogs, which costs nothing.
there is one problem, though. I’ve read (Herb Titus) that “natural” in
“natural born citizen”
(or “natural born subject ?”) would refer
to “natural law” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
but how can natural law be different in England and France ?
So I’d argue that children to aliens – being not citizens in France –
would already mean that they are not “natural born citizens” in USA.
(but I’m no lawyer nor historican nor American nor English nor French)
how can natural law be different in England and France ?
All it requires is a different theory or understanding of what is “natural.”
Titus is right that “natural born citizen” derives from an understanding of “natural law.” But it’s NOT an understanding of “natural law” that “it takes two horses to make a horse.” And this is quite clear. I have recently published an article on this.
The ironic thing is that Titus worked at a Christian university — yet here he is publicly denying the Biblical origin of the natural law philosophy that gave us the term “natural born citizen.”
natural however means universal.
So at least one of the understandings must have been wrong.
Thus making the whole historical juristical arguing
somehow unlogical,foggy to me … and reducing my hope
to understand all this and come to a clear opinion …
You can understand it.
I recommend you read all 20 or so articles I’ve written on the subject. It will save you a lot of research.
Verify what I’ve written — I usually try to provide sources for information or at least let you know what info I looked up so that you can look it up for yourself.
France didn’t use the term “natural born subject or citizen.” However, in 1787, they followed jus soli just like England. This was changed in the early 19th century. Titus does not know his history. The term “natural born subject” was an historical legal term of art that was around for at 300 years prior to our founding. The Constitution is full of old legal terms of art. And such term was based upon the law of nature as viewed in England in those earlier centuries. Hence, Lord Coke explained why the law of nature made persons born in the dominions of the crown natural born subjects.
No legal authority in the United States said the law of nature with respect ot allegiance was viewed differently in 1787. For example, here is Jefferson decribing the English common law and stating it is in accord with the law of nature:
“Obj. The state of the father draws to it that of the son.
Ans. In Villenage it does, but in no other case at the Com- [mon] law. Thus a Natural subject having a son born in a foreign state; the son was an alien at the Com. law.
Thus a Natural subject having a son born in a foreign state; the son was an alien at the Com. law. The stat. 25.E.3. st.2. first naturalized him if both parents were, at the time of his birth, natural subjects; & 7.Ann.c.5. & 4.G.2.c.2l. where the father alone was. So an Alien in England having a child born there, that child is a natural subject…..If an alien have issue born within the k[ing]‘s obedience, the issue is a natural only: ib. This excludes enemies possess[in]g a town &c. ib. Abjuratur still owes allegiance because he may be restored. 9.b. So an outlaw. ib. 14.a. The law of nature is part of the law of Engld. 12.b.”
ballantine,
(1) ballantine: “Mario thinks he has won the McClure argument by re-defining “Citizen of the United States” to mean something no one in history has ever said it meant. Why would someone do such a thing? It has been pointed out the terms was used in a multitude of early statutes and treaties in a context where t couldn’t possibly mean what he says it means. He has no answer but rather just keeps repeating he is right.”
Apuzzo: The James Madison administration ruled that James McClure, born in South Carolina after the revolution to a British father who naturalized after his birth and when his son was dwelling in the United States, was a “naturalized “Citizen of the United States,” not a “natural born Citizen.”
(2) ballantine: “It has been pointed out that his definition would mean that in the Constitution that natural born citizens were literally excluded from the Congressional eligilbity and the grandfather provisions. Such interpretation is silly and he needs to then infer additional language in order have it make any sense at all.”
Apuzzo: Members of American society are called “citizens.” The “citizens” are made up of the “natural born Citizens” and the “citizens of the United States.” See Article I and II. Any “citizen” who is not a “natural born Citizen” is a “citizen of the United States” under the Fourteenth Amendment, Congressional Act, or treaty. Both “natural born Citizens” and “citizens of the United States” are “citizens.” Hence, anything that the Constitution, treaties, or Congressional statutes allow a “citizen of the United States” to do so can a “natural born Citizen.”
(3) ballantine: “In reality, no one ever said people born in the states prior to 1787 were naturalized as there was never any statute that naturalized them.”
Apuzzo: State statutes naturalized aliens prior to the first Congressional naturalization act which was passed in 1790. For example, Cochran McClure, was naturalized under the laws of the state of South Carolina on February 20, 1786, when his son was dwelling in the United States. The Naturalization Act of 1802, was given a retroactive effect and made those state naturalized “citizens” into “Citizens of the United States.”
(4) ballantine: “In addition, when the Congressional eligiblity provisions were written there was no NBC clause and hence no difference between naturalized and natural born citizens so even reading in an “At minimum” makes no sense. Mario can’t answer any of this.
Apuzzo: What in the world are talking about, no difference between a naturalized and natural born citizen?
(5) ballantine: “And, of course, if McClure was natuarlized, no one would have said that proof of his place of birth was sufficient to make him a citizen since place of birth would have been irrelevant. You really can’t make this stuff up.
Apuzzo: Publius stated:
“Mr. Rodman hints, that it would have been sufficient for James McClure to have been born in the United States—he is mistaken. The law of the United States recognizes no such claim. The law of Virginia, of 1792, does—for, “all free persons born within the territory of this commonwealth,” is deemed a citizen. The law of Virginia considers him as a son of the soil. An alien, as well as a citizen, may beget a citizen, but the U. States’ act does not go so far. A man must be naturalized to make his children such.” The James Madison Administration adopted this rule and ruled that James McClure was a “Citizen of the United States” not by any birthright, but under the naturalization statutes of the United States (the Naturalization Act of 1802).
(6) ballantine: “And John has done a great job refuting Mario’s Tucker claims. John points out that when actually talking about who is natural born or eligible to be president, Tucker refutes Mario. Notice that Mario thinks it doesn’t count that Tucker approvingly quoted someone on the definition of Natural born citizen. When Marshall quoted Vattel solely on th issue of domicile, it somehow meant he was approving of Vattel’s definition of natural born. Howver, here, where Tucker is quoting someone on who is natuarl born, it doesn’t count. The dishonesty is breathtaking.”
Apuzzo: Yes, the dishonesty is breathtaking. I cannot believe that you are still peddling that “famous” Tucker quote (“Prior to the adoption of the Constitution. . . “) which he never even made. You are still trying to make people believe that Tucker said what someone else said. In Tucker’s Commentaries, Vol. 1, App. 254-59, Tucker comments on whether the states still had any power left to naturalize citizens after the Constitution was adopted. He gives some case law in which the judges said that they did. Then he gives another case which disagreed with those courts. Then he provides the quote from that “very respectable political writer” who Tucker said made “the following pertinent remarks upon the subject.” Tucker then quotes him. The reason Tucker quotes him is to show that there may still be a small area where the states did not give up their power to the federal government under the naturalization clause. That writer had taken the position that the states, while they gave up the right to naturalize aliens to the federal government, retained the right to make persons “denizens” (which had effect only in that state) and even to prescribe their own qualifications for holding state office. Tucker then concludes after quoting that writer at length:
“Now although the act of congress may operate to repeal this act, so far as relates to the rights of naturalization, or, a state of perfect citizenship, under the constitution and laws of the union; yet, as it respects the rights which the state hath power to grant, such as holding lands, or an office under the sole, and distinct authority of the state, I see no reason to doubt that the law is as valid at this day, as it was before the adoption of the constitution of the United States.”
Here, Tucker explains that the acts of Congress on naturalization abrogated any state naturalization statutes or laws. What is also most important is that Tucker said that only the federal government decided what “the state of perfect citizenship, under the constitution and laws of the union” would be. Here, there is not doubt that he is referring to one being a “natural born Citizen,” and calling that citizenship “perfect citizenship” which existed only under the constitution and national law. That national law would have been the law of nations and not the English common law. And that national law, as confirmed later by Minor v. Happersett (1875), defined a “natural born Citizen” as a child born in the country to “citizen” parents. Finally, Tucker explains that the states did retained the power to decide how titles to land and what state office qualifications would be.
So, all this talk that Tucker adopted jus soli citizenship, which is contained in someone else’s quote, is absurd at best and fraudulent at worst. Simply, Tucker never said what you say he said, i.e., that he accepted defining a “natural born Citizen” under the jus soli of English common law. On the contrary, all he did was quote someone else on an unrelated topic and then give his opinion on the matter. And that opinion contains that powerful quote on “perfect citizenship” which existed under the Constitution and national law, which was the law of nations and not English common law. Moreover, everything that Tucker wrote shows that he required birth to “citizen” parents in order for one to be a “natural born Citizen.”
Again, he said: “The right of electing, and being elected to, any public office or trust, may be considered as among the most important of these rights. These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
(7) ballantine: “And Tucker is clear the President must a native born citizen and he uses native and alien throughout his treatise when talking about both English and American law clearly indicating they meant the same think.”
Apuzzo: Yes, under the law of nations, “native” and “natural-born citizen” did mean the same thing. Here is Vattel on the point: “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, Section 212 (London 1797) (1st ed. Neuchatel 1758).
(8) ballantine: “And if Mario was right, Tucker would define “alien” to include children of aliens when in fact he defines it only with respect to place of birth.”
Apuzzo: This is incorrect. Tucker said that “[a]liens by birth, are all person born out of the dominions of the United States, since the fourth day of July 1776, on which day they declared themselves an independent and sovereign nation, with some exceptions” which were in “favor of infants.” He then commented on Jefferson’s citizenship law of 1779 and 1783 and Congress’s early naturalization acts to show that infants followed the citizenship of their parents, showing that “the children of such persons duly naturalized, dwelling within the United States, and being under the age of twenty-one years, at the time of such naturalization; and the children of citizens of the United States, born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,” also obtained the right to be “citizens of the United States.”
(9) ballantine: “Mario has never been able to find a single person that has said anyone born in the US is an alien, but he will go to his grave saying such was the law.”
Apuzzo: This is a blatant lie. See:
1. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, Section 212-217 (London 1797) (1st ed. Neuchatel 1758) (birth in the country would give citizenship only if parents were “citizens”);
2. Thomas Jefferson in 1779 (if one was an “infant” one had to be born to citizen parents in order to be a citizen, even if born in Virginia);
3. Founder and historian David Ramsay in 1789 (birthright citizenship after July 4, 1776 reserved only for the children of “citizens”);
4. Our early Congress starting in 1790 (if born in the U.S. to alien, child himself an alien);
5. U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Wilson in 1791 (citizen was the son of a citizen reaching age 21 or 22);
6. The James Madison Administration in 1811 regarding James McClure (“Mr. Rodman hints, that it would have been sufficient for James McClure to have been born in the United States—he is mistaken. The law of the United States recognizes no such claim. . . . A man must be naturalized to make his children such”);
7. Chief Justice John Marshall concurring in The Venus, 12 U.S. 8 Cranch 253, 289 (1814) (relies on Vattel’s definition of “natives, or indigenes” with the English translator of Vattel’s The Law of Nations in the 1797 English translation changing “indigenes” to “natural-born citizens”);
8. Speaker of the House Landon Cheves in 1814 (paraphrases Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”);
9. The majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in Inglis v. Sailors’ Snug Harbor, 28 U.S. 99 (1830) (child born in New York after July 4, 1776 to British parents was an alien);
10. The majority of the U.S. Supreme Court with Justice Story in Shanks v. Dupont, 28 U.S. 242, 245 (1830) (children follow the citizenship of their parents no matter where born);
11. Justice Daniels in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1856) (cites and quotes Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”);
12. The unanimous U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162, 167 (1875) (provided a paraphrased version of Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” and said “there have been doubts” whether a child born in the U.S. to alien parents was a “citizen”);
13. Ex parte Reynolds, 20 F.Cas. 582, 5 Dill. 394, No. 11,719 (C.C.W.D.Ark 1879) (cites and quotes Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”);
14. United States v. Ward, 42 F.320 (C.C.S.D.Cal. 1890) (cites and quotes Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”);
15. The dissent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 679-80 (1898) (found that Wong, who was born in the U.S. to alien parents, under the national law of the United States which was the law of nations, was an alien).
16. Finally, ballantine and all his supporters have not been able to cite one U.S. Supreme Court case that held that a person born on U.S. soil to one or two alien parents is an Article II “natural born Citizen.”
Yet, you have not shown one case where the holding states you must have 2 citizens to be a natural born citizen. You claim that is what the law is, yet, here are the recent courts that disagree with you and your Minor claim (from Doc C’s copy and paste, with update for Tisdale v. Obama, for convenience):
Here is a list of all of the cases that ruled in support your position:
Would you like to see that list again?
You keep claiming John, Ballantine and RC lost to you, yet, you keep losing in the only place that it matters.
Whether you call it “holding” or not, the Supreme Court in US v Wong Kim Ark CLEARLY found, as part of the ration decidendi, that children born on US soil of non-citizen parents were natural born citizens.
That’s binding precedent and end of argument, in any sense that matters. And it’s why other courts say, “It is well settled that persons born in the United States are considered natural born citizens.”
Apuzzo: The James Madison administration ruled that James McClure, born in South Carolina after the revolution to a British father who naturalized after his birth and when his son was dwelling in the United States, was a “naturalized “Citizen of the United States,” not a “natural born Citizen.”
Simply a lie. They never said he was naturalized and the fact that the only proof provided was place of birth makes clear he was not.
“The James Madison Administration adopted this rule and ruled that James McClure was a “Citizen of the United States” not by any birthright, but under the naturalization statutes of the United States (the Naturalization Act of 1802). ”
Again, a lie. You have no evidence they adopted such a rule. Proof of his place of birth would have been irrelevant under such statutes. Again, simply asserting the Madison administration agreed with you when they said no such thing is dishonest. the only argument you can make is to re-define a term to say something no one in history ever said it meant. you are pathetic.
“Yes, the dishonesty is breathtaking. I cannot believe that you are still peddling that “famous” Tucker quote (“Prior to the adoption of the Constitution. . . “) which he never even made. You are still trying to make people believe that Tucker said what someone else said.”
It was clear in the conbtext that Tucker agreed with such definition. And Tucker was an addition of Blackstone that uses the terms alien andnative throughout talking of both English and American law the same sas Blackstone. Did you actually read his definition of alien? SAme as Blackastone. Nowhere is there any indication that “native” means anything of than born in the US. Have you found anyone in the US who has ever said otherwise? No.
“Apuzzo: This is a blatant lie. See:”
LOL. Show me the definition of alien in any of those. Of right, there is none except perhaps the one that had nothing to do with US law. We already have shown that none of those American authorities actually support you other than the sore loser whose arguments were rejected by Madison and Congress. It really is sad that you still cite Marshall after it has been clearly shown his citation had nothing to do with citizesnship and when Marshall actually said people born inthe US were citizens. The clown show that is the birther movement will continue and you and your friends’ cases will continue to be laughed out of court. Courts can read and have had no trouble understandng what out courts have said on these issues and will pay no attention to the language games you play.
Here are actual definitions of “alien” in case you are interested in learning something:
“But to return to the subject of alienage—an alien, according to the notion commonly received as law, is one born in a strange country and in a foreign society, to which he is presumed to have a natural and a necessary allegiance.” James Wilson, The Works of James Wilson, Vol. II, pg. 291 (1802)
“Aliens by birth, are all persons born out of the dominions of the United States, since the fourth day of July, 1776, on which day they declared themselves an independent and sovereign nation, with some few exceptions, viz. 1.” St. George Tucker, Blackstone Commentarires, (1802)
“We have already defined an alien to be one born without the limits of the United States, and owing allegiance to a foreign country.” William Charles White, a Compendium and Digests on the laws of Massachusetts (1809)
ALIEN, persons. One born out of the jurisdiction of the United States, who has not since been naturalized under their constitution and laws. To this there are some exceptions, as this children of the ministers of the United States in foreign courts. See Citizen, Inhabitant. Bouvier Law Dictionary (1843)
An alien is one who is born in a foreign country. Analysis of Civil Government, By Calvin Townsend, pg. 325 (1869)
Alien: In american Law. One born out of the jurisdiction of the United States. Alexander Mansfield Burrill, A new law dictionary and glossary, pg 81 (1851)
“The people are considered as aliens, born in some foreign country, as inhabitants of some neighbouring state in the union, or natural born subjects, born within the state.” Zephaniah Swift, A system of the laws of the state of Connecticut: in six books, Volumes 1-2 of A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut: In Six Book, pg. 163,167 (1795)
“An alien is a person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States. There are some exceptions, however, to this rule, by the ancient English law, as in the case of the children of public ministers abroad, (provided their wives be English women,) for they owe not even a local allegiance to any foreign power. ” James Kent, COMMENTARIES ON AMERICAN LAW (1826)
“Aliens are persons born out of the jurisdiction of the United States, and not naturalized.” John Frederick Archbold, John Jervis, William Newland Welsby, Thomas Whitney Waterman, A complete practical treatise on criminal procedure, pleading, and …, Volume 1, pg. 8 (1853)
By this law, to make a man an alien, he must be born without the allegiance of the commonwealth ; although persons may be naturalized or expatriated by statute, or have the privileges of subjects conferred or secured by a national compact.” Ainslie v. Martin, 9 Mass. 454, 456, 457 (1813).
I think someone posted a comment here or at Dr. Conspiracy’s blog that made a very important point. The two citizen parent Birthers like Apuzzo are really just arguing the losing side of the Wong Kim Ark case that George D. Collins presented on behalf of the government in 1898. Collins’ xenophobic rant looks pathetic to us now:
However, if you modernize Collin’s language a bit and substitute “Muslim” and “usurper” this could have easily been written by a Birther. Also, the Birthers have recast the argument to be about “Citizen” vs. “Natural Born Citizen” instead of “citizen” vs. “alien”. They know that they would not get anywhere trying to argue the exact issue in Wong Kim Ark. The quotes most often used by Birthers to support their case were not about “citizen” vs. “natural born citizen”. They were about the jus soli route to citizenship – natural born citizenship.
When Chief Justice Waite wrote the decision in Minor the “doubts” he was talking about were about the birth citizenship of aliens born in the US. There were no doubts about the citizenship of white Europeans born to alien parents. The doubts were about blacks, native Americans, and Asians. These doubts were born in the baggage of institutionalized racism that unfortunately is a part of US history. It was not invented by the USA but inherited from our European forebears. The Birthers are now trying to take these racist arguments made over 100 years ago and use them in an invented controversy over “citizen” vs. “natural born citizen”.
I think I might develop this into a blog post when I have time. It will be constructive to take the arguments made by Mario and see who many of the quotes he drags out are really about citizenship period and not the fictional category of “14th amendment citizen” that the Birthers borrowed from racist and sovereign citizens.
The thing that strikes me is the similarity of Collins’ rhetoric to that of some of today’s birthers:
…honor and dignity in American citizenship… sacred… descendants of the patriots of the American Revolution… exalted qualification… the Constitution… dignity… patriotic ideals… our forefathers… surely in that case American citizenship is not worth having…
A few years later, the same George D. Collins ran into a bit of trouble with the law over a little matter of bigamy and perjury. He got married, which turned out to be a bit of a problem when his long-standing first wife showed up.
Instead of owning up to the marriage with his first wife, he claimed that he had been married to her sister, who had passed away. His wife said no, that was not the case — they had had five children together — but testified that he had also twice impregnated her sister as well. Collins then promptly fled to Canada, from where there was no extradition for the crime of bigamy. Unfortunately, though, there was extradition for perjury, and he was brought back forcibly to the United States. He was tried and sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin. He eventually emerged from prison and died an old man.
Anyway, the similarity of some of the rhetoric is interesting. It is the false appropriation of honorable and patriotic American ideals, the slick patter of the snake oil salesman, as what we hear from some (who shall of course remain nameless) on the birther side.
John Woodman and Reality Check,
Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 provides in pertinent 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 . . .”
Clearly, this eligibility clause makes a constitutional distinction between a “natural born Citizen” and a “Citizen of the United States.”
From this plain constitutional provision I have argued that members of American society are called “citizens.” The “citizens” are made up of the “natural born Citizens” and the “Citizens of the United States.” See Article I and II. Any “citizen” who is not a “natural born Citizen” is a “citizen of the United States” under the Fourteenth Amendment, Congressional Act, or treaty. Both “natural born Citizens” and “citizens of the United States” are “citizens.” Hence, anything that the Constitution, treaties, or Congressional statutes allow a “citizen of the United States” to do a “natural born Citizen” can also do.
So let me understand this now. You say that I am a racist because I distinguish between a “natural born Citizen” and a “Citizen of the United States.”
You just cannot make this stuff up.
You say that I am a racist because I distinguish between a “natural born Citizen” and a “Citizen of the United States.”
You just cannot make this stuff up.
Actually, you can — and did.
Point to where I accused you of being a racist for distinguishing between a “natural born citizen” and a “citizen of the United States.”
For that matter, point to any place, during the entire history of our months-long conversation regarding natural born citizenship, in which I have accused you of being a racist.
I have (reluctantly) accused you of being a liar — because:
a) multiple clear falsehoods have been publicly promoted by you,
b) these falsehoods have been called to your attention,
c) you are not able to refute the plain fact that they are falsehoods, and
d) you continue to assert them.
I have accused you of being a snake-oil salesman — because you have repeatedly pushed false theories — known and confirmed to be false — to the public, building a following of those who happen to like your false tales.
But I have never accused you of being a racist.
Now, to add to your other lies, you have publicly accused me of making such an accusation.
You have three choices.
1) Apologize for your false accusation.
Well, we all know you won’t do that, so let’s move on to the other options.
2) Justify your false accusation by showing where I accused you of being a racist.
Well, we all know you can’t do that, since it never happened. So let’s move on to the one remaining option.
3) Be known for the absolute, bald-faced, disingenuous, unrepentant, morally-bankrupt, corrupt, shameless, dishonest, slimy, two-faced… (but presumably non-racist)… peddler of non-legal, non-historical fiction that you are.
@ Mario (who is a zero for eight loser in court)
Again you are obfuscating. Article II allows two groups to become President, natural born citizens in perpetuity and every citizen of the United States at the time of adoption of the Constitution. Since no one is surviving now from the latter group only natural born citizens are eligible. This clause does not define a third class of citizens. There are only two. Natural born and naturalized.
In my opinion one is a racist if one makes racist arguments. Let’s look at your record. You have cited the majority opinion in the Dred Scott. You have embraced the idea that “14th amendment citizens” are somehow a lesser class of citizen. You glean for every quote from Google that was intended to deny the citizenship of the non-white classes. You have tried to say that Wong Kim Ark is a second class citizen. You writings reveal your nature. It is up to us to draw our own conclusions.
You are a liar too as John Woodman has pointed out.
Is Mario zero for eight now?
I hate to call anybody a liar.
Here we have a situation, however, in which multiple falsehoods have been told.
It is clear and verifiable that they are falsehoods.
Take the Minor v Happersett falsehood. It is crystal clear that that case did not create a “binding precedent” that a natural born citizen is, restrictively, “a person born in the United States of citizen parents.” It could not possibly have created such a “binding precedent.”
It’s been explained, in great detail, exactly why this is true.
Can Mario refute that explanation? No. He ignores it. Ignores it, but continues to repeatedly assert that Minor v Happersett did create such a “binding precedent” when it did not.
Take the example of US v Wong Kim Ark. Same thing. It is clear that Mario can’t refute the logic that the Court found, as an “irresistible” “conclusion” that Wong Kim Ark was “natural born” as well as a citizen.
Yet he continues to repeatedly assert that the Court “only” found Wong to be “a citizen.”
Take the Virginia citizenship law authored by Thomas Jefferson. It’s crystal clear that “all white persons born in the territory of the Commonwealth of Virginia” — and certain other classes of people — were citizens of Virginia.
The word “and” means and. There is no other definition for it. So Mario’s claim that they were not is clearly and irrefutably false. He has not and can not refute that. Yet he continues to assert that white persons born in Virginia of non-citizen parents were not citizens of Virginia.
He states that St. George Tucker clearly supports his position. He doesn’t. St. George Tucker clearly refutes Mario’s position. Tucker states that the Virginia citizenship law and the citizenship laws of the United States are “accordant” with the passage in Blackstone which says, “The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.”
So Mario makes the lame excuse that Tucker is saying the 3 American laws are only “accordant” with each other. The statement is clearly and irrefutably false. First of all, Tucker’s entire point is to compare the laws of American with the laws of England — not with each other. Secondly, it’s the exact same thing he says when he only states that ONE US law is “accordant,” in other footnotes.
So it is clear and irrefutable what he’s saying. Mario can’t refute it. But he continues to assert that which is clearly and irrefutably false.
So here we have a guy who makes multiple undeniably false claims, makes them publicly, makes them repeatedly, and attempts to base a major public doctrine — the eligibility of America’s Presidents — on the false claims.
What else can one call such a person, except a liar?
Well there is no reason to bring racisism into the argument, althougth many birthers clearly are racists. I have seen no evidence that this applies to Mario. However, he does make stuff up and his legal arguments are frivolous. It is sad that he keeps instisting that “citizen of the United States” means naturalized citizens when no one in history has ever said that such is the case. Again, why would someone make such a claim when they cannot support it with a single authority in US history? And, as I have pointed out, such cannot be the defintiion under the Constitution of the multitude or early statutes. I think this point illustrates how pathetic his position is. He acutally has to re-define terms in a manner that no one in history has done to try to win his point on the internet. Of course, actual courts laugh at such arguments as they have laughed at all his and his friends’ cases.
I do think the McClure case and the Jefferson issue points out best the dishonesty of these people. The evidence is quite clear that the government did not consider McClure a naturalized citizen and no one who reads English would interpret Jefferson’s statute as Mario does. When we no longer apply the laws of plain English, we no longer have law. To say “all white persons born in Virginia are citizens” does not mean all white person born in Virginia are citizens is simply claiming one no long respects the English language. For those of us who stayed awake in law school, there is no rule of statutory construction that allows one to change the plain meaning on any unambiguous phrase. And there is no rule that a statute needs to use terms uniformly or that a person could not be included under multiple prongs of a statute. For example, even under Mario’s interpretation of this statute, there are persons that would be included under more than one prong. But we can’t teach Mario statutory construction here. He has made up his own rules that any court or scholar would laugh at, as they have done over and over and over and over. I suggest he looks to the English statutes that Jefferson was copying to get his language and do some research to see that English jurists like Blackstone and Chitty talked about “children born” or “persons born” in the same paragraph without thinking it made any difference.
John Woodman and Ballantine,
Both of you say I am a liar. John Woodman even says that I am an “absolute, bald-faced, disingenuous, unrepentant, morally-bankrupt, corrupt, shameless, dishonest, slimy, two-faced… (but presumably non-racist)… peddler of non-legal, non-historical fiction.”
Maybe both of you can show me where I have failed in my ways.
St. George Tucker said:
“Civil rights, taken in a strict and confined sense, as contradistinguished from natural and social rights, are such as appertain to a man as a citizen or subject, of this, or that, particular state or country; in his private and individual capacity as a free agent, and member of the body politic or state, in respect to the state or body politic; and contradistinguished from such as might be due to him as a magistrate, legislator, judge, or other public agent, character, or functionary. The right of electing, and being elected to, any public office or trust, may be considered as among the most important of these rights.
These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
(1) Please reconcile your position on Tucker’s Footnote 10, which you say shows that St. George Tucker concludes that the Jefferson’s statutory laws of Virginia on citizenship and our early naturalization acts (1790, 1795, 1798, and 1802) were in agreement with Blackstone’s jus soli English common law, with this part of the above quote from Tucker in which he tells us what the law “in the United States” is:
“These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
(2) After you are done reconciling your position on Footnote 10 with the referenced part of Tucker’s quote, then explain how Tucker could find a child to be a “natural born Citizen” and therefore eligible to be elected president if that child was not born to “citizen” parents when Tucker tells us that:
a. “The right of electing, and being elected to, any public office or trust, may be considered as among the most important of these rights.”
b. “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
c. “The children of persons naturalized under any former law of the United States, or under the laws of any state, previous to the passing of any law of congress upon the subject, being under twenty-one years of age, at the time of the parents naturalization, if dwelling in the United States, shall be considered as citizens; and the children of citizens of the United States, wheresoever born, shall also be considered as citizens.”
d. “Persons naturalized according to these acts [1790, 1795, 1798, 1802], are entitled to all the rights of natural born citizens, except, first, that they cannot be elected as representatives in congress until seven years, thereafter. Secondly, nor can they be elected senators of the United States, until nine years thereafter. Thirdly, they are forever incapable of being chosen to the office of president of the United States. Persons naturalized before the adoption of the constitution, it is presumed, have all the capacities of natural born citizens. See C. U. S. Art. 1, 2.”
Mario,
I’ve basically already done everything you ask — but of course you won’t accept it.
As for “reconciling the quote,” show me where in that quote Tucker refers to the children born on US soil of non-citizen parents. You will say it’s included in persons who are naturalized. But there’s not the slightest evidence that it is — only your claim.
As for the quote itself, it is crystal clear. Justify your claim that Tucker was stating the 3 American laws were merely “accordant” with each other. You can’t. It’s nonsense. Horsefeathers. Balderdash. Poppycock. An utter, ridiculous fantasy.
As for my calling you a liar, I have given no less than five examples, and stated that in each of those five cases:
Show me in any one of those five instances where I am incorrect.
You won’t even apologize for having lied about my calling you a racist.
There’s really not much more that can be said.
I can’t see where in a)…d) he specifies the status of children
born to one or two foreigners in USA.
He only talks about naturalized people and people born to citizens.
Citizens include natural born citizens.
Ballantine says that I cannot read statutes. Well, let’s just see how well Ballantine can read those statutes:
In explaining our early naturalization acts and the U.S. law on citizenship, St. George Tucker said:
“The children of persons naturalized under any former law of the United States, or under the laws of any state, previous to the passing of any law of congress upon the subject, being under twenty-one years of age, at the time of the parents naturalization, if dwelling in the United States, shall be considered as citizens; and the children of citizens of the United States, wheresoever born, shall also be considered as citizens.”
So, tell us Ballantine, how do you get from “children of citizens of the United States, wheresoever born, shall also be considered as citizens” that Tucker was only talking about children born out of the United States? Do you want us to believe that Tucker, in telling us in his Commentaries what the U.S. law was on U.S. citizenship, forgot to tell us anywhere in his treatise how children who were born in the United States obtained their citizenship? If you contend that he did not so forget, then provide for us quotes from his Commentaries where Tucker informs us how children who were born in the United States obtained their citizenship.
Tucker didn’t forget.
Blackstone:
“The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.”
Tucker (paraphrased):
“The citizenship laws of both Virginia and the United States are in harmony with this principle.”
John Woodman,
Your response is absurd. It is ridiculous to think that Tucker would have left it up to us to read his mind regarding what he meant by a cryptic and ambiguous footnote concerning what he believed the law of the United States was on the matter of the citizenship of children born in the United States.
Also, I see that you have not responded to my previous comment wherein I asked you and Ballantine some questions regarding Tucker. You attempt to evade my questions by asking me questions and repeating your rhetoric that I am a liar. John Woodman, you are a fraud. Maybe ballantine can come to your aid.
You say it’s ridiculous to think that Tucker would have left it up to us to read his mind — and yet you infer from statements in which he did not mention the children born on US soil of alien parents what he must have meant, and ignore the clear — if succinct — occasion in which he unambiguously stated what both Virginia and United States law to be regarding precisely such children.
To the extent that Tucker’s footnote is cryptic, it is only because he used abbreviations which clearly explained in the key to his work. And those abbreviations are decisively and unambiguously traceable, as he intended to the exact and precise laws that I referenced.
And Tucker tells us clearly that the 1783 Virginia citizenship law, The 1790 United States Naturalization Act, and the 1802 United States Naturalization Act were all ACCORDANT with Blackstone’s statement, “The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.”
And that’s even entirely without reference to the other clear statements by Tucker, in which he:
You attempt to evade my questions by asking me questions and repeating your rhetoric that I am a liar.
I just gave you every opportunity to prove to us that you are NOT a liar.
And you completely passed up the opportunity to factually prove me wrong and demonstrate your innocence, preferring instead to assert — without providing any evidence whatsoever — that I am a fraud.
I wonder why?
Mario,
Any normal person would admit:
1. Minor v Happersett didn’t actually establish a binding precedent for whether the children born on US soil of non-citizen parents were natural born citizens.
2. US v Wong Kim Ark did, because the Supreme Court not only found Wong to be a citizen, they also found him to be “natural born,” and this was part of the core rationale. They also stated that the same rule had always applied in regard to the children of non-citizens, first in England, then in the Colonies, then in the United States after the establishment of the Constitution.
3. Thomas Jefferson’s citizenship law actually did state that all white persons born in the territory of the Commonwealth of Virginia were Virginia citizens.
4. St. George Tucker did actually clearly say that the laws of both Virginia and the United States were in agreement with the English common law principle that the children even of aliens, born in the country, were natural born subjects.
5. It’s true that John Woodman never called me a racist. Therefore, I apologize for saying he did.
As I say, any normal person would admit those 5 things were true. But so far, you won’t. Why not?
It’s pretty clear why. Because his sugar daddy would give him the ol’ pink slip.
“Look here, Mario… What’s the idea acknowledging the truth?!! That’s not what we’re paying you for. Hit the road!”
After all, lamentably, there’s no shortage of Liars for Hire. Mario can be fairly easily replaced.
John Woodman,
You maintain that you have proven me wrong on St. George Tucker by making four points. Your points are 1. the Nicholas quote; 2. the meaning of “native-born; 3. who Tucker considered to be aliens; and 4. Footnote 10. I will now address each one of your points and show that none of them have merit.
1. The Colonel George Nicholas quote: The [HONEST RESEARCHERS], including you, John Woodman, have always snuck the Colonel George Nicholas quote in as though it were Tucker’s. But Tucker never adopted Nicholas opinion stated in the long Nicholas quote.
Here is the beginning of the quote: “A very respectable political writer makes the following pertinent remarks upon this subject. ‘Prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people inhabiting the different states might be divided into two classes: natural born citizens, or those born within the state, and aliens, or such as were born out of it.’”
Obama’s enablers have so abused this quote. They always left out the first part of the quote which shows that it was not Tucker’s position that he was stating, but rather only that of Nicholas. Tucker was only making reference to what Nicholas (if he is the reference as you contend) thought about state rights (states retaining power over local denization and setting qualifications for state offices) and not for any definition of who was a “citizen.” Only after I called them on it do they now start to give the full quote with the name of that “political writer” even being stated.
We can see from how Tucker defined citizenship, he did not approve of what Colonel George Nicholas said. He only repeated what Nicholas believed. Just like Tucker did not approve of Blackstone’s take on indelibility of allegiance. But he still states what Blackstone’s view was and then shows how Blackstone was wrong. .
In Tucker’s Commentaries, Vol. 1, App. 254-59, Tucker comments on whether the states still had any power left to naturalize citizens after the Constitution was adopted. He gives some case law in which the judges said that they did. Then he gives another case which disagreed with those courts. Then he provides the quote from that “very respectable political writer” who Tucker said made “the following pertinent remarks upon the subject.” Tucker then quotes him. The reason Tucker quotes him is to show that there may still be a small area where the states did not give up their power to the federal government under the naturalization clause. That writer had taken the position that the states, while they gave up the right to naturalize aliens to the federal government, retained the right to make persons “denizens” (which had effect only in that state) and even to prescribe their own qualifications for holding state office. Tucker then concludes after quoting that writer at length:
“Now although the act of congress may operate to repeal this act, so far as relates to the rights of naturalization, or, a state of perfect citizenship, under the constitution and laws of the union; yet, as it respects the rights which the state hath power to grant, such as holding lands, or an office under the sole, and distinct authority of the state, I see no reason to doubt that the law is as valid at this day, as it was before the adoption of the constitution of the United States.”
Here, Tucker explained that the acts of Congress on naturalization abrogated any state naturalization statutes or laws. What is also most important is that Tucker said that only the federal government decided what “the state of perfect citizenship, under the constitution and laws of the union” would be. Here, there is not doubt that he is referring to one being a “natural born Citizen,” and calling that citizenship “perfect citizenship” which existed only under the constitution and national law. That national law would have been the law of nations and not the English common law. And that national law, as confirmed later by Minor v. Happersett (1875), defined a “natural born Citizen” as a child born in the country to “citizen” parents. Finally, Tucker explained that the states did retained the power to decide how titles to land and what state office qualifications would be.
So, all this talk that Tucker adopted jus soli citizenship, which is contained in someone else’s quote, is absurd at best and fraudulent at worst. Simply, Tucker never said what you say he said, i.e., that he accepted defining a “natural born Citizen” under the jus soli of English common law. On the contrary, all he did was quote someone else on an unrelated topic and then give his opinion on the matter. And that opinion contains that powerful quote on “perfect citizenship” which existed under the Constitution and national law, which was the law of nations and not English common law. Moreover, everything that Tucker wrote shows that he required birth to “citizen” parents in order for one to be a “natural born Citizen.”
2. The meaning of “native-born: You argue that since Tucker said that a “native-born” (which you contend means “born within a country”) could be President, he adopted the jus soli rule of English common law. But under the law of nations, “native” and “natural-born citizen” meant the same thing. Here is Vattel on the point: “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, Section 212 (London 1797) (1st ed. Neuchatel 1758). So under the law of nations (U.S. national law or federal “common law”), “native-born” meant born in a country to “citizen” parents, not only “born within a country.”
3. The definition of aliens by birth: Tucker said that “[a]liens by birth, are all person born out of the dominions of the United States, since the fourth day of July 1776, on which day they declared themselves an independent and sovereign nation, with some exceptions” which were in “favor of infants.” He then commented on Jefferson’s citizenship law of 1779 and 1783 and Congress’s early naturalization acts to show that infants followed the citizenship of their parents, showing that “the children of such persons duly naturalized, dwelling within the United States, and being under the age of twenty-one years, at the time of such naturalization; and the children of citizens of the United States, born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,” also obtained the right to be “citizens of the United States.”
So, while Tucker explained that aliens were all those born out of the dominion of the United States,” he also explained how their minor children, born in the United States, became “citizens of the United States.” He showed that under the early naturalization acts, those children became “citizens of the United States” at the time their alien parents naturalized if they did so prior to the child reaching the age of majority and the child was dwelling in the United States at that time.
4. Footnote 10: Tucker quotes William Blackstone thus: “The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.10 In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.c”
10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28. accordant.
You argue in your article in which you attempt to discredit my argument on Tucker that this quote and footnote show that Tucker agreed with the jus soli English common law rule and that he informed that the rule prevailed in the United States. But Tucker did not say any such thing. On the contrary, Footnote 10 can be read in two other ways which show that your interpretation is incorrect.
a. Condition A is accordant with condition B interpretation
What does “accordant” mean today. If we consult The Free Dictionary at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/accordant , we learn that the word is used to show that the stated matter is in agreement with what follows the state matter. Here is how the term is defined: “accordant”
“adj (usually postpositive and foll[owed] by with) in conformity or harmony.”
1. “[B]eing in agreement or harmony; often followed by ‘with’; ‘a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature’-Thomas Hardy.”
2. “[I]n keeping; ‘salaries agreeable with current trends’; ‘plans conformable with your wishes’; ‘expressed views concordant with his background’ . . . sometimes followed by ‘with’ . . . ‘testimony consistent with the known facts’; ‘I have decided that the course of conduct which I am following is consistent with my sense of responsibility as president in time of war’-FDR.”
Merriam Webster provides this example: “.” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accordant .
What did “accordant” mean when Tucker used in 1803? In defining the word “fair,” “alongside the meaning ‘according to custom, appropriate’ we find (as defined by the Middle English Dictionary [1100-1500]) ‘accordant with truth, reason, approved practice, or justice; right, proper, sound; equitable, impartial, just’ and ‘morally good and proper’, as well as ‘highly to be approved of; splendid, excellent; fine, good.’” http://keywords.pitt.edu/keywords_defined/fair.html . We can tell from the title of this book how the word “accordant” was used in England in 1857. Richard Ball, The Perpetuity of a Seventh-Day Ordinance, Accordant With Scripture Testimony and the Course and Constitution of Nature 36 (2nd ed. London 1857) (“And how accordant with the analogy of Scripture”). So we can safely presume that the word was used then the same as it is used today.
What this means is that when using “accordant,” the writer will state condition A and condition B and then say that condition A is accordant “with” condition B. Since the “with” follows the word “accordant,” condition A will be in agreement with condition B which follows it. But in the sentence, the compared condition (condition B) is stated after the antecedent condition with “accordant with” placed between the two compared conditions (e.g. condition A accordant with condition B).
What this means is that when Tucker in Footnote 10 first stated “10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28” (condition A) and then “accordant,” we have to determine with what these cited laws were in agreement (condition B). In other words, Tucker had to cite some other thing after the word “accordant” to show with what the first cited laws agreed.
So Tucker first gave the Virginia law on citizenship and the two Congressional naturalization acts (condition A). Then he said “accordant.” The question then becomes with what are those cited laws in agreement. Since the thing with which those laws was being compared comes after those cited laws, we have to look to see what followed in Tucker’s explanation. In other words, we have to look for condition B. When we exhaust the reading of footnote 10, we have to return to the main text. The next thing that follows those cited laws is the sentence: “In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.” So what Tucker says is that the Virginia citizenship statute and the two Congressional Acts (condition A) were in conformity, agreement, harmony with the French constitution and its jus sanguinis rule of citizenship (condition B).
We know that Tucker considered those U.S. laws to be in agreement with the principle that children followed the condition of the parents because earlier in his treatise, he discussed at length John Locke. He relies on Locke to show that William Blackstone was wrong in saying that a person could not expatriate. He shows through, among other sources, Locke, that persons did have the natural right to expatriate. His discussion of Locke also shows that Locke believed that children, during their years of minority, had no capacity to consent and that when they reached adulthood, they could make decisions on their own. In the area of citizenship, this meant that a child inherited the citizenship of his/her parents and could accept that choice by tacit consent upon reaching the age of majority or throw off that choice by expatriation.
This statement by Tucker also supports the idea that Tucker agreed with the French constitution: “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.” Here we can see that Tucker consider all those who were “citizen” and not born to “citizen” parents to have been naturalized. He considered those who were born to “citizen” parents to have inherited their citizenship by nature and not by naturalization. These “citizens” would have been the “natural born Citizens.” This explanation by him informs that he rejected, not only Blackstone’s notion of indelibility of allegiance, but also his jus soli English common law rule of citizenship. He accepted the French constitution’s (the law of nations) jus sanguinis rule of citizenship and the law of nation grant to individuals of the natural right of expatriation.
You have to date not been able to explain what Tucker meant by this statement. Please explain what Tucker meant by: “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
More evidence that this is the correct reading of Footnote 10 is Tucker’s explanation of who were “[a]liens, in the United States . . . at present.” He included “all persons born out of the dominion of the United States, since the fourth day of July, 1776, . . . with some few exceptions.” He then explained how the citizenship laws of Virginia and the early naturalization acts naturalized the children of those persons born out of the dominions of the United States. In Virginia, for children “‘wheresoever born’” (meaning born in or out of Virginia) they could not be “citizens” unless born to “citizen” parents. Since the Virginia statute did not naturalize children born in Virginia to alien parents at the time their parents naturalized, he then shows how the early naturalization acts of Congress filled in the lacuna. He cited the Naturalization Act of 1802 and explained that that statute provided that “the children of such persons duly naturalized dwelling within the United States, and being under the age of twenty-one years, at the time of such naturalization” shall be considered as “citizens of the United States.”
What is interesting to note here is that in the James McClure case, the South Carolina naturalization statue, like the Virginia one, did not naturalize the children of persons naturalizing in South Carolina and so it was initially decided that McClure was not naturalized like his father. But then the James Madison Administration ruled that the Naturalization Act of 1802 filled the void by providing retroactively that any such child would be made a “citizen of the United States” under that federal statute. They then ruled that McClure was a naturalized “Citizen of the United States” under the Naturalization Act of 1802.
So, your reading of Footnote 10 is backwards. The Virginia citizenship laws and early naturalization acts were “accordant” with what followed in Tucker’s writing, i.e., the French constitution and its jus sanguinis citizenship, not with what preceded Tucker’s writing, i.e., Blackstone’s jus soli English common law. My position is supported by both how the word “accordant” is used in the English language and also by what Tucker actually wrote in other parts of his treatise.
b. Condition B is accordant with condition A which immediately precedes condition B in the string citation (e.g., Condition A; Condition B. accordant)
Tucker cited the Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Cong. c. 3) immediately followed by the Naturalization Act of 1802 (7 Cong. c. 28). He followed the latter with “accordant.” The other possible way that Tucker used “accordant” is therefore to show that the Naturalization Act of 1802 (7 Cong. c. 28) was “accordant” with the Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Cong. c. 3), meaning that the 1802 act was in agreement with that of 1790.
As we can see, there is no merit to your four points of contention which you make against my position that St. George Tucker supports my position that a “natural born Citizen” is a child born in the country to “citizen” parents.
Apuzzo: I will now address each one of your points and show that none of them have merit.
Response: Frankly — this ought to be good for a laugh; since all of them do, in fact, have merit. But do proceed.
Apuzzo: But Tucker never adopted Nicholas opinion stated in the long Nicholas quote.
Response: So you claim, but the actual evidence — in the form of Tucker’s clear words — says directly otherwise.
Apuzzo: Here is the beginning of the quote: “A very respectable political writer makes the following pertinent remarks upon this subject. ‘Prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people inhabiting the different states might be divided into two classes: natural born citizens, or those born within the state, and aliens, or such as were born out of it.’”
Obama’s enablers have so abused this quote. They always left out the first part of the quote which shows that it was not Tucker’s position that he was stating, but rather only that of Nicholas.
Response: On the contrary, I have often included the entiire quote, noting — quite accurately — that Tucker quoted Nicholas approvingly.
First, he stated that Nicholas was “a very respectable political writer” — and he was. He was the first Professor of Law at our nation’s 16th university.
Secondly, he stated that Nicholas’ remarks on the subjects of citizenship and naturalization (which Tucker was discussing) were “pertinent.” In fact, Tucker delivers quite a LONG quote from Nicholas, in which he goes on to discuss some of these subjects in detail.
Apuzzo: Tucker was only making reference to what Nicholas (if he is the reference as you contend) thought about state rights (states retaining power over local denization and setting qualifications for state offices) and not for any definition of who was a “citizen.” Only after I called them on it do they now start to give the full quote with the name of that “political writer” even being stated.
Response: IF he is the reference as I contend? Don’t you know??
The fact is, you NEVER knew who the quote was from until I wrote about it! And still you aren’t certain.
Be that as it may, the more IMPORTANT fact is that Tucker quoted Nicholas with obvious approval, and he did not take exception to a single thing that Nicholas had to say about natural born citizenship. That in itself is an indication that Tucker had no disagreement — because if he had a disagreement, he stated it, as he did regarding the following point from Blackstone:
“It is a principle of universal law, that the natural born subject of one prince cannot by any act of his own, no, not by swearing allegiance to another, put off, or discharge his natural allegiance to the former.” Blacks. Com. Vol. I. p. 369.
The positive, and unqualified manner in which the learned commentator advances this to be a principle of universal law, would induce a supposition, that it is a point in which all the writers on the law of nature and nations are perfectly agreed. As my researches have led me to adopt a very different, or, rather, opposite conclusion, it will be the business of this note to examine the subject.
Apuzzo: We can see from how Tucker defined citizenship, he did not approve of what Colonel George Nicholas said. He only repeated what Nicholas believed. Just like Tucker did not approve of Blackstone’s take on indelibility of allegiance. But he still states what Blackstone’s view was and then shows how Blackstone was wrong. .
Response: Nonsense. Tucker gave every sign of approving of what Nicholas said — quoting him with strong words of approval, stating that his remarks were very relevant, and not saying a single word that conflicted with Nicholas’ quoted statement on natural born citizenship.
Apuzzo: So, all this talk that Tucker adopted jus soli citizenship, which is contained in someone else’s quote, is absurd at best and fraudulent at worst. Simply, Tucker never said what you say he said, i.e., that he accepted defining a “natural born Citizen” under the jus soli of English common law. On the contrary, all he did was quote someone else on an unrelated topic and then give his opinion on the matter. And that opinion contains that powerful quote on “perfect citizenship” which existed under the Constitution and national law, which was the law of nations and not English common law. Moreover, everything that Tucker wrote shows that he required birth to “citizen” parents in order for one to be a “natural born Citizen.”
Response: You simply repeat the same nonsense. Tucker clearly and unambiguously stated that the laws of Virginia and the United States were accordant with the principle he referenced in Blackstone, that the children born in the country, even of aliens, were natural born subjects.
Apuzzo: 2. The meaning of “native-born: You argue that since Tucker said that a “native-born” (which you contend means “born within a country”) could be President, he adopted the jus soli rule of English common law. But under the law of nations, “native” and “natural-born citizen” meant the same thing. Here is Vattel on the point: “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, Section 212 (London 1797) (1st ed. Neuchatel 1758). So under the law of nations (U.S. national law or federal “common law”), “native-born” meant born in a country to “citizen” parents, not only “born within a country.”
Response: Vattel never said any such thing, and you know it. Vattel used the words, “les naturels, ou indigenes,” and “indigenes” was never even translated as “natural born citizens” until 10 years after the Constitution was written; and when it was translated, the translation was done by some anonymous English guy in London.
And as has been demonstrated, NOT ONE SINGLE TIME — as far as you, I or anybody else can tell — did ANY writer on the “Law of Nations” EVER use the phrase “natural born citizen.” Not once.
Furthermore, “born in the country” ALWAYS made a person “native born.” So Tucker here stated his opinion — and stated it clearly — that birth in the country met the Constitution’s requirements for Presidential eligibility.
Apuzzo: 3. The definition of aliens by birth: Tucker said that “[a]liens by birth, are all person born out of the dominions of the United States, since the fourth day of July 1776, on which day they declared themselves an independent and sovereign nation, with some exceptions” which were in “favor of infants.”
Response: Yes, in favor specifically OF INFANTS WHO WERE BORN OUTSIDE OF THE UNITED STATES. All infants born INSIDE the United States were ALREADY EXCLUDED BY TUCKER FROM THE DEFINITION OF ALIENS.
This is crystal clear to anyone who isn’t determined to represent lies for truth.
Apuzzo: He then commented on Jefferson’s citizenship law of 1779 and 1783 and Congress’s early naturalization acts to show that infants followed the citizenship of their parents, showing that “the children of such persons duly naturalized, dwelling within the United States, and being under the age of twenty-one years, at the time of such naturalization; and the children of citizens of the United States, born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States,” also obtained the right to be “citizens of the United States.”
Response: ALSO obtained the right to be citizens — along with ALL persons who were born on US soil.
Apuzzo: 4. Footnote 10: Tucker quotes William Blackstone thus: “The children of aliens, born here in England, are generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.10 In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.c”
10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28. accordant.
You argue in your article in which you attempt to discredit my argument on Tucker that this quote and footnote show that Tucker agreed with the jus soli English common law rule and that he informed that the rule prevailed in the United States. But Tucker did not say any such thing. On the contrary, Footnote 10 can be read in two other ways which show that your interpretation is incorrect.
Response: Attempt to discredit your argument on Tucker? Your argument on Tucker is DEAD to any honest reader.
Or as Thomas Brown would put it:
It’s not pinin,’ it’s passed on! This argument is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late argument. It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t propped it up with bald-faced falsehoods it would be pushing up the daisies. Its metabolical processes are of interest only to historians. It’s hopped the twig. It’s kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! This…. is an ex-argument!
Apuzzo: What this means is that when using “accordant,” the writer will state condition A and condition B and then say that condition A is accordant “with” condition B. Since the “with” follows the word “accordant,” condition A will be in agreement with condition B which follows it. But in the sentence, the compared condition (condition B) is stated after the antecedent condition with “accordant with” placed between the two compared conditions (e.g. condition A accordant with condition B).
What this means is that when Tucker in Footnote 10 first stated “10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28” (condition A) and then “accordant,” we have to determine with what these cited laws were in agreement (condition B). In other words, Tucker had to cite some other thing after the word “accordant” to show with what the first cited laws agreed.
Response: It could hardly be more straightforward. The laws in the footnote are accordant with the statement the footnote references.
Apuzzo: So Tucker first gave the Virginia law on citizenship and the two Congressional naturalization acts (condition A). Then he said “accordant.” The question then becomes with what are those cited laws in agreement. Since the thing with which those laws was being compared comes after those cited laws, we have to look to see what followed in Tucker’s explanation. In other words, we have to look for condition B. When we exhaust the reading of footnote 10, we have to return to the main text. The next thing that follows those cited laws is the sentence: “In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.” So what Tucker says is that the Virginia citizenship statute and the two Congressional Acts (condition A) were in conformity, agreement, harmony with the French constitution and its jus sanguinis rule of citizenship (condition B).
Response: Your claim is nothing short of astonishing.
You failed utterly in your laughable claim that Tucker was saying that the laws of Virginia and the laws of the United States were in agreement with each other.
Now, having failed there, you actually have the nerve to try and make the case… that a footnote referred not to the sentence that it footnotes — but to the sentence AFTER the one it footnotes.
If there remains any honest reader on the internet who still entertains the slightest doubt about what an absolute, dishonest, bald-faced liar you are, this one action on your part is quite sufficient to remove those doubts.
It says that there is no sentence you won’t twist, no depth of lying or deception you won’t go to, in order to attempt to “prove” your claims. It brands you as a man who can never be trusted in anything he says, because he has shown his willingness to cast about for whatever remotely plausible lie he can tell, even when he has been caught clearly and indisputably with the truth solidly against him.
Apuzzo: Tucker… relies on Locke to show that William Blackstone was wrong in saying that a person could not expatriate.
Response: So? Has absolutely nothing to do with whether a person born on the soil was a natural born citizen to start with.
Apuzzo: You have to date not been able to explain what Tucker meant by this statement. Please explain what Tucker meant by: “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.”
Response: I already explained it. The statement is true enough, but makes no reference to those born on US soil of non-citizen parents. Your saying I haven’t explained it doesn’t make it so.
Apuzzo: But then the James Madison Administration ruled that the Naturalization Act of 1802 filled the void by providing retroactively that any such child would be made a “citizen of the United States” under that federal statute. They then ruled that McClure was a naturalized “Citizen of the United States” under the Naturalization Act of 1802.
Response: Again, another bald-faced lie. They ruled no such thing. You can produce no “ruling” that says that, because they never issued any such ruling. They stated that McClure was a citizen of the United States, and produced as proof of that evidence of where he was born.
Apuzzo: So, your reading of Footnote 10 is backwards. The Virginia citizenship laws and early naturalization acts were “accordant” with what followed in Tucker’s writing, i.e., the French constitution and its jus sanguinis citizenship, not with what preceded Tucker’s writing, i.e., Blackstone’s jus soli English common law. My position is supported by both how the word “accordant” is used in the English language and also by what Tucker actually wrote in other parts of his treatise.
Response: Once again, the claim that a footnote refers not to the sentence it references, but to the sentence following the one it references. What an astonishing liar you are.
Apuzzo: As we can see, there is no merit to your four points of contention which you make against my position that St. George Tucker supports my position that a “natural born Citizen” is a child born in the country to “citizen” parents.
Response: At least you tried to answer them. Far better, however, would have been for you to admit the truth, rather than double down on your claim and attempt to support it with the most obvious, transparent and laughable of lies.
Good Lord John, you have an amazing amount of patience. Mario will never ever concede. Thank you for all your wonderful content and comments — your blog has been a wonderful resource.
You’re very welcome. Thanks for taking part in the discussion! 😉
I must say, I’m a bit disappointed on
how JW handles this here with personal
attacks and frequent use of the N-word,
unscientific rhetoric, ridiculing.
Maybe others started to do it this way,
I don’t know but no need to follow. (IMO)
I don’t see this behaviour so much in MA’s posts
but followed only briefly and recently.
OK, MA should have addressed JW’s point that footnotes
were used frequently by Tucker always with the meaning
that JW read into it. But no reason to followup
with personal attacks.
I am not at all sure what you’re talking about. N-word? “Nonsense?” Or do you mean L-word? “Lying” / “liar”?
The fact is, what Mario has repeatedly posted, and continues to post, is nonsense. He’s been caught in all kinds of falsehoods, and all kinds of completely ridiculous claims. Those who’ve honestly followed the issue for the past couple of months — or longer — are well aware of that.
At one point, for example, he was claiming that “citizen of the United States” used in the Constitution means “naturalized citizen of the United States.” He has apparently backed off of that one. Last night over at his own blog he was claiming that the recent dismissal of Tisdale v Obama — in which the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals cited a specific section of the law that says “some or all of the arguments are don’t have enough merit to warrant writing an official opinion” for the reason why the didn’t give one, as a victory.
Did you get that? The court threw him and the plaintiff out and didn’t even bother to write an opinion, and actually said, in effect, “this is such nonsense we can’t even be bothered to write an opinion on it.”
Blackstone has a sentence that says very clearly that the children born in the country of non-citizens are natural born subject. And St. George Tucker, commenting on it, said that the important citizenship laws of Virginia and the United States agree.
So then Mario comes along and claims that Tucker’s footnote only means that the citizenship laws of Virginia and the United States agree with each other and not with the English law Tucker was footnoting. How stupid is that? How ridiculous is that? What kind of bald-faced lie is that? And yet Apuzzo shamelessly makes it, before the whole world, including you over in Europe. And it is easily seen to be absolutely false first by how ridiculous it is, and second by the clear way in which it is the same as Tucker’s other footnotes when he says an American law agrees with the English law.
So then he figures out that he looks like an absolute fool, and changes the story. Now he claims instead that Tucker was not commenting on the passage that he footnoted, but on the one after it! Once again that is easily seen to be so ridiculous as to defy belief — since when do footnotes ever refer to the sentence after the one they footnote? — and completely against every other instance in the entire work in which Tucker makes a footnote.
There are many more examples — and those of us who have dealt with Mario have dealt with such things pretty much every single day — but those alone should be enough to show that there is no depth of straight-out lying that Mario will not sink to in order to try and prop up his debunked claims.
At some point, after months or years of this stuff, you have to stop being quite so polite, and start calling a lie a lie, and a liar a liar. Otherwise people like yourself will not understand how clear the situation is.
you are exaggerating.
What you call nonsense,ridiculous,liar is not so in the normal definition of these words.
He posts a lot, so no surprise if he sometimes is wrong. I’d bet, so are you (and me)
just hopefully not so often.
Even if true, does that make everything he posts invalid ?
(What percentage of what he posts do you think is nonsense,ridiculous,wrong ?)
Then I would wonder why you even bother to reply.
And there is no need to repeat it again and again, as if that
would already make an argument. (IMO)
> At some point, after months or years of this stuff, you have to stop being quite so polite,
by what law ?
> and start calling a lie a lie, and a liar a liar.
how many lies (or percent of wrong statements) do you need to be a “liar” ?
Is Obama a liar ? Or George Bush ?
> Otherwise people like yourself will not understand how clear the situation is.
thanks, but people like me in internet made the experience that calling something
a lie does not make it a lie. You’ll have to check.
What did they do with you in that Jan.22 debate ?
Zebest: nonsense , Denninger : factually false – did that make me “understand how
clear the situation is” ?
you are exaggerating.
If you believe I am exaggerating, then state on what points I am exaggerating.
I have given three very specific and concrete examples of statements made by Mr. Apuzzo just in the past week or so alone that are so ridiculous as to defy belief.
And yet he makes them, and solemnly asserts that they are perfectly true, and attempts to deceive the public with them.
Which of those statements is anything other than a clear falsehood? If you think that all of them are reasonable or has any basis in reality, or even that one of them is, then please explain which statement is reasonable, and why.
He posts a lot, so no surprise if he sometimes is wrong. I’d bet, so are you (and me)
There is a difference. If somebody points out that I am wrong on an issue, then I will correct it — as I did very early in the history of this blog when someone pointed out that I had given in my book the wrong name for the Democratic Party.
Mr. Apuzzo will not. Sometimes he will stop making an obviously false statement, but that is not the same thing as correcting an error.
Even if true, does that make everything he posts invalid?
Not everything; but pretty much every important claim he has made on this issue is false.
(What percentage of what he posts do you think is nonsense, ridiculous, wrong ?)
Every important claim he has made, to have good evidence that “natural born citizen” requires two citizen parents, is false.
His legal arguments have comprehensively been shown to be false.
Minor v Happersett does not say what he says it does. Even if it did, it wouldn’t make any difference.
US v Wong Kim Ark says what he says it doesn’t say.
The definition of “natural born citizen” does not come from “American common law” derived from the Law of Nations, as he claims.
There is not the slightest historical evidence that the Founding Fathers relied on Vattel for the definition of “natural born citizen,” as he claims.
Thomas Jefferson’s citizenship law for the Commonwealth of Virginia clearly did not say what Apuzzo claims it says.
His claim that David Ramsay represented the Founding Fathers’ understanding of citizenship is completely false — Ramsay was voted down 36 to 1 by all of our actual leaders, including James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution.”
He claimed that Congress told us in the Naturalization Acts that the child born on US soil of non-citizen parents was “not even a citizen.” The Naturalization Acts said absolutely nothing about the child born on US soil of non-citizen parents, and the claim is clearly false.
He claimed that the translator of the 1797 translation of Vattel’s “Law of Nations” used the phrase “natural born citizens” because he had an understanding of what the American Founding Fathers meant by the phrase, and he was writing their meaning. The claim is obviously false.
He even claimed at one point that Peter van Schaack — a British loyalist who opposed the Revolution and moved back to Britain after the Declaration of Independence — represented the Founding Fathers’ views on citizenship.
He won’t even correct a false claim he made this past week that I supposedly called him a racist!
You ask how many lies someone needs to tell in order to be a liar? Only one, unrepentantly. But there are more than a dozen examples. In each case, the falsehood has been refuted. Mr. Apuzzo cannot refute the analysis that shows the statement is false. And yet he continues making the known false claim. That’s pretty much the definition of a lie, and of a liar.
Is a dozen or so enough? If it isn’t, then I’m sure we can find a few more. When it comes to Mr. Apuzzo, there’s no shortage.
Then I would wonder why you even bother to reply.
Because if one does not identify falsehood as falsehood, people will believe it — especially if the person making false claims does so in a way that seems convincing.
thanks, but people like me in internet made the experience that calling something a lie does not make it a lie. You’ll have to check.
Then check. I have always encouraged people to research the facts for themselves.
What did they do with you in that Jan.22 debate? Zebest: nonsense , Denninger : factually false – did that make me “understand how
clear the situation is” ?
Here’s the difference: When I say that something is nonsense, I give the specific reason why it is nonsense, and you can go and check for yourself.
The other reason is that I don’t call something nonsense unless it actually is nonsense; but of course you will have to check for yourself in order to know that is true.
Nonsense?
n.
– Extravagant foolishness or frivolity.
– Matter of little or no importance or usefulness.
intej.
– Used to express disagreement or exasperation. (seems rather appropriate here.)
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
How about Bouvier?
3. In pleading, when matter is nonsense by being contradictory and repugnant to something precedent, the precedent matter, which is sense, shall not be defeated by the repugnancy which follows, but that which is contradictory shall be rejected;
A Law Dictionary, Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States. By John Bouvier. Published 1856.
If my judgment that Mario’s claims are nonsense is not enough, then know this:
Eight times he has appeared to present his case in court. Eight times his case has been dismissed. He has zero successes in eight court appearances.
Once he was nearly sanctioned for filing a frivolous appeal (“Frivolous” pretty much = “nonsense”).
This last time the court:
a) specifically admitted his brief (this means: “We are listening to you and taking your arguments into account.”)
b) didn’t issue a written opinion, citing a section of the law that allowed them to skip issuing a written opinion in instances where “some or all of the arguments made are without sufficient merit to warrant discussion in a written opinion.”
This judgment came from the Fourth Circuit United States Court of Appeals.
————————————–
Northland10, wikipedia says:
Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system,
that lacks any coherent meaning. And gives an example from Noam Chomsky:
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.
How would “someone like JW” even be able to reply to it
in a meaningful way ?
Did any of the judges say that MA said or wrote nonsense ?
—————————————————
John Woodman, “without sufficient merit” is different from “nonsense”
MA is not so easy for me to check, maybe we can ask an independent expert …
And you admitted that it’s necessary to call him, so “people like me”
will see it. Which is a little contradictory since you also admit
that I’ll have to check it by myself anyway. And do you have to point
it out, again and again ? Looks more like a general strategy to me
to discredid and attack people.
Anything that goes to Court is hardly “nonsense” in the normal sense.
Else they would dismiss it immediately in USA.
Nonsense must be identifyable to normal people as such.
Like random words or unrelated stuff.
if you need much research for it then it is at most
wrong or unsubstantiated.
This very post is also nonsense in your view ?
Because you disagree. But you won’t call it nonsense
since I’m new …. but if I continue to disagree then …
It’s not the kind of language that you find in a scientific paper,
in a scientific analysis, in a book.
gs, I would say that “without sufficient merit even to discuss in a written opinion” is the exact same thing is “nonsense.”
It’s a statement that the claims made by Apuzzo and the plaintiff are so far from having any basis in reality or law that they are not worth the court’s time.
If that isn’t “nonsense,” I’m not sure what is.
Nonsense must be identifyable to normal people as such. Like random words or unrelated stuff. if you need much research for it then it is at most wrong or unsubstantiated.
I understand your point, but would have to disagree. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics. But I would say that just because an issue gives sufficient room for someone to cook up a complicated theory and say a bunch of things most people don’t understand and aren’t sure of — because they don’t know the history and law of the issue — does not exclude a claim from being complete nonsense.
It’s not the kind of language that you find in a scientific paper,
in a scientific analysis, in a book.
I read scientific papers, scientific analyses, and case law in order to get at the truth. But very, very few people do.
However, context is everything and therefore, it need only be identifiable to those versed in the context in which it is used. It may not make sense to “lay people.”
If I were to use the following statement:
SELECT Style, Party, Court, Decision_Dt FROM Bither_Case WHERE Party LIKE ‘%Apuzzo%’ AND Decision_Dt Not Null
This statement would be considered by many to be nonsense, but would make sense to somebody with experience in SQL (and following Apuzzo cases).
Context would also be important within the actual subject matter. If I were to use the above statement in explaining the use of deceptive cadences in Beethoven’s 7th Symphony or use it as justification for a toe only pedal technique on Bach’s Schübler Chorale, Meine Seele erhebt den Herren, BWV 648, that would be nonsense as it does not fit the context of music theory or performance practice. In addition, the discussion of deceptive cadences and organ pedal technique would likely be nonsense to a great many people.
I used the definition from Bouvier as it relates the the legal context of John’s statement. Within this context, Mario has shown to be uttering nonsense. It may not make sense to non-lawyers or those who have not been following this for 3 years now.
As with everything, Context is King.
When I say that both the forgery claims and the two-citizen parent claims are “nonsense,” what I mean is that both major claims are completely without merit, and they are factually known to be without merit.
They are both constructions built entirely of things like invalid arguments, cherry-picked evidence, things taken out of context, outright falsehoods, and the like. Like this:
invalid-argument cherry-picked-evidence falsehood falsehood
cherry-picked-evidence falsehood out-of-context falsedhood
falsehood true-but-unimportant falsehood cherry-picked-evidence
cherry-picked-evidence invalid-argument invalid-argument
true-but-unimportant invalid-argument falsehood falsehood
invalid-argument out-of-context falsehood out-of-context
Those kinds of statements make up the entire construction. And it is known and verifiable that those kinds of statements make up the entire construction.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the falsehoods are readily apparent to the average person. The average person could look at a real diamond and a worthless imitation and not be able to tell the difference. But someone who truly understands diamonds could spot the difference in seconds.
John Woodman wrote:
> gs, I would say that “without sufficient merit even to discuss in a
> written opinion” is the exact same thing is “nonsense.”
> It’s a statement that the claims made by Apuzzo and the plaintiff are
> so far from having any basis in reality or law that they are not worth
> the court’s time.
counterexample: your book would be without merit in a Court decision
about murder in Kongo.
> just because an issue gives sufficient room for someone to cook up a
> complicated theory and say a bunch of things most people don’t
> understand and aren’t sure of — because they don’t know the history
> and law of the issue — does not exclude a claim from being
> complete nonsense.
So you admit it’s complicated and people don’t understand it.
And you can’t provide proof which they can easily verify.
So you mark it as nonsense and hope that replaces the
easily-checkable proof.
But then others do the same with your complicated
200 pages long theories. What shall people think now ?
> I read scientific papers, scientific analyses, and case law
> in order to get at the truth. But very, very few people do.
still you claim repeatedly -and I agree- that it’s just
this sort of analysis that makes your conclusions
superior to those of your opponents.
—————————–
the effect of this language – to my experience –
often is, that those people quit and no longer post.
The same thing what you complain about : that they keep
ignoring your book. When they post here and
expect to be marked by you with these words,
their reputation suffers, so why should they post
here in the first place ? Would you go to
the Mark Gillar show again, when you expect they’d
shout you down and ridicule you in the same way
as they did the first time ? And that you won’t be able
to immediately find the proper replies or can’t
come through with them
—————————–
I’d like people to cooperate and commonly
advance to the consensus truth and admit
when they were wrong
counterexample: your book would be without merit in a Court decision
about murder in Kongo.
No, my book, while true, would be completely irrelevant to a Court decision about murder in the Congo.
There’s an enormous difference between whether something is not relevant to a particular topic, and whether it is composed of invalid arguments, the cherry-picking of evidence, and statements that are flat-out known and demonstrable to be untrue.
I’d like people to cooperate and commonly advance to the consensus truth and admit when they were wrong
Then you are going to be deeply disappointed in your dealings with birthers, because you will find that the few remaining birther advocates will NOT adhere to that behavior.
A few of them may be so deluded in their own minds as to be incapable of accepting reality. Some of the others, I am convinced, are completely aware that what they are saying to the public is absolutely untrue. But they don’t care anything about the truth. It’s not about coming to a correct conclusion. It is about the presentation of propaganda to the public, building a following, and getting personal gain from those they deceive.
Exhibit A: The Birthers four years ago saying “If he just shows his Birth Certificate, this will all be over!”
JW, irrelevant is not nonsense
improve the birthers (and others) , there is still hope …
TB, they showed it in a bad way, they didn’t explain
the used software, only one reporter was allowed to see it,
the Hawaii-copying process was not filmed, etc.
improve the birthers (and others) , there is still hope …
There are some people for whom there is no “hope.” I’ve long ago given up trying to convince people like “Rambo Ike.” Such people will believe what they want to believe, or at least claim what they want to claim.
But in regard to “others,” yes, there is plenty of hope.
Every single day there are people who visit this blog, who have heard something and don’t know exactly what to think. They come here and read, and they vanish silently without ever leaving a comment. And many of them read the articles, and the discussions, and they compare what they have read elsewhere, and they come to understand that both the forgery theories and the two-citizen-parents claim are — as one newspaper editor out in California put it — “a scam on conservatives.”
So the blog has served and is serving its purpose: To make the actual truth available to the public.
Very soon I will be wrapping up this blog with a final article, and I will move on to other things. But the blog will continue to serve its purpose. And by participating in the discussion here, you’ve helped to build the blog, so you’ve helped to shed light on the subject. So thanks for that. 😉
Utter and complete garbage. You are thinking of McCain’s BC, where only one reporter was allowed to see it, and it wasn’t certified by any authority whatsoever. Same with Romney’s; all we have is a .pdf which is so rife with problems (if one were of a Birfer mindset) that it could be termed worthless.
There are certified, signed original State-issued paper copies of BHO’s BC with raised seals. Many people have seen them and felt the seals. All your hogwash about someone having to see the “original” and view the “copying process” is utter malarky: not the way we do things in America. We follow the LAW… that’s why no judge… conservative, liberal, white, black, hispanic, young, old, whatever… has ever sided with the Birfers: BECAUSE IT’S ALL BUNK.
It’s illegal for unofficial personnel to be allowed access to vault records, for obvious reasons. If you allowed Orly into the vault she’d try to burn the original to ashes so she could claim there isn’t one.
The State of Hawaii has sent certified verification to a federal court judge in Mississippi. Checkmate. Nothing more will be done about further documentation; that dog won’t hunt. There is now officially more proof of Obama’s origins than any President, living or dead, has ever provided.
And still some people want more. Unbelievable. If there was super8 film of the birth, you’d claim it was faked. If the delivering Doctor was alive, you’d call him a liar. If you saw closed-circuit video of Fukino opening the book and showing the original on file, you’d claim it was an elaborate ruse by Hawaii, as part of the “cover-up.”
You people ain’t right.
Here is a link to a list, FYI, of all the documentary data on BHO:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/96756764/Barack-Obama-Was-Born-in-Hawaii
So, basically, listen up: either accept that BHO was born in Hawaii (you don’t have to like him to do that, by the way… just ask John!), or take a long walk off a short pier.
I. Woodman: “Apuzzo: ‘But Tucker never adopted Nicholas’ opinion stated in the long Nicholas quote.’ Response: So you claim, but the actual evidence — in the form of Tucker’s clear words — says directly otherwise.”
Apuzzo: You are taking the Nicholas reference to citizenship out of context. Tucker does not discuss at all Nicholas’ view on citizenship before the constitution was adopted after he provides his long quote which had to do with matters not involving citizenship before the Constitution was adopted. “Natural born citizen” status was not the reason Tucker quoted Nicholas. The thrust of Tucker’s discussion after quoting Nicholas has nothing to do with citizenship before the Constitution was adopted. He quoted him only for the purpose of discussing what powers the states still had in the area of naturalization after the Constitution was adopted. Nicholas said the states could still make denizens (which would only have a local status within the states) and prescribe qualifications for state offices. Tucker said states could decide matters regarding titles to lands located within their territory and qualifications for local office and that any state laws touching such subject were not abrogated by federal naturalization statutes. Your attempt to thrust upon Tucker what Nicholas said about citizenship before the Constitution was adopted, without evidence from any source, including the very Tucker’s Commentaries, is recklessness at best and fraud at worst.
“If there remains any honest reader on the internet who still entertains the slightest doubt about what an absolute, dishonest, bald-faced liar you are, this one action on your part is quite sufficient to remove those doubts. It says that there is no sentence you won’t twist, no depth of lying or deception you won’t go to, in order to attempt to ‘prove’ your claims. It brands you as a man who can never be trusted in anything he says, because he has shown his willingness to cast about for whatever remotely plausible lie he can tell, even when he has been caught clearly and indisputably with the truth solidly against him.”—John Woodman.
How ironic how your own words so aptly apply to you.
II. Woodman: “Vattel never said any such thing, and you know it. Vattel used the words, “les naturels, ou indigenes,” and “indigenes” was never even translated as “natural born citizens” until 10 years after the Constitution was written; and when it was translated, the translation was done by some anonymous English guy in London.
And as has been demonstrated, NOT ONE SINGLE TIME — as far as you, I or anybody else can tell — did ANY writer on the ‘Law of Nations’ EVER use the phrase ‘natural born citizen.’ Not once.”
Apuzzo: The Founding generation knew that “les naturels, ou indigenes” meant “natural born Citizen.” Here is some strong historical evidence of this. The French phrase, “sujects naturels,” was used in a 1781 trade treaty between the United States and France. The French word “naturels” was translated into English as “natural born.” Here are the treaty provisions showing this understanding: The French: “ARTICLE III Les consuls et vice consuls respectifs ne pourront être pris que parmi les sujets naturels de la puissance qui les nommera[]” was translated into English thus: “The respective Consuls and Vice Consuls shall only be taken from among the natural born subjects of the power nominating them.” Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, Friday, July 27, 1781, accessed at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hlaw:@field(DOCID+@lit(jc0216)) . So, “naturels” was understood to mean “natural born.” This shows that when members of the founding generation, many of whom were fluent in French, read Vattel’s French term “naturels,” they translated the clause into “natural born.” Thus the later translation of Vattel’s treatise better reflected what the founders would have understood, by keeping “natives” and removing “indigenes” and inserting in the place of “indigenes” “natural-born citizens.” The 1795 English translation of Vattel uses the clause “natural born citizen” in place of “indigenes” and likewise U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts in subsequent decisions translated the word “indigenes” to “natural born citizens.” See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857) (J. Daniels concurring); Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 167-68 (1875); Ex parte Reynolds, 20 F.Cas. 582, 5 Dill. 394, No. 11,719 (C.C.W.D.Ark 1879); United States v. Ward, 42 F.320 (C.C.S.D.Cal. 1890); U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 708 (1898). This also shows that “naturels” meant the same thing as “indigenes.” Hence, if “naturels” meant “natural born,” “indigenes” also meant “natural born.”
In The Venus, 12 U.S. (8 Cranch) 253, 289 (1814), Chief Justice John Marshall, concurring and dissenting for other reasons, cited Vattel and provided his definition of “natural-born citizens” and said:
“Vattel, who, though not very full to this point, is more explicit and more satisfactory on it than any other whose work has fallen into my hands, says “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 indigenes are those born in the country of parents who are citizens. Society not being able to subsist and to perpetuate itself but by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights.”
So when Chief Justice John Marshall said “natives or indigenes,” it was the same as though he said “natives or natural-born citizens.”
III. Woodman: “Furthermore, ‘born in the country’ ALWAYS made a person ‘native born.’ So Tucker here stated his opinion — and stated it clearly — that birth in the country met the Constitution’s requirements for Presidential eligibility.”
Apuzzo: Your use of words which took on different meanings well after the Founding to try to win the argument does not help you. Tucker said:
“That provision in the constitution which requires that the president shall be a “native-born citizen (unless he were a citizen of the United States when the constitution was adopted) is a happy means of security against foreign influence, which, wherever it is capable of being exerted, is to be dreaded more than the plague.”
Clearly, Tucker equated a “native-born citizen” to a “natural born Citizen,” for the latter clause is the exact clause used by Article II, Section 1, Clause 5. No where did Tucker define a “native-born citizen” as one merely “born in the country.” On the contrary, Tucker said: “These civil rights [which included the right to be elected president] may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.” Clearly, Tucker included the constituent element of being born to “citizen” parents for anyone wanting to inherit the “civil right” to be elected president (so as not to be a naturalized “citizen” who Tucker said was forever barred from being eligible to be president) which meant to be a “natural born Citizen.” Furthermore, Tucker’s concern was “foreign influence,” which was to be avoided “more than the plague.” Mere birth in the country to aliens produced dual and conflicting allegiance to the United States, for such children by jus sanguinis were born subject to foreign powers. Hence, mere birth in the country was no effective way to avoid the scourge of “foreign influence.” Finally, that later in U.S. history the word “native-born” came to mean mere birth in the United States does not mean that the Founders and Framers used that term in such a manner. On the contrary, under the law of nations which is what the Founders and Framers would have relied upon, “native” meant the same thing as “natural-born citizen.” See Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, Section 212 (London 1797) (1st ed. Neuchatel 1758) (“The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens”).
Even our United States Supreme Court in 1830, per Justice Story, clearly established that merely being “born in a country” did not equate to being a “natural born Citizen.” Rather, the Court also required “citizen” parents. In Shanks v. Dupont, Justice Story, writing for the Court in 1830, stated:
“Whether she was of age during this time does not appear. If she was, then her birth and residence might be deemed to constitute her by election a citizen of South Carolina. If she was not of age, then she might well be deemed under the circumstances of this case to hold the citizenship of her father; for children born in a country, continuing while under age in the family of the father, partake of his national character, as a citizen of that country.”
Shanks v. Dupont, 28 U.S. 242, 245 (1830). Also, note that Minor v. Happersett in 1875 (as confirmed by Wong Kim Ark) used the same exact phrase, “born in a country” and also required that the child be born to “citizen” parents in order to be a “natural-born citizen” (“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” Wong Kim Ark, at 167-68).
So, your argument that when Tucker said “native-born citizen” he meant to say that “born within a country” would be sufficient to establish that status is in error not only based on Tucker’s own words found within his Commentaries but also on based on subsequent case law of our own United States Supreme Court.
IV. Woodman: “Yes, in favor specifically OF INFANTS WHO WERE BORN OUTSIDE OF THE UNITED STATES. All infants born INSIDE the United States were ALREADY EXCLUDED BY TUCKER FROM THE DEFINITION OF ALIENS” (emphasis in the original).
Nowhere did Tucker say that children born in the United States to alien parents were “citizens of the United States” and not aliens. On the contrary, he gave us the Jefferson Virginia citizenship law of 1779 and explained the three cases of “infants” covered by that statute, telling us that the 1783 version of that law did away with the last two cases but maintained the first. He provided that “infants” fell into one of three categories. He gave no others. If an infant fell into any one of these three categories, the infant was a “citizen” of Virginia. The three examples that he gave, using Jefferson’s citizenship laws as a model, are:
1. CHILDREN BORN IN VIRGINIA: “ infants, ‘wheresoever born, whose father, if living, or otherwise, whose mother was a citizen at the time of the birth of such infants.’” “Wheresoever” has no limitation at to place. Hence, these “infants” included those who were born in Virginia to “citizen” parents.
2. CHILDREN BORN OUT OF VIRGINIA: (a) “ infants, ‘wheresoever born, whose father, if living, or otherwise, whose mother was a citizen at the time of the birth of such infants.’” “Wheresoever” has no limitation at to place. Hence, these “infants” included those who were born out of Virginia to “citizen” parents. Even though these “infants” were born out of Virginia, provided they were born to “citizen” parents, they were considered “citizens” of Virginia from the moment of birth; (b) “infants” . . . who migrated hither, their father, if living, or otherwise their mother becoming a citizen of the commonwealth.” This category included children born out of Virginia to alien parents, brought by their alien parents to Virginia, and their parents naturalizing. Upon such naturalization by their parents, the children themselves became “citizens” of Virginia after their birth; (c) “infants . . . who migrated hither without father or mother.” These included children born out of Virginia and brought to Virginia who did not have a mother or father. These children also become “citizens” of Virginia upon being found in Virginia without father or mother. We can imagine how the Revolutionary war left so many children without fathers and mothers. These children had to be given some citizenship status. These laws provided for them.
So, Tucker exhausted all possible ways that an “infant” could become a “citizen” of Virginia. He did not leave out as you contend the case of children born in Virginia because as you further contend by some unstated law (you suggest the English common law) they were automatically “citizens” of Virginia. It simply would not have made sense for him to do so, for he had to also cover those children. He did so cover them by including them within those “infants, wheresoever born.” And he also showed that Jefferson required that those children be born to “citizen” parents in order for them to be born “citizen” of ‘Virginia. Finally, if Tucker understood Jefferson’s law to be based on the jus soli of English common law, he would have explained that any “infant” born in Virginia, regardless of the citizenship of his or her parents, was a “citizen” of Virginia. He did not make any such statement because that was not the law of Virginia.
V. Woodman: “ALSO obtained the right to be citizens — along with ALL persons who were born on US soil.”
Apuzzo: No where in either the Virginia act or federal naturalization acts does it state that mere birth on U.S. soil is sufficient to make one a “Citizen of the United States.”
VI. Woodman: “Attempt to discredit your argument on Tucker? Your argument on Tucker is DEAD to any honest reader.”
Apuzzo: There you go again claiming victory without having earned it.
VII. Woodman: “Tucker clearly and unambiguously stated that the laws of Virginia and the United States were accordant with the principle he referenced in Blackstone, that the children born in the country, even of aliens, were natural born subjects. . . . It could hardly be more straightforward. The laws in the footnote are accordant with the statement the footnote references. . . . Your claim is nothing short of astonishing.”
Apuzzo: First, I provide two possible positions on the correct reading of Footnote 10. You attack my first position and do not address my second interpretation of Footnote 10, i.e. that Tucker simply said that the Naturalization Act of 1802 was “accordant” with the Naturalization Act of 1790 when it came to how children born in the United States were treated. My first argument is just as plausible as yours which attempts to link “accordant,” which follows the last citation in a string citation (the Naturalization Act of 1802. accordant”) to the text to which the footnote relates (which discusses Blackstone’s jus soli English common law), thereby not considering whether the writer is simply saying that the last cited source (the Naturalization Act of 1802) is “accordant” with the immediately preceding cited source (the Naturalization Act of 1790) rather than that all the citations included in the footnote (the Virginia citizenship law of 1783, the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the Naturalization Act of 1802) are in “accordant” with the text to which the footnote refers (Blackstone’s jus soli English common law rule). You “accordant” in Footnote 10 goes jumping backwards over obstacles, but yet for you it is perfectly reasonable.
Second, your interpretation of Footnote 10 simply is not supported by what Tucker actually explains regarding U.S. law in other parts of his treatise. Your reading of Footnote 10 simply cannot be reconciled with this quote from Tucker: “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.” Blackstone’s jus soli simply did not require “citizen” parents to make a “natural born subject.” But Tucker in his quote and on his discussion of naturalization told us that a child could only inherit the civil right to be elected president if he/she were born to “citizen” parents. This was a “natural born citizen” or what he calls “a state of perfect citizenship, under the constitution and laws of the union.” Such an expression hardly describes a “natural born subject” under English common law whose jus soli citizenship children born on English soil with allegiance to the King while their alien parents had allegiance to another King or nation. Hence, the English common law ladened a child with conflicting allegiances and citizenships.
Third, your interpretation of Footnote 10 is also no supported by subsequent rulings of our U.S. Supreme Court. All decision of our Supreme Court that touched upon the subject of the status of children born in the United States said that children born in the United States to “citizen” parents were “natural born citizen.” See Inglis v. Sailors’ Snug Harbor, 28 U.S. 99 (1830) and Shanks v. Dupont, 28 U.S. 242, 245 (1830). It was again confirmed by Justice Daniels in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). It was again expressly confirmed by the whole U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875), U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 708 (1898), and the lower federal courst in Ex parte Reynolds, 20 F.Cas. 582, 5 Dill. 394, No. 11,719 (C.C.W.D.Ark 1879) and United States v. Ward, 42 F.320 (C.C.S.D.Cal. 1890). Finally, it was implicitly confirmed by Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872), Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884), Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325 (1939) and Schneider v. Rusk, 377 U.S. 163 (1964). On the contrary, any case where the children were born in the United States to alien parents presented doubts. In Minor, the Court said: “Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their 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. It is sufficient, for everything we have now to consider, that all children, born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction, are themselves citizens. Id. 167-68. And then in Wong Kim Ark, the Court stated: “In McCreery v. Somerville (1824) 9 Wheat. 354, which concerned the title to land in the state of Maryland, it was assumed that children born in that state of an alien who was still living, and who had not been naturalized, were ‘native-born citizens of the [169 U.S. 649, 662] United States’; and without such assumption the case would not have presented the question decided by the court, which, as stated by Mr. Justice Story in delivering the opinion, was ‘whether the statute applies to the case of a living alien ancestor, so as to create a title by heirship, where none would exist by the common law, if the ancestor were a natural-born subject.’ Id. 356.” If the Naturalization Act of 1802, which on the subject of the status of children born in the United States, was an extension of the Naturalization Act of 1790 and 1795, provided, as you contend Tucker confirmed, that “born in the country” meant “native-born citizen,” Minor in 1875 would not have said that “there have been doubts” whether children born in the United States to alien parents were even “citizens.” After all, Minor should have simply pointed to the naturalization act of 1855 and said that anyone “born within a country” was a “citizen of the United States.” If such a statute existed, Minor did not have to leave any question open regarding whether a child “born within a country” to alien parents was even a “citizen.” And both McCreery and Wong Kim Ark would not have had to just “assume” that a child born in the United States to alien parents was a “native-born citizen.” Wong would not have needed to go through so many pages of old English common law to make Wong a “citizen” when it could have simply pointed to the naturalization acts which you say clearly established that a child “born within a country” to alien parents was a “citizen of the United States.” In fact, Wong did not rely on any congressional acts for its decision, but rather used the English common law to do so. The United States also would not have argued in Wong Kim Ark, with both Chief Justice Fuller and Justice Harlan in agreement, that Wong, “born within a country” but to alien parents was an alien.
Fourth, it makes little sense that Tucker would have said through a cryptic footnote that the national law of the United States on national citizenship was in agreement with the English common law. Such a topic is very complex and Tucker would never have treated such a complex matter by way of an ambiguous short footnote which provides no explanation. What Tucker meant through Footnote 10 is contained in my argument “b,” meaning the last cited source (the Naturalization Act of 1802) is “accordant” with the previously cited source (the Naturalization Act of 1790). In fact, both the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the Naturalization Act of 1802 both said that one born in the United States to alien parents was an alien. So those two statutes were not only “accordant” with each other, but also in agreement with what Tucker actually wrote in his treatise, e.g., “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.” This is the only reasonable explanation given that Tucker did not explain anything in this footnote.
VIII. Woodman: “Apuzzo: ‘Tucker… relies on Locke to show that William Blackstone was wrong in saying that a person could not expatriate.’ Response: So? Has absolutely nothing to do with whether a person born on the soil was a natural born citizen to start with.”
Apuzzo: So you want us to believe that the Founders and Framers rejected the English common law when it came to how one may terminate his or her citizens (by expatriation) but accepted it when it came to how one obtains that citizenship in the first place.
IX. Woodman: “Apuzzo: ‘You have to date not been able to explain what Tucker meant by this statement. Please explain what Tucker meant by: ‘These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.’ Response: I already explained it. The statement is true enough, but makes no reference to those born on US soil of non-citizen parents. Your saying I haven’t explained it doesn’t make it so.”
Apuzzo: But a simple reading of the quote shows that Tucker does tell us how to treat children born on United States soil to non-citizen parents. Tucker said that in order to inherit the “civil right,” which included the right to be elected President, one had to be born to “citizen” parents. He did not state that the requirement of “citizen” parents depended upon whether the child was born in or out of the United States. He just simply required “citizen” parents to be able to inherit that “civil right.” He explained that if one did not “inherit” those “civil rights” by being born to “citizen” parents, but rather “acquired” them, then one was a naturalized “citizen” and forever barred from being eligible to be elected President. Hence, any child, “wheresoever” born (Thomas Jefferson), if not born to “citizen” parents, could not “inherit” the “civil right” to be elected President. And this surely excluded from inheriting that “civil right” to be elected President any child who was born in the United States to alien parents. So your point has no merit.
X. Goodman: “Apuzzo: ‘But then the James Madison Administration ruled that the Naturalization Act of 1802 filled the void by providing retroactively that any such child would be made a ‘citizen of the United States’ under that federal statute. They then ruled that McClure was a naturalized “Citizen of the United States” under the Naturalization Act of 1802.’ Response: Again, another bald-faced lie. They ruled no such thing. You can produce no “ruling” that says that, because they never issued any such ruling. They stated that McClure was a citizen of the United States, and produced as proof of that evidence of where he was born.”
Apuzzo: Publius published an article in The Alexandria Herald on October 7, 1811. In that article he states that James McClure was born in the United States on April 21, 1785. His father was a British subject at the time of his birth. On February 20, 1786, his father naturalized to be a citizen under the laws of South Carolina. McClure remained in the United States until 1795 when he was sent to England for his education. He never returned to the United States. His father also returned to his country, Great Britain.
You state that the early naturalization acts did not apply to children born in the United States because they were “natural born Citizens” under “common law” which borrowed from the English common law definition of a “natural born subject.” But we can see from the McClure case that you are mistaken. Again McClure was born in South Carolina after the revolution. But Publius stated that the Naturalization Act of 1802 applied to him and made him a naturalized “citizen of the United States.”
Publius stated that McClure’s case fell within the Naturalization Act of 1802. He then quoted the statute. He also added:
“Mr. Rodman hints, that it would have been sufficient for James McClure to have been born in the United States—he is mistaken. The law of the United States recognizes no such claim. The law of Virginia, of 1792, does—for, “all free persons born within the territory of this commonwealth,” is deemed a citizen. The law of Virginia considers him as a son of the soil. An alien, as well as a citizen, may beget a citizen, but the U. States’ act does not go so far. A man must be naturalized to make his children such.”
If children born in the United States were not covered by this naturalization act because they were already “citizen” under the “common law,” why would Publius say that McClure’s citizenship fell within the act and that the act even made him a naturalized citizen? Publius even said that in the United States, birth in the country was insufficient to make anyone a “citizen.” He said that a child needed to be born to “citizen” parents in order to be a “citizen.” Given these comments by Publius in 1811, there was no such “common law” rule based on the English common law prevailing in the United States after July 4, 1776. Hence, Publius had to resort to the 1802 act for resolution of the question of whether McClure was a “Citizen of the United States.”
Furthermore, we learn from then Secretary of State James Monroe’s letter of November 27, 1811 to Joel Barlow, Esq., that U.S. Supreme Court Justice, William Johnson, found that, based on “several affidavits and Certificates” and “agreeable to the laws and usage of the United States,” James McClure was a “Citizen of the United States.” Under the 1802 Act, the clerk of the court granted each applicant a “certificate” that could be exhibited to the court as evidence of time of arrival in the United States. Hence, one of the “Certificates” given to Justice Johnson would have been the “certificate” that McClure’s father obtained when he naturalized.
Notice that Justice Johnson also used the exact language that is contained in Article I and II, i.e., “Citizen of the United States.” Even though McClure was born after July 4, 1776 in the United States, Justice Johnson did not say he was a “natural born Citizen.” If the United States after the Revolution had adopted the English common law jus soli rule of citizenship as Justice Gray said it had in Wong Kim Ark, Justice Johnson would have ruled that McClure, born in the United States after July 4, 1776, was a “natural born Citizen” (a “citizen” “natural born”) and not just a “Citizen of the United States” (a “citizen” naturalized). But Justice Johnson only said he was a “Citizen of the United States.”
We also know from a legal opinion that Justice Johnson wrote in 1830 in a case while sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court that he would not have ruled 19 years earlier that McClure was a “Citizen of the United States” simply because he was born in the United States. In Shanks v. Dupont, 28 U.S. 242 (1830), the Court through Justice Story, reversing both state courts of the State of South Carolina which found Ann Shanks to be a citizen of South Carolina, ruled that Ann Shanks was born in South Carolina before the revolution a British subject, also became a “citizen” of South Carolina upon the Declaration of Independence, but then later adhered to the British which ultimately made her a British subject. Justice Johnson, dissenting, ruled that Ann Shanks, was born before the revolution in South Carolina to native born parents. He ruled, based on principles of the law of nations and the “common law” of the State of South Carolina, that, being born into a community whose allegiance was by the Declaration of Independence transferred to the free and independent states, was a “citizen” of South Carolina and that she was not able to throw off that allegiance and citizenship and to elect to become a British subject. Justice Johnson gave great deference to South Carolina to decide for itself questions of alienage and inheritance of real property. He said:
“By an act of the state passed in 1712, the common law of Great Britain was incorporated into the jurisprudence of South Carolina. In the year 1782, when this descent was cast, it was the law of the land, and it becomes imperative upon these appellants after admitting that their parent was a native born citizen of South Carolina, daughter of a native born citizen of South Carolina, to show on what ground they can escape from the operation of these leading maxims of common law. Nemo potest exuere patriam — and proles sequitur sortem paternam.”
Id. at 252. Justice Johnson did not prescribe to an absolute denial of the right of expatriation. Rather, he looked to the law of nations and to the “writers on public law” (which undoubtedly included Vattel) for guidance on the matter. He explained that the law of nations left it up to each individual nation to decide by its own positive law under what circumstances it would grant to an individual the right of expatriation. He ruled that South Carolina had adopted the English common law with rules of allegiance which provided for the indelibility of allegiance (meaning natural allegiance was unalienable). He said that South Carolina had not by any statute altered that rule. He also considered whether Acts of Congress passed in 1790 and thereafter abrogated the South Carolina rule. Given that those acts did not make any express statement on the subject, he was not willing to declare that those acts by “inference” abrogated the law of South Carolina. But what is important in Justice Johnson’s discussion on the right of expatriation is how he shows what the basis of citizenship in the new nation was in the first instance. The ideas that he presents on why a person should not have an absolute right to throw of his or her allegiance comes directly out of Vattel, Section 220-33, where Vattel explains how the right to expatriation should be qualified depending on the needs of both the individual and the nation. Here is what Vattel said:
“The children are bound by natural ties to the society in which they were born: they are under an obligation to shew themselves grateful for the protection it has afforded to their fathers, and are in a great measure indebted to it for their birth and education. They ought therefore to love it, as we have already shewn (§122),—to express a just gratitude to it, and requite its services as far as possible by serving it in turn.We have observed above (§212), that they have a right to enter [104] into the society of which their fathers were members. But every man is born free; and the son of a citizen, when come to the years of discretion, may examine whether it be convenient for him to join the society for which he was destined by his birth. If he does not find it advantageous to remain in it, he is at liberty to quit it on making it a compensation for what it has done in his favour,* and preserving, as far as his new engagements will allow him, the sentiments of love and gratitude he owes it. A man’s obligations to his natural country may, however, change, lessen, or entirely vanish, according as he shall have quitted it lawfully, and with good reason, in order to choose another, or has been banished from it deservedly or unjustly, in due form of law, or by violence.
2. As soon as the son of a citizen attains the age of manhood, and
acts as a citizen, he tacitly assumes that character. . . . ”
Vattel, Section 220. And here is what Justice Johnson said:
“Nor have we anything to complain of in this view of the subject. It is a popular and flattering theory that the only legitimate origin of government is in compact and the exercise of individual will. That this is not practically true is obvious from history, for, excepting the State of Massachusetts and the United States, there is not perhaps on record an instance of a government purely originating in compact. And even here probably not more than one third of those subjected to the government had a voice in the contract. Women, and children under an age arbitrarily assumed are necessarily excluded from the right of assent and yet arbitrarily subjected. If the moral government of our maker and our parents is to be deduced from gratuitous benefits bestowed on us, why may not the government that has shielded our infancy claim from us a debt of gratitude to be repaid after manhood? In the course of nature, man has need [28 U. S. 263] of protection and improvement long before he is able to reciprocate these benefits. These are purchased by the submission and services of our parents; why then should not those to whom we must be indebted for advantages so indispensable to the development of our powers, be permitted, to a certain extent, to bind us apprentice to the community from which they have been and are to be procured?
If it be answered that this power ought not to be extended unreasonably or beyond the period when we are capable of acting for ourselves, the answer is obvious — by what rule is the limit to be prescribed unless by positive municipal regulation?”
Id. at 262-63.
Note how Justice Johnson emphasized the “moral government of our maker and our parents” and that children inherit their right to protection and advantages due them them from the society in which they are born based on the submission and services that the children’s parents gave to that society. He stated that infants during their years of minority are not capable of giving consent as to what allegiance or citizenship to choose. He also stated that their condition follows that of their “parents” and that children are indebted to the society to which they parents belonged and from which they gained benefits and protection which also benefited the children. He explained that it is a child’s parents’ “submission and services” to the society which earned for the child the society’s “protection and improvement.” He added that children upon reaching the age of majority should repay their parents’ society in which they were born and from which they received protection and benefits during their years of minority. These are ideas that come directly out of Vattel at Sections 220-33.
Here we see that Justice Johnson under the circumstances existing in South Carolina not only accepted indelibility of allegiance (“Nemo potest exuere patriam”—“no man can renounce his own country.” Black’s Law Dictionary 936 (5th ed. 1979)) but also the maxim that the children follow the condition of their fathers (“proles sequitur sortem paternam”—“the offspring follows the condition of the father.” Black’s Law Dictionary 1091 (5th ed. 1979)). So, having adopted the maxim that children followed the condition of their fathers, there is no way that Justice Johnson would have ruled that a child born in the United States to alien parents, was a “natural born Citizen” or even a “Citizen of the United States” from birth. So, having adopted this maxim that children followed the condition of their parents, there is no way that Justice Johnson would have ruled that James McClure, born in South Carolina to alien parents, was a “natural born Citizen” or even a “Citizen of the United States” from birth. Rather, in keeping with his position expressed in Shanks, he would have found that McClure at birth was a British subject because he was born to a British subject father. Then when his father naturalized, McClure the son would have followed his father’s condition and Justice Johnson would have declared him a “Citizen of the United States” (he did not say “natural born Citizen”). And this is exactly what he did for James McClure.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, in 1791 said: “In this view, a citizen of Pennsylvania is he, who has resided in the state two years; and, within that time, has paid a state or county tax: or he is between the ages of twenty one and twenty two years, and the son of a citizen.” Note the reference to Vattel’s “the son of a citizen.”
James Monroe in his letter of November 27, 1811 also said that it was “Mr. Cheves the Representative in Congress from the City of Charleston” who handed to him the “affidavits and certificates,” which included the “Certificate” of Justice Johnson. So it appears that Representative Cheves also got involved in the matter and supported finding James McClure a “Citizen of the United States.” Let us see if there is any information on Representative Cheves which can lead us to concluded whether he would have found McClure to be a “natural born Citizen” (natural born) or a “Citizen of the United States (naturalized).
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Langdon Cheves, in February of 1814, made the following speech:
“The children have a natural attachment to the society in which they are born: being obliged to acknowledge the protection it has granted to their fathers, they are obliged to it in a great measure for their birth and education. … We have just observed that they have a right to enter into the society of which their fathers were members. But every man born free, the son of a citizen, arrived at years of discretion, may examine whether it be convenient for him to join in the society for which he was destined by his birth.”
Speech of Rep. Langdon Cheves, in the House of Representative in 1814, reported in The Historical Register of the United States, Vol 3, Part 1, Sec. 7, p. 174 (Philadelphia 1814), accessed at http://books.google.com/books?id=6qC1NICFYR0C&pg=PA174&dq=%22children+have+a+natural+attachment%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=cvtoT-PyEuiB0QHiscmLCQ&sqi=2&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=children%20have%20a%20natural%20attachment&f=false. (citing and quoting Vattel, Book 1, Chapter 19, Sec. 220).
Also in Cheves, note the reference to Vattel’s “the son of a citizen.” It can be readily seen that Cheves borrowed his ideas from Vattel, The Law of Nations. This was the Speaker of the House who adopted Vattel’s definition of citizenship and not that of England’s common law.
This shows that there was prevailing in the United States after the Revolution no English common law jus soli rule. Rather, Congress had put in place naturalization acts which abrogated that English common law. These naturalization acts followed American “common law” that developed from the law of nations which put forth the jus sanguinis rule of citizenship. Indeed, we can see from the writing of these persons who were intimately connected to the Founding that the citizenship of children followed that of the parents and that they could under proper circumstances throw that allegiance and citizenship off upon reaching the age of majority. And under these congressional acts, a children born in the United States to alien parents were themselves born aliens.
All this historical evidence sufficiently proves that my reading of St. George Tucker and analysis of the James McClure citizenship case is correct and yours incorrect.
Oh, good grief. You think that by sheer force of words, and length of reply, and volume of nonsense, you can overcome the truth.
I’ll address the first of your points now. Hopefully I’ll have time to address the rest later.
I ) Unlike you — I will grant the point that Tucker, when he gives the quote by Nicholas, does so for the purpose of discussing how much of the power of naturalization the States still have. Therefore, the quote about natural born citizenship was not essential to that conversation.
I’ll go even further than that: For Tucker’s purposes, the quote was really not required at all. He could have dropped it off entirely, and still conducted his discussion of the States’ power of naturalization.
Here’s the part of the quote from Nicholas that he could easily have dropped:
Prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people inhabiting the different states might be divided into two classes: natural born citizens, or those born within the state, and aliens, or such as were born out of it. The first, by their birth-right, became entitled to all the privileges of citizens; the second, were entitled to none, but such as were held out and given by the laws of the respective states prior to their emigration.
So now the question: If he didn’t really need to include that part of the quote, then why did he?
More to the point: If Tucker in any way disagreed with what Nicholas said about natural born citizenship, then why did he include Nicholas’ quote on it, when he didn’t even need to?
The very fact that Tucker included that portion of the quote — without any further comment, or any statement of disagreement — when he did not need to in order to make his points — is evidence in itself that Tucker agreed with what Nicholas (whom he complimented as being “a very respectable political writer”) was saying.
You said:
Your attempt to thrust upon Tucker what Nicholas said about citizenship before the Constitution was adopted, without evidence from any source, including the very Tucker’s Commentaries, is recklessness at best and fraud at worst.
You vastly overstate your case. Tucker quoted Nicholas, approvingly, and without any evidence to the contrary it can only be reasonably assumed that Tucker’s approval applied to the entire quote that he was quoting. The very fact which you noted — that the quote in question was nonessential to Tucker’s point — is in itself evidence that Tucker was in agreement with that portion of the quote. If he hadn’t been, he would quite simply have deleted that part of the quote and begun with, “In the states of Kentucky and Virginia, the privileges of alien friends…”
You said:
“If there remains any honest reader on the internet who still entertains the slightest doubt about what an absolute, dishonest, bald-faced liar you are, this one action on your part is quite sufficient to remove those doubts. It says that there is no sentence you won’t twist, no depth of lying or deception you won’t go to, in order to attempt to ‘prove’ your claims. It brands you as a man who can never be trusted in anything he says, because he has shown his willingness to cast about for whatever remotely plausible lie he can tell, even when he has been caught clearly and indisputably with the truth solidly against him.”—John Woodman.
How ironic how your own words so aptly apply to you.
You thereby attempt to dodge my observation, and to claim that my observation instead applies to me.
You are like the thief who, when caught, claims that the policeman is the real culprit.
Let’s review that observation, shall we?
First, you asserted that Tucker was merely saying that the laws of Virginia and the laws of the United States were in agreement with each other.
Such a claim is ridiculous on its face. Tucker was making a comment in reference to the specific passage in Blackstone. He was making a comment on the passage where Blackstone said that the child born in England, even of aliens, was a natural born subject. And Tucker FOOTNOTED THAT SPECIFIC STATEMENT, and said that the major citizenship laws of both Virginia and the United States were in agreement.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand what Tucker meant. It doesn’t even take a 6th-grader. It is plain English, and it is quite clear.
But YOU claim — FIRST — that Tucker meant that the laws of Virginia and the laws of the United States were in agreement with each other.
If that was what Tucker was saying, why attach the statement to that specific passage of Blackstone at all?
Your extreme attempt to word-twist and deny the crystal clear meaning of Tucker’s footnote is further demolished by the practice throughout the book, where Tucker frequently notes where US law is “accordant,” or in agreement, with the English law.
And in a number of those passages, his footnote simply lists ONE SINGLE United States law.
It is just astonishing what degree of word-twisting you stoop to — on your first attempt to deny the meaning of Tucker’s clear footnote.
So, of course, the utter idiocy of that claim was pointed out. Embarrassed on that, you then attempted a SECOND dodge of the footnote’s clear meaning, claiming that the footnote refers NOT to the sentence it footnotes — but to the sentence AFTER the one that it footnotes!!!
Such a claim is obviously just as idiotic and word twisting as your first one. And of course, it is easily refuted not only by the obvious fact that it is ridiculous — footnotes reference the sentence they are actually attached to, not some other sentence — but by the usage in every other footnote in Tucker’s work.
That was the context for my previous statement. And the statement stands:
If there remains any honest reader on the internet who still entertains the slightest doubt about what an absolute, dishonest, bald-faced liar you are, this one action on your part is quite sufficient to remove those doubts.
It says that there is no sentence you won’t twist, no depth of lying or deception you won’t go to, in order to attempt to “prove” your claims. It brands you as a man who can never be trusted in anything he says, because he has shown his willingness to cast about for whatever remotely plausible lie he can tell, even when he has been caught clearly and indisputably with the truth solidly against him.
John Woodman,
1. You said: “Unlike you — I will grant the point that Tucker, when he gives the quote by Nicholas, does so for the purpose of discussing how much of the power of naturalization the States still have. Therefore, the quote about natural born citizenship was not essential to that conversation.”
Even though you concede that the whole purpose of Tucker’s quoting Nicholas was not about citizenship before the adoption of the Constitution, you go on and say that the little he did quote about that citizenship must be important because he could have left it out. First, you fail to understand that since it what he quoted about that citizenship was so little and inconsequential, Tucker did not tell us anything about whether he agreed or disagreed with what Nicholas said and why. Second, you have always argued that Minor’s citizenship discussion was not necessary. So applying your new found standard, we can all agree that what Minor said about citizenship is really important because it did not have to say it. Or are you now going to tell me that your test for importance only applies to Tucker’s quote of Nicholas but not to Minor?
2. You said that I said: “First, you asserted that Tucker was merely saying that the laws of Virginia and the laws of the United States were in agreement with each other.”
That is not what I said. I said that one possible reading of Footnote 10 is that Tucker said that the Naturalization Act of 1802 (“L.U.S. 1 Cong. c. 3”) was “accordant” with the Naturalization Act of 1790 (“7 Cong. c. 28”).
If Tucker, after commenting on Blackstone followed with a footnote which said: “Accordant 10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28,” rather than “10. L. V. Edi. 1794, c. 110. L. U. S. 1 Cong. c. 3. 7 Cong. c. 28. accordant,” than your argument would have more plausibility. But Tucker put “accordant” at the end of his string citation which suggest that “accordant” only refered to the most immediate preceding source which is the Naturalization Act of 1790.
Furthermore, I find it very hard to believe that in one fell swoop, without any explanation, Tucker in a cryptic footnote would have said that the Virginia citizenship law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the Naturalization Act of 1802 were all in agreement with the English common law jus soli rule of citizenship. The comparison is simply to complex to deal with it in such a fashion. In any event, your interpretation cannot be reconciled with what Tucker wrote about citizenship (“These civil rights [which included the right to be elected president] may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens”) and even with Minor v. Happersett which said: “Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their 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. It is sufficient, for everything we have now to consider, that all children, born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction, are themselves citizens. Id. 167-68.
You said that I said: “First, you asserted that Tucker was merely saying that the laws of Virginia and the laws of the United States were in agreement with each other.”
That is not what I said. I said that one possible reading of Footnote 10 is that Tucker said that the Naturalization Act of 1802 (“L.U.S. 1 Cong. c. 3″) was “accordant” with the Naturalization Act of 1790 (“7 Cong. c. 28″).
Ha! Here are your exact words, quoted from above:
On the contrary, here is what Tucker really meant by his footnote 10. What is critical to understand here is that Tucker did not cite any American “common law” but rather statutes. This means that there was no American “common law” that was comparable to the jus soli English “common law.” If the American “common law” was the same as that of Great Britain like Wong Kim Ark said in 1898, Tucker would have cited and quoted that “common law” and explained that the United States had adopted the English common law rule of jus soli on the matter. But Tucker made no such statement. Rather, he cites to Jefferson’s and Congress’s statutes which on their face do not agree with the jus soli English “common law.” Tucker also tells us that the Act of 1802 was “accordant” (in agreement) with the Virginia 1783 citizenship statutes and Act of 1790.
Tucker tells us that the Virginia statute of 1783, which was basically the same as that of 1779, and the 1790 and 1802 Congressional Acts, were all in agreement.
And later…
Your trying to tell us that Tucker said that those laws were consistent with jus soli English common law means that those laws would have to address birth in the United States. [Not true, by the way.] You have painted yourself into a contradictory position from which you cannot escape. Second, “accordant” means that the Virginia and U.S. statutes were in agreement with each other, not that those laws were in agreement with the English common law.
Are you going to claim now that you didn’t write that? Did your pet monkey get loose and sit at your computer?
Furthermore, I find it very hard to believe that in one fell swoop, without any explanation, Tucker in a cryptic footnote would have said that the Virginia citizenship law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the Naturalization Act of 1802 were all in agreement with the English common law jus soli rule of citizenship. The comparison is simply to complex to deal with it in such a fashion.
All children born in a country, except for the children of foreign royalty, ambassadors and invading armies, are natural-born members of that country.
One sentence of less than 25 words. I fail to see what is so overwhelmingly complicated about that.
John Woodman,
1. This is what I said regarding specifically analyzing Footnote 10: “What Tucker meant through Footnote 10 is contained in my argument “b,” meaning the last cited source (the Naturalization Act of 1802) is “accordant” with the previously cited source (the Naturalization Act of 1790). In fact, both the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the Naturalization Act of 1802 both said that one born in the United States to alien parents was an alien. So those two statutes were not only “accordant” with each other, but also in agreement with what Tucker actually wrote in his treatise, e.g., “These civil rights may be inherited, or acquired, in the United States: they are acquired by a foreigner who is naturalized; they are inherited by all whose parents, at the time of their birth, were citizens.” This is the only reasonable explanation given that Tucker did not explain anything in this footnote.”
What’s the matter, did your pet monkey take your reading glasses?
2. You said: “All children born in a country, except for the children of foreign royalty, ambassadors and invading armies, are natural-born members of that country.” According to you, Tucker is supposed to ascribe to such a notion. This is your own creation. Tucker never made any such statement and never would have because, apart for the other falsities in the statement, he know, unlike you, that members of the U.S.A. are called “citizens.” You cannot provide any quote from Tucker in which he made any such statement or even anything close to any such position.
Mario Apuzzo, Esq. says: “You cannot provide any quote from Tucker in which he made any such statement or even anything close to any such position.”
ehancock says:
“Here is an example of how the phrase was used at the time, in 1803, shortly after the Constitution was written:
“Prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people inhabiting the different states might be divided into two classes: natural born citizens, or those born within the state, and aliens, or such as were born out of it. The first, by their birth-right, became entitled to all the privileges of citizens; the second, were entitled to none, but such as were held out and given by the laws of the respective states prior to their emigration. …St. George Tucker, BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES: WITH NOTES OF REFERENCE TO THE CONSTITUTION AND LAWS OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA. (1803)
As you can see, the meaning of the phrase referred only to the place of birth, not to the parents. Natural Born Citizens were “those born within the state.””
Seems to me that Tucker says that even prior to the constitution, and the phrase is quite clear. Now, what does ehancock win Mario?
Jim,
I hope you are joking. If you are not, you are quite a bit behind the learning curve. Ask John Woodman to help you.
You are quite a bit behind the learning curve, Jim. And I will help you.
ehancock wins BUPKIS!!!
That’s because in order to win the prize, you MUST submit only a genuine, Birther-Approved (TM) quote. Non-Birther-Approved (TM) quotes do not qualify.
Also, this offer is only good on American territory for entrants born in the US of two citizen parents. Employees of the Mario Apuzzo Law Firm, Vattelevision LLC, the Democratic National Congress, the Executive Branch of the US Government, liberal* universities, and persons previously identified as Obots not eligible. Void where illegal, inconvenient or prohibited by law.
* A liberal university is considered to be any university which would produce someone who would come up with such a quote.
And besides, Jim, you have stumbled into the rabbit-hole called Apuzzoland. There is one over-riding and all-important rule in Apuzzoland: Nothing means what it says unless it agrees with Mario.
If Mario says there have only been twenty-eight Presidents, not 44, in Apuzzoland it means that every single document that says there have been 44 have been using base 6, meaning there have really been 28. And you are an ignorant, backward poopy-head if you say otherwise.
If Mario says Rin Tin Tin was actually a pig, not a dog, every trainer, every director, every owner who worked with the dogs who played Rin Tin Tin were all liars. Why? One tabloid writer who penned a single article on Rinny in 1963 said, only once, after seeing the dog eat his dinner, “He was an absolute pig.” Proof positive in Apuzzoland!
The prize cannot be won in Apuzzoland. Who could have imagined otherwise? And the offer is not good in the real world, where John Woodman and the rest of us live.
Mr. Brown,
Facts, logic, and law are constraints in Apuzzoland. If anyone is so devoted to an outcome driven investigation that they must relinquish one or more of these three, you are right to warn them to keep away from Mr. Apuzzo’s influence. It is a question of bending reality to ones preconceived notions or of confronting and conforming your understanding with evidence if there is some mismatch.
I have found that far from depending on a jocular phrase as his evidence, he has collected a great and consistent body of facts and law that support his point. That he must have been fortunate in his initial understanding or evolved it to match his discoveries.
The prize is in finding in Mario Apuzzo Esq. another devoted to truth.
This.
Then why it is that every argument the Putz has made has been refuted definitively? Why does every Judge state his case is “without merit”?
Simple. Because Mario is a proven liar, a patisan hatchet-man… and because Judges can’t use the word “bullcrap.”
that’s not my understanding of law, that the history of a
lawyer’s arguments in previous cases plays any role in a new trial.
gs,
I think it divides up like this:
Then why it is that every argument the Putz has made has been refuted definitively?
Simple. Because Mario is a proven liar, a patisan hatchet-man…
[And] Why does every Judge state his case is “without merit”?
…because Judges can’t use the word “bullcrap.”
😉
I don’t know what it is. You consider it funny to use these
insulting words,general negative classifications ? It gives you
“sympathy” with your readers here ?
You can point out occasionally that/why you think he is
wrong so often but not again and again using ever new
word creations to describe it.
But you won’t do it in talkshows or books or scientific
papers, or in Court I assume (?).
Makes me doubt a bit your reputation to write such books
and do these analyses in an unbiased, scientific way.
No, I don’t think it’s funny at all that Mr. Apuzzo is deceiving people as to our Constitution, history and laws.
I’ve already given you more than a dozen known and verified examples of false claims made by Mr. Apuzzo. Why does he get a pass from you on that?
But you won’t do it in talkshows or books or scientific papers, or in Court I assume (?).
Oh — and by the way — I wouldn’t hesitate to appear on a national talk show, given the opportunity, and explain why the birther legal and historical claims are totally without any merit.
Nor would I hesitate to appear in a court of law and help destroy Mr. Apuzzo’s arguments on the subject. Heck, I would be willing to publicly stack my arguments up against Mr. Apuzzo’s before the United States Supreme Court. I would only need three resources: 1) the financing so that I wouldn’t have to do it at my own expense, 2) a law license, and 3) partnership with a good, solid, competent, experienced Real Attorney who would provide assistance and coverage for my total and absolute lack of any experience in a courtroom whatsoever.
John
If I didn’t know Mario Apuzzo, Esq* was an attorney I would have never guessed that he had ever appeared in court before his two appearances in New Jersey. They were both pathetic. He was unprepared for obvious questions from the judge(s) and his arguments were incoherent to the point of being childlike.
* Mario is very insistent that the title “Esq” be affixed to his name. I don’t wish to further demean this pathetic excuse for an attorney.
funny – your reaction, your choice of insulting,ridiculing words.
He gets no “pass” from he, but was not as much insulting as you,
AFAICS so let him post. I also heard him in the Gary Wilmott show –
no problem. Not that I agree with him, I have not much expertise in that area.
Frankly, I think my words have been reasonably conservative, given the magnitude and number of the enormous, demonstrably false claims that Mr. Apuzzo has presented to the public, and the apparent arrogance with which he has presented them.
Someone makes a claim that’s completely false and absurd. You call them on it, presenting clear, irrefutable, factual evidence that it’s false. They stare you in the face, proclaim that your evidence is worthless, that they are right after all, and that you are the one who is lying. They then “back that up” with the flimsiest, most transparent of excuses — which they proclaim as a hard and undeniable fact.
I’m not sure why you think such behavior is worthy of anything but contempt.
> Someone makes a claim that’s completely false and absurd.
> You call them on it, presenting clear, irrefutable evidence that it’s false.
> They stare you in the face, proclaim that your evidence is worthless,
> that they are right after all, and that you are a liar.
like Corsi,Denninger,Zebest ?
how long have you been doing internet discussions ?
you should be accustomed to it by now.
It also often appears differently to others than how you perceive
it when writing.
——-
not so easy for me to check the legal subleties of ancient US-constitution
You could start by reading the analysis of Presidential Eligibility published by the most neutral and readily-available source for such detailed analyses: The Congressional Research Service.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42097.pdf
Come back when you can argue coherently against Maskell and his non-partisan expert research staff. And don’t bother saying “they’re in the tank for Obama!” because that would just make you look like a hopeless nut job.
This is perhaps going to sound odd, but I have not really yet read the Congressional Research Service’s report.
I did skim through, or semi-read it at one point.
Part of the reason I’ve kind of stayed away from it was because I wanted to reach my own conclusions independently.
I have it open and am embarking on a better read now.
Prepare to be vindicated.
John Woodman,
I see that you are still repeating and spreading all your lies. You have not refuted anything that I have written. You just say you have. Keep dreaming.
What a sad post.
As for whether I have refuted what you have written, the readers can be the judge of that. I think for most who’ve read very far here, the jury is already in.
By the way, have you read the latest? Conservative, Constitutionalist, Obama-disliking blogger Jake Walker over at RedState.com (described as “the most widely read right of center blog on Capitol Hill” as well as “the most often cited right of center blog in the media,” and “one of the most influential voices of the grassroots on the right”) mentioned you by name today. He says that the arguments put forth by you, Leo Donofrio and Orly Taitz are:
John Woodman and Jake Walker,
Here is my response to Jake Walker’s drivel:
1. The Alexander Hamilton “born a citizen” language: What point does Mr. Walker make? He proves nothing that supports his position by providing this quote. He says that Hamilton did not use “natural born.” But bringing that out goes against him because it shows that the Founders and Framers saw a difference between a “natural born Citizen” and a “born Citizen.” Hence, he argues a point that goes again his own position.
2. The James Madison quote: Mr. Walker’s reliance on the James Madison quote to prove the meaning of a “natural born Citizen” is misplaced.
First, he did not provide the full quote from Madison. This is the full quote:
“It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth however derives its force sometimes from place and sometimes from parentage, but in general place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States; it will therefore be unnecessary to investigate any other. Mr. Smith founds his claim upon his birthright; his ancestors were among the first settlers of that colony.”
Source: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_2_2s6.html ; Library of Congress, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875, Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 1stCongress, 1st Session, Gales & Seaton’s History of Debates in Congress,
Madison at 420-423. http://www.scribd.com/doc/79655719/James-Madison-on-Contested-Election-Citizenship-And-Birthright-22-May-1789-House-of-Representatives
You left off: “Mr. Smith founds his claim upon his birthright; his ancestors were among the first settlers of that colony.” The last part of the quote has to be included because it goes to recognize that Madison did not only look to place of birth but also to parentage. He acknowledged that both place of birth and parentage are forces which produce allegiance. Why does Mr. Walker cut off important parts of quotes?
Second, William Smith, who was running for the House of Representatives, only needed to be a “Citizen of the United States” for seven years under Article I, Section 2, not a “natural born Citizen.” Here is the issue as framed by Madison:
“Mr. MADISON.—I think the merit of the question is now to be decided, whether the gentleman is eligible to a seat in this House or not; but it will depend on the decision of a previous question, whether he has been seven years a citizen of the United States or not.” Id. at 420.
Hence, Madison only defined an Article I and II “Citizen of the United States” (citizenship needed to be a congressperson), not an Article II “natural born Citizen” (citizenship needed to be president). Madison’s soil criterion, along with any other means to gain “citizenship,” was used by our nation only to establish the status of “Citizen of the United States” (Article I and II) for the first generation of Americans into which Representative William Smith fell. These were those the grandfather clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 called “Citizen[s] of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” As David Ramsay eloquently explained, birthright citizenship for those born after July 4, 1776 was reserved only for the children of the these original “citizens” and subsequent “citizens.” This fact is confirmed by, among other historical sources, the early Acts of Congress and judicial activity which followed the Founding.
Third, Madison, in finding Smith to be a “Citizen of the United States,” and given the absence of “laws and constitution of South Carolina” that would have controlled in resolving the question of Smith’s citizenship if such laws were in place, relied upon “principles of a general nature” “established by the revolution” and not the English common law. He made the statement in 1789 in reference to finding William Smith to be a “citizen” of South Carolina before the enactment by Congress of the Naturalization Act of 1790. Madison said:
“From an attention to the facts which have been adduced, and from a consideration of the principles established by the revolution, the conclusion I have drawn is, that Mr. SMITH was, on the declaration of independence, a citizen of the United States; and unless it appears that he has forfeited his right, by some neglect or overt act, he had continued a citizen until the day of his election to a seat in this House. I take it to be a clear point, that we are to be guided, in our decision, by the laws and constitution of South Carolina, so far as they can guide us; and where the laws do not expressly guide us, we must be guided by principles of a general nature, so far as they are applicable to the present case.” Id. at 420.
Justice Curtis in his dissent in Dred Scott explained what a “citizen of the United States” before the Constitution was adopted was which would have also been before Congress passed any of its naturalization acts:
The first section of the second article of the Constitution [p572] uses the language, “a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.” One mode of approaching this question is to inquire who were citizens of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.
Citizens of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution can have been no other than citizens of the United States under the Confederation. By the Articles of Confederation, a Government was organized, the style whereof was “The United States of America.” This Government was in existence when the Constitution was framed and proposed for adoption, and was to be superseded by the new Government of the United States of America, organized under the Constitution. When, therefore, the Constitution speaks of citizenship of the United States existing at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, it must necessarily refer to citizenship under the Government which existed prior to and at the time of such adoption.
Without going into any question concerning the powers of the Confederation to govern the territory of the United States out of the limits of the States, and consequently to sustain the relation of Government and citizen in respect to the inhabitants of such territory, it may safely be said that the citizens of the several States were citizens of the United States under the Confederation.
That Government was simply a confederacy of the several States, possessing a few defined powers over subjects of general concern, each State retaining every power, jurisdiction, and right, not expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled. And no power was thus delegated to the Government of the Confederation to act on any question of citizenship or to make any rules in respect thereto. The whole matter was left to stand upon the action of the several States, and to the natural consequence of such action that the citizens of each State should be citizens of that Confederacy into which that State had entered, the style whereof was, “The United States of America.”
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 571-72 (1857).
Madison specifically said that South Carolina had no statute on the matter and so general principles would have to be relied upon. He relied upon universal principles of citizenship arising out of the revolution. Citizenship under that model had been grandfathered into Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, and was called “Citizen of the United States.” Madison did not rely upon the English common law. If fact, there is nothing in his quote which suggests that he did. On the contrary, in his quote he recognized both citizenship by jus soli (place of birth) and by jus sanguinis (by parentage) in the case of Smith who was undoubtedly born in South Carolina. We also know from his Federalist No. 42 that Madison, who called the English common law “a dishonorable and illegitimate guide” in defining terms in the Constitution, would not have relied upon the English common law to define a “natural born Citizen” or a “Citizen of the United States.”
Fourth, in 1790, just less than one year following the Smith citizenship debate, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790. In that naturalization act and those that followed, which abrogated all English common law in any of the states, Congress treated children born in the United States to alien parents as aliens. The James McClure citizenship case of 1811, which applied the Naturalization Act of 1802 to James McClure who was born in South Carolina on April 21, 1785 to a British subject father, proves that after Congress entered the naturalization arena, the law of citizenship changed. An anonymous writer named Publius, wrote an article in The Alexandria Herald, which was published on October 7, 1811, in which he explained the new national law of citizenship thus:
“Mr. Rodman hints, that it would have been sufficient for James McClure to have been born in the United States—he is mistaken. The law of the United States recognizes no such claim. The law of Virginia, of 1792, does—for, “all free persons born within the territory of this commonwealth,” is deemed a citizen. The law of Virginia considers him as a son of the soil. An alien, as well as a citizen, may beget a citizen, but the U. States’ act does not go so far. A man must be naturalized to make his children such.”
Publius, in 1811, living when the acts were passed by Congress, would know what Congress intended when it passed the naturalization acts. In that connection, Publius tells us that it did not matter where a child was born. “Wheresoever born,” (Jefferson in his citizenship law of 1779), if his parents were aliens, he or she was an alien. Regardless of where the child was born, the child’s parents had to naturalize in order to make their children citizens.
The historical record tells us that Secretary of State, James Monroe, eventually declared McClure to be a “citizen,” not because he was born in South Carolina on April 21, 1785, but because a few months after he was born, his British father naturalized as a “citizen of the United States.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, acting on behalf of the James Madison Administration, ruled that pursuant to “the laws and usage of the United States” (not the English common law that had prevailed in South Carolina prior to the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790) McClure was a naturalized “Citizen of the United States” under the 1802 Act. McClure was born in South Carolina on April 21, 1785 to a British subject father who naturalized under the naturalization statute of South Carolina on February 20, 1786 when his son was dwelling in the United States. Those facts made James McClure a derivative naturalized “Citizen of the United States” under the 1802 Act. Hence, after Congress passed its naturalization acts, James Madison took on a different view of what made one a “Citizen of the United States.” Now he was guided by acts of Congress which preempted all state laws which had prevailed in the past. What Publius and the James Madison’s Administration told us in 1811 regarding what the 1802 Act meant is very strong evidence of how the Founding generation viewed national citizenship after the Constitution was adopted. And we can see from that understanding that the English common law no longer supplied the rules of decision in defining that citizenship.
In short, Madison’s quote is no evidence from the Founding era that just being born in the United States (jus soli) after the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790 was sufficient to grant to anyone the status of a “citizen,” let alone a “natural born Citizen.” Madison only defined that citizenship under universal principles that he applied to those born before the American Revolution and prior to the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790. But those general principles no longer applied to determine national citizenship after July 4, 1776 and the passage of the 1790, 1795, and 1802 Naturalization Acts.
3. Zephaniah Swift: Regarding Zephaniah Swift A System of Laws of the State of Connecticut (1795), many states adopted constitutional and statutory provisions in which they stated that the English common law would continue to prevail in the state until abrogated by the state legislature. As can be seen from the title of this treatise, Swift did nothing more than tell us what the law of the state of Connecticut was on citizenship. It is no surprise that Swift would look to the old English common law on the matter. But state laws on citizenship could produce only state citizenship, not national citizenship.
“In American law the term “citizen” of “citizenship” is used to denote a relation to the various states as well as to the United States. The conditions of State citizenship greatly vary in the several states, some requiring as a prerequisite of the exercise of the elective franchise the possession of citizenship of the United States, while others require only a declaration of intention to become a citizen of the United States, coupled with dome qualification of residence. Citizenship of a State does not, however, confer citizenship of the United States; and it is only who are citizens of the United States that can be considered as possessing, on the ground of citizenship, American nationality.” 3 John Bassett Moore, A Digest of International Law 273-74 (1906) (citing Boyd v. Thayer, 143 U.S. 135; Minneapolis v. Reum, 56 Fed. Rep. 576, 6 C.C.A. 31; United States v. Rhodes, 1 Abb. U.S. 28, 40). In his First Annual Message of 1885, President Cleveland said: “The laws of certain states and territories admit a domiciled alien to the local franchise conferring upon him the rights of citizenship to a degree which places him in the anomalous condition of being a citizen of a state and yet not of the United States within the purview of Federal and International law .”
Note that Swift did not use the national term for citizenship which the Constitution calls “natural born Citizen.” The clause “natural born subject” was both rejected by the Founders and Framers as a phrase to describe the new membership in the republic and appears nowhere in the Constitution or any acts of Congress. Swift’s use of the clause “natural born subject” shows that he was dealing only with state citizenship and not national citizenship.
4. Regarding St. George Tucker Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803): Tucker used “native-born citizen” the same as the Framers used “natural born Citizen” in Article II. In the early years, the clauses meant the same. Vattel in Section 212 of his The Law of Nations (London 1797) (1st ed. Neuchatel 1758) defined what a “natural born Citizen” is. There he said that the “natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” We can see that the two claused were interchangeable. So Jake Walker really has no point.
Regarding the “respectable political writer” quote, that quote is not Tucker’s. Before, Obama’s supporters were leaving off the first part of the quote to misrepresent that it was Tucker himself who was saying those words. I caught them in the lie and so now they are compelled to include the first part of the quote which shows that it is a “very respectable political writer” that Tucker is quoting. The reference in the quote of this other person to citizenship before the constitution was adopted has nothing to do with the whole purpose of why Tucker quotes from this political writer. The issue that Tucker was addressing was whether the states had any power left to naturalize persons after giving that power to Congress in the Constitution. Mr. Walker cannot point to anything in Tucker’s Commentaries which suggest that Tucker adopted the definition of that “political writer” regarding how citizenship was defined before the constitution was adopted. On the contrary, Tucker said that the civil right to be elected President belonged only to the children born to “citizen” parents who inherited that right from those “citizen” parents.
5. James Kent: Kent said: “Natives are all persons born within the jurisdiction and allegiance of the United States.” First, Mr. Walker does not show us how Kent defined being born within the “allegiance of the United States.” Second, Kent is not very convincing. The major problem with such sources is that they are not very close to the Founding like St. George Tucker, for example. So they are not a Founding source within their own right. Not themselves being founding source, they have to provide links to the Founding for their opinion to be convincing. But those Kent fails to provide any link to the Founders or Founding era which supports what he wrote. His personal opinion without any evidence from the Founding era or shortly thereafter which supports his position whatever it may be is not helpful.
6. William Rawle: Rawle provides no source from the Founding era which supports his definition of a “natural born Citizen.” Basically, he just provides his unsupported personal opinion. He also gave his quote in the context of disagreeing with John Locke on the meaning of citizenship. But the Founders and Framers adopted Locke’s ideas of citizenship and not Rawle’s.
7. Joseph Story: Mr. Walker makes a point that Story uses the phrase “native citizen.” But again, “native citizen” and “natural born Citizen” in the early years of the republic meant the same thing. See No. 4 above. Hence, Mr. Walker proves nothing. Also, Story in Shanks said that minors follow the condition of their parents during their years of minority and can choose what citizenship to accept upon reaching adulthood. This philosophy followed that of Locke, and not that of Rawle.
8. Inglis v. The Trustees of Sailor’s Snug Harbor: Mr. Walker cites and quotes from Justice Story’s minority opinion. He fails to understand that the majority disagreed with Justice Story. The majority said that if the demandant was born in New York after July 4, 1776 to British parents, he was a British subject and not an American citizen. Justice Story abandoned his minority opinion in Inglis when he wrote the majority opinion in Shanks. In Shanks he said: “If she was not of age, then she might well be deemed under the circumstances of this case to hold the citizenship of her father, for children born in a country, continuing while under age in the family of the father, partake of his national character as a citizen of that country.”
9. Lynch v. Clarke: There are many errors contained in the Lynch decision. I will just cover the erroneous points made by Mr. Walker:
a. Patrick Lynch (Julia Lynch’s alien father) was not even domiciled in New York. He was only there temporarily. For example, see the 1860 New York state citizenship statute which said that all persons born and domiciled in the state, except children of transient aliens and of public ministers and consuls, were citizens of New York. Here is the statute:
Political Code of the State of New York (1860)
Sec. 5. The citizens of the state are:
1. All persons born in this state and domiciled within it, except the children of transient aliens and of alien public ministers and consuls;
2 All persons born out of this state who are citizens of the United States and domiciled within this state.
The State of New York thus rejected the English common and Lynch v. Clark, 1 Sandf.Ch. 583 (1844), a state decision which had held by relying on the English common law that a child born in New York of aliens parents who were subjects and domiciliaries of Ireland during their temporary sojourn in that city, returning with them the same year to their native country and always residing there afterwards was a “citizen of the United States.” Note that Minor in 1875 also put into serious doubt the validity of the Lynch decision and even U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) included “domicile” in its holding on the meaning of a “citizen” under the Fourteenth Amendment. There are many problems and errors with the Lynch decision which I will not discuss at this moment.
b. In declaring Julia Lynch either a “natural born Citizen” or even a “citizen of the United States,” the Lynch decision was in direct violation Congress’s naturalization acts which treated children born in the United States to alien parents as aliens. Lynch recognized that the English common law of New York would have no force if abrogated by “express legislation.” But then through absurd interpretation of Congress’s naturalization acts concludes that those acts did not apply to children born in the United States when in fact they clearly did. See the James McClure case of 1811 (the James Madison Administration ruled that the Naturalization Act of 1802 did apply to James McClure who was born in South Carolina on April 21, 1785 and that James McClure only became a “Citizen of the United States” thereunder when his alien father naturalized after James was born and when James was still a minor and “dwelling in the United States,” showing that James McClure, even though born in South Carolina after the revolution, was born an alien and needed naturalization to become a “Citizen of the United States”). Hence, the court in Lynch could have declared Julia Lynch a citizen of the State of New York under more relaxed state rules, but it could not declare her a national citizen whose qualifications were spelled out by Congress when it came to defining a “citizen of the United States” and the American “common law” when it came to defining a “natural born Citizen.”
c. English common law was not incorporated into the original Constitution on the national level. That law only continued to apply on the state level and only until abrogated by statute. It only came into the Constitution by way of the Bill of Rights in 1791. But that limited application of the English common law under the Bill of Rights does not mean that the English common law was brought back into America. Also, note that the Bill of Rights does not touch upon national citizenship. That the Founders and Framers brought the English common law into the Bill of Rights on a very limited basis is not without more evidence that they also used the English common law and not the law of nations to define a “natural-born citizen.”
The “natural-born citizen” clause was incorporated into the original Constitution. While the Founders and Framers expressly included the law of nations into that original Constitution, they did not do the same with the English common law. To whatever limited degree the Founders and Framers may have later through the Bill of Rights accepted the English common law to define a very limited area of rights, you have not provided one shred of evidence from the Founding period that the Founders and Framers relied upon the English common law to define the new national citizenship let alone that they defined a “natural born Citizen” the same as the English defined a “natural born subject.” Note that the framers of the Bill of Rights specifically included the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in the Bill of Rights to show that there were many other rights and powers retained by the people and the states which were not enumerated in the Constitution. These rights and powers would have come from natural law, revealed or divine law, the law of nations, and municipal law.
d. Lynch also used the wrong “common law” to define a “natural born Citizen.” Hence, that Julia Lynch could be a “natural born subject” under the English “common law” is not relevant. Minor v. Happersett used the American “common law” to define a “natural-born citizen,” not the English “common law.” Minor told us that that “common law” provided: “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.” Id. at 167. Minor, being a U.S. Supreme Court decision that followed Lynch, trumps that case on not only what “common law” to apply but also on the correct definition of a “natural born Citizen.”
e. Lynch said that there was no “reasonable doubt” that someone who was born in the United States to alien parents was a “natural born Citizen.” But we can see that Lynch was wrong in making this statement of dicta. Minor said that “there have been doubts” whether a child born in the country to alien parents was even a “citizen.” We know that under Minor’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” that child could not be a “natural-born citizen.” But Minor was not even willing to establish that such a child was a “citizen.” Again, Minor is the word of our U.S. Supreme Court and it trumps the Lynch case which was only a New York state case.
f. Both Gilbert M. Speir and Charles F. Grim, and the Lynch court misunderstood Vattel on the question of whether he would allow the municipal law of a nation decide who its citizens are. Vattel’s comments in Section 215 apply to children born out of the country. Vattel states that it is asked if such citizens (born out of the country) are “citizens.” While he said that by the law of nature alone those children follow the condition of their parents and that the place of birth should not take away from that child what nature has given to him, he cautioned that the municipal laws of a nation have to be followed to answer that question. Hence, he was not referring to children born in the country, but rather to those who were born out of it.
Regarding the children born in the country, he told us clearly in Section 212 that they followed the condition of their parents. These lawyers and the court used Vattel’s statements that applied to children born out of the country and used them to show that he too supported the idea that that a child born in the country to aliens could still be a citizen. This is error in a grand sense.
g. Vice Chancellor Sandford said that the law of nations rule was “more liable to the charge of injustice.” The Federal District Court in Wong Kim Ark said that the law of nations rule “is undoubtedly more logical, reasonable, and satisfactory, but this conclusion will not justify this court in declaring it to be the law against controlling judicial authority.” The court was referring to In re Look Tin Sing, 10 Sawy 353, 21 Fed. 905 (1884) as being the “controlling judicial authority.” Hence, the federal lower court in Wong disagrees with Lynch as to which rule is the better rule. Also, note that the only authority cited by Look Tin Sing is the Lynch case which is hardly any authority to rely upon when looking for rules of decision on defining U.S. citizenship. The district court also said that there was no controlling U.S. Supreme Court case on point and so it felt compelled to follow Look Tin Sing. But apart from historical sources from the Founding such as David Ramsay, St. George Tucker, Chief Justice James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and others, and Acts of Congress, cases such as The Venus (Chief Justice Marshall concurring), Inglis, Shanks, Dred Scott (Justice Daniels concurring), and Minor all supported the law of nations rule. So clearly, the district court erred when it made this statement.
10. Mr. Walker’s analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment proves nothing. That amendment in its text clearly refers to a “citizen of the United States,” not an Article II ‘natural born Citizen.” The amendment even includes within that “citizen of the United States” naturalized citizens after birth. There is also nothing in the congressional debates on the amendment which in any way suggests that the amendment was intended to change the meaning of an Article II “natural born Citizen.”
11. Mr. Walker’s, Professor Hylton’s, and Professor Fallone’s comments about Minor are in error. Minor did not leave open the question of what is a “natural-born citizen.” On the contrary, the Court definitively answered that question and confirmed what that definition was under “common law.” Since the definition related to presidential eligibility, there could only be one definition and Minor gave it to us.
Mr. Walker says that the Court did not decide the question of whether a child born in the country to alien parents is a “natural born Citizen.” He does not quote the Court on what question it raised, for if he did his quote would include the word “citizen” rather than “natural-born citizen.” Rather, he paraphrases the Court’s question and ascribes to the Court the use of the clause “natural born Citizen” when it never used that clause in its question. This is at best intellectual dishonesty and at worst fraud upon the courts, the American people, and the historical record.
The truth is that natural law and the law of nations teaches that when American society was created after July 4, 1776, those who created that society (through the Declaration of Independence and by adhering to the American Revolution) lost their English “natural born subject” status and became “citizens” of the new free and independent states. The unamended Constitution calls these persons “Citizens of the United States.” Those who were born after July 4, 1776 in the country (the Naturalization Act of 1790 allowed until 1795 also children born out of the United States to “citizen” parents to be considered as “natural born citizens”) to those first “citizens” or were or are born to their descendents are “natural-born citizens.” Hence, the “natural born Citizens” are those who are born in the country to “citizen” parents. This was the definition of a “natural born Citizen” which American “common law” recognized and adopted. All the cases that I have cited (especially Minor v. Happersett) which you so easily discount, show that this has been our American “common law” on the definition of a “natural born Citizen.” So the weight of the these cases along with other sources existing in the historical record (David Ramsay, Thomas Jefferson, Justice James Wilson, Justice William Johnson, Chief Justice John Marshall, St. George Tucker, Justice Joseph Story, House Speaker Rep. Landon Cheves, Rep. A. Smyth, Rep. John Bingham, to name a few), support this American “common law” definition of a “natural born Citizen” and not your English “common law” definition.
A nation can decide to add to its “natural born Citizens” by naturalization. In the United States, “citizens” are added to the “natural born Citizens” by the Fourteenth Amendment, Acts of Congress, or treaties. These positive laws call these “citizens” the same thing that the original Constitution calls them, i.e., “citizens of the United States.” Because naturalization also creates “citizens,” the “natural born Citizen” definition includes children born in the country to parents who become “citizens” under any one of these positive laws and the U.S.-born children of their descendents. This includes parents who become “citizens of the United States” after their birth. This means that the “natural born Citizen” clause includes children born in the United States who are born to “citizen” parents who were not descendants of the original “citizens.”
Minor confirmed this long-standing definition of a “natural born Citizen,” which had already been confirmed by the historical record and previous U.S. Supreme Court cases which I cited, and said there was no doubt as to who fell into that class. Given the limited parameters of the definition, only those who were born in the country to “citizen” parents were included. The Court added that “there have been doubts” as to whether children born in the country to alien parents were included in the “citizen” class. So, the truth is that the only question that Minor did not decide is the question of whether a child born in the country to alien parents after July 4, 1776 but before the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment was a “citizen” and whether the Fourteenth Amendment made that child a “citizen of the United States” thereunder. But as I have explained in No. 10 above, this is not a “natural born Citizen.” Such a child’s allegiance might be strong enough to make him or her a “citizen of the United States,” but not strong enough to make him or her an Article II Presidential and Commander in Chief “natural born Citizen.” Again, you cannot say that a “citizen of the United States” is a “natural born Citizen,” for your argument fails simply on the text of Article I, II, the Fourteenth Amendment, and all Congressional Acts which all distinguish between a “natural born Citizen” and a “Citizen of the United States.” Additionally, even Wong Kim Ark recognized the difference between a “natural born Citizen” and a “citizen of the United States.” Moreover, a “natural born Citizen” does not need the English common law exceptions applicable to those wanting to be “natural born subjects,” i.e., born to parents who are foreign diplomats or foreign invaders, to be excluded from citizenship, for a “natural born Citizen” must be born to “citizen” parents. It is grave constitutional error to conflate and confound a “natural born Citizen” and a “citizen of the United States.”
Hence, the big lie is in telling us that Minor left open the question of who is a “natural born Citizen” when in fact it only left open the question of who was a “citizen of the United States” (those wanting to be “citizens” and therefore initial members of American society and who could not possibly be second or subsequent generation Americans making them “natural born Citizens”) both before and after the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment.
12 Wong Kim Ark answered the “citizen of the United States” question left open by Minor. Wong Kim Ark was not willing nor did it have to go beyond what Minor again confirmed to be a “natural born Citizen” under American “common law.” It even cited Minor and quoted its definition. It held that a child born in the country to “domiciled” alien parents is born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States” and therefore a “citizen of the United States” under the Fourteenth Amendment. But then Mr. Walker has to tell another big lie. He misstates what Wong held and says that it held Wong to be an Article II “natural born Citizen,” even though Ankeny even concedes in Footnote 14 that Wong did not hold that Wong was a “natural born Citizen.” Ankeny reads something more constitutionally special into Wong Kim Ark declaring that Wong was a “citizen” from the moment of birth than it deserves. In footnote 14 the court said that the “fact that the Court in Wong Kim Ark did not actually pronounce the plaintiff a ‘natural born Citizen’ using the Constitution’s Article II language is immaterial,” because the Court held Wong to be a “citizen of the United States” “at the time of his birth.” The court concluded that citizenship from the moment of birth is what made Wong a “natural born Citizen” even though Wong Kim Ark did not hold he was a “natural born Citizen” and even though Wong Kim Ark said that children who are born out of the United States to one or two U.S. “citizen” parents,” while “citizens” at birth, are still naturalized at birth by Congressional Acts.
The question presented and the holding of Wong are clear as a sunny summer day. The Court was concerned with whether Wong was a “citizen of the United States” under the Fourteenth Amendment, not whether he was a “natural born Citizen” under Article II. The Court avoided having to apply Minor’s American “common law” to the question because it was not defining a “natural born Citizen.” Rather, it relied upon the English “common law” because it was only looking to determine whether Wong was born “subject to the jurisdiction” (a lesser standard than having to be a “natural born Citizen”) and therefore a “citizen of the United States” under the Fourteenth Amendment. While the Court injected the English “common law” into our national citizenship without providing any evidence that the English common law continued to provide the rules of decision on matters of national citizenship (not to be conflated and confounded with state citizenship) and when the historical evidence and Congressional Acts show such a reliance to be misplaced, the Court nevertheless only defined a Fourteenth Amendment “citizen of the United States” and not an Article II “natural born Citizen.” Concerning what is the true nature of Fourteenth Amendment citizenship at birth, we need to remember that the amendment is the constitutionalization of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which given Congress’s limited power over citizenship, was a naturalization act designed to remove any alienage with which anyone born on U.S. soil might have. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 758 ( 1857) (“It appears, then that the only power expressly granted to Congress to legislate concerning citizenship is confined to the removal of the disabilities of foreign birth”).
Jake Walker has made the following statement about be:
“…fraught with misinterpretations, misquotes, quotes taken out of context, and generally shoddy scholarship that demonstrates a lack of understanding of United States legal thought. I suspect that their method consists of grasping at whatever little quote they can, regardless of the context, and insisting it says what they say it does. Unfortunately for them, a modicum of applied research would disprove their arguments. They are a disgrace to the legal profession, a profession which has more than its share of disgraces, and to Constitutional law, and they are rightfully treated as pariahs. We on the Right are better than this, and liberty-minded Constitutional conservatives are right to reject them utterly.”
Upon examination, it is clear that the statement applies to Mr. Walker and not to me.
Then how come you’re zero for eight in the courts?
And why did the last court — The US federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals — specifically admit your brief (indicating they were listening to you) and then dismiss the case without so much as a written discussion, citing a section of the law that allowed them to do so in cases in which:
“…some or all of the arguments made are without sufficient merit to warrant discussion in a written opinion.”
[Edit: I am withdrawing a portion of my comment, as it smacks too much of ridicule. The fact is, most of Mr. Apuzzo’s claims in the long passage above have already been refuted. Some of the few additional claims will be refuted in my final article.]
Just saying that Apuzzo is zero for eight in his cases understates how thoroughly his arguments have been rejected. To date, not a single judge or tribunal member has ever voted in favor of a case where this argument was presented. While the SCOTUS does not publish votes when writs for certiorari are denied unless a justice chooses to write a dissent we can infer that they have all been rejected unanimously because the defense has waived the right to file an opposition every singe time. Ballot challenges maintaining that a natural born citizen must be born of two citizen parents have been filed in NH, GA, AL, IL, PA, NJ, AZ, and IN. Every single one has lost unanimously before those bodies and every appeal has been rejected unanimously.
I challenge anyone to find a proposition in law that has been so completely and thoroughly rejected. Is their any wonder that no one other than a handful of Birthers takes this guy seriously?
Sorry about that. Please pardon me for understating the case of how completely and utterly without merit this man’s bogus, worthless, disproven, discredited claims are.
I see some progress folks. Mario is no longer repeating Leo’s silly assertion that “Publius” is James Madison. Now he is just some anonymous guy. Otherwise it is just more classic Apuzzo – he twists the quotes he can reasonable twist and what he cannot he just says “they are in error”.
So will Redstate not let you comment there?
Mario makes only one or two points worth really discussing in the entire long diatribe.
1. Madison does say, “Mr. Smith founds his claim upon his birthright; his ancestors were among the first settlers of that colony.”
However, this is a minor supporting statement to Madison’s MAIN point, which Mario (of course) simply brushes aside:
“It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth however derives its force sometimes from place and sometimes from parentage, but in general place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States; it will therefore be unnecessary to investigate any other.”
Madison thus CLEARLY states that PLACE OF BIRTH is WHAT APPLIES IN THE UNITED STATES.
He also says:
“I conceive that every person who owed this primary allegiance to the particular community in which he was born retained his right of birth, as the member of a new community.”
2. He makes much of the fact that Madison said the English common law would be a “dishonorable and illegitimate guide” on the definition of “felonies on the high seas:” This is a legitimate point, as far as it goes. Madison clearly felt that this particular term in the English common law was too vague and indefinite, and he also felt that we should set our own definition of the term.
But Madison, as has been noted many times, was equally clear that when it came to the allegiance that makes for citizenship: “…in general place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.”
So this is another instance of Mario — as he always does — seizing upon a minor or only perpherally related point, and using it to “prove” his claim, while ignoring, minimizing and denying the much clearer, much more ON-TOPIC points that DISPROVE his claim.
Jake Walker also has an informative article about our relationship with the English common law.
Mario, why don’t you go and post that reply at Redstate rather than here where Jake Walker may never see it.
Some possible reasons
1) you have been banned from redstate
2) You are that afraid of Mr Walker taking your arguments apart
3) You know you would just be confirming to the readers of Redstate that you are a complete fool.
4) All of the above.
Either way, you are about as successful here as you are in the courtroom.
John Woodman,
We are debating a rule of law here. It is highly pathetic and indicative of the weakness of your position that you expect to win this debate by pointing to some courts which did not only not provide any reasons for their decisions but also advised us that their decisions are not to be published and are non-precedential. If you want to prove me wrong, then you will have to give us your rationale rather than solely rely upon the silence of the courts.
Mario….rule of law…and not one liberal or conservative court has ruled in your favor at all even when it dealt with the merit of your case. Now don’t lie and say no court has ruled on the merit of your case.
When I say your case…I’m talking about your 2 citizen theory whether you were the actual attorney or not. That is your case and it’s been shot down faster than a turkey before Thanksgiving.
Mario also gives a huge long diatribe list of arguments, almost all of which have already been dealt with and discredited.
1. He recycles the known falsehood that Hamilton’s use of “born a citizen” “shows that the Founders and Framers saw a difference between a “natural born Citizen” and a “born Citizen.” There’s no evidence whatsoever that they saw any difference at all.
2. He repeats his reliance on David Ramsay, who was voted down 36 to 1.
3. He says, “Madison did not rely upon the English common law. If fact, there is nothing in his quote which suggests that he did. On the contrary, in his quote he recognized both citizenship by jus soli (place of birth) and by jus sanguinis (by parentage) in the case of Smith who was undoubtedly born in South Carolina.”
So what? English law relied upon both jus soli — in the case of those born on English soil — and jus sanguinis, in the case of those born of British citizens overseas, who were declared by statute to be considered just as equally natural born subjects as those born on English soil. In fact, Mario has just made an pretty good case that both all persons born on US soil and all persons born of US citizens overseas are eligible to the office of President.
4. He repeats the completely false and discredited claim that the Naturalization Acts abrogated the rule for those born on US soil.
5. He repeats the completely false and utterly discredited claim that under Jefferson’s Virginia citizenship law, “Regardless of where the child was born, the child’s parents had to naturalize in order to make their children citizens.” This is as false as claiming that Elvis is President.
6. He repeats the false and discredited James McClure argument.
7. He acknowledges what Zephaniah Swift said, but then claims, “But state laws on citizenship could produce only state citizenship, not national citizenship.”
Okay, but the exact same source that he quotes as being supposedly in support of this point — John Bassett Moore’s 1906 Digest of International Law — says very clearly, just 3 pages later:
“Children born in the United States of alien parents, who have never been naturalized, are native citizens of the United States.”
So his point here completely illustrates what a cherry-picker of quotes Mr. Apuzzo is. One clearly cannot expect anything from him other than one-sided propaganda.
8. He repeats the completely discredited claim that Vattel provided the definition of “natural born citizen,” a claim for which there is no evidence at all, and a great deal of evidence against.
9. He makes much of the fact that Tucker quoted George Nicholas, but ignores that this has already been slapped down: There was no reason for Tucker at all to approvingly include that part of Nicholas’ quote if he didn’t agree with it; in fact, if he hadn’t agreed with it, he would most certainly have left it off.
10. He says — laughably — that Chancellor James Kent, who graduated from Yale in 1781 and entered law two years before the Constitution was written, who was the first Professor of Law for Columbia College — starting six years after the Constitution was written — who wrote four highly-respected volumes of Commentaries on American Law “is not very convincing,” is “not very close to the Founding,” and “fails to provide any link to the Founders or Founding era which supports what he wrote.”
Kent WAS a link to the Founding era, and an authoritative one.
11. He makes a similar ludicrously idiotic criticism of William Rawle, saying he “provides no source from the Founding era which supports his definition of a ‘natural born Citizen.'”
William Rawle was appointed the United States District Attorney for the State of Pennsylvania just 4 years after the Constituton was written, only 3 years after it was ratified. Pennsylvania was certainly one of the largest and most important of only 13 or 14 States of the United States of America (depending on whether Vermont had yet joined), having also the second largest city in the country, Philadelphia, which was only slightly smaller than New York City.
12. He tries to use Joseph Story’s comments in Shanks v Dupont to back his bogus claims. A few comments on that case are going to appear in my final article. Suffice it to say that Story’s words in that case are taken out of context. Meanwhile, Apuzzo ignores completely what Story said in Inglis v Sailors’ Snug Harbor, the exact same month:
“Nothing is better settled at the common law than the doctrine that the children even of aliens born in a country while the parents are resident there under the protection of the government and owing a temporary allegiance thereto are subjects by birth.”
And Story wasn’t applying this to England, he was applying it directly to the United States.
13. He correctly states that Story’s opinion in Inglis was a dissent. He ignores that another Justice firmly expressed the same opinion on that point, that the majority itself stated the case was not about birth in a settled country but was entirely about the choice of people who were in the United States at the time of Independence to become American citizens or remain British subjects, and that even the majority said John Inglis had had the right to choose to become an American citizen! If he had exercised that choice, he would undoubtedly have been counted as a natural-born American citizen.
The majority opinion in Inglis therefore doesn’t support Apuzzo’s claim.
14. Lynch v Clarke is such a decisive slapdown of Apuzzo’s two-citizen-parent claim that all he can do is say, “There are many errors contained in the Lynch decision.”
Huh. That must be why the United States SUPREME COURT cited the case approvingly.
I have read Lynch v Clarke. I found it astonishing the degree of care and research that Judge Sandford went to in order to write his decision. He is the only Judge I know of so far to trace the citizenship principle all the way back into the 1400s.
Of all the judicial opinions I have now read, two have stood out: this one, for the reasons I’ve stated, and Justice Fuller’s dissent in US v Wong Kim Ark, which stood out for how shockingly ill-founded in history and law most of it seemed to be.
Anyway, Lynch very decisively refutes him, and was later cited approvingly by the Supreme Court.
15. He repeats the birther claim that the State of New York “rejected” or “overrode” Lynch v Clarke. The claim — like virtually every claim made by the birthers — is false.
First of all, New Yorks’ 1860 citizenship law was obviously passed in… 1860. Lynch v Clark was decided in 1844, sixteen years earlier. To suppose that the 1860 citizenship law was a reaction to Lynch v Clarke is like claiming that a law passed today is a reaction to some court case that was decided back two years before Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal. Ancient history.
Secondly, at the time Julia Lynch was born, her parents had been living in New York for FOUR YEARS. I don’t think they were really what the legislature meant by “transient aliens.”
16. He repeats the tired, disproven flat-out lie that “Congress’s naturalization acts… treated children born in the United States to alien parents as aliens.” They didn’t, and once again, it’s as clearly false as someone standing up and claiming that Elvis is President.
17. He says, “English common law was not incorporated into the original Constitution on the national level.” Fine, but as has been noted many times, many terms in the Constitution are only defined by the English common law. In fact Judge Sandford stated that the Framers of the Constitution provided no definition for the terms “impeachment, felonies, treason, bribery, indictment, cases in equity, bankruptcy, attainder, and writ of habeas corpus,” “all of which were unknown even by name, to any other system of jurisprudence than the common law.”
18. He claims, “Lynch also used the wrong “common law” to define a ‘natural born Citizen.'” He then appeals to his thoroughly discredited and disproven claim that American common law based on the “law of nations” supports his bogus arguments. This has been shown to be false not just for one reason, but for several.
Even his statement that “Lynch used the wrong ‘common law’ to define a ‘natural born citizen'” is false. Judge Sandford in fact made his judgment based on AMERICAN common law! This was a surprising discovery that I made in reading that case while researching my final article. I will have more to say on that shortly.
19. He repeats the thoroughly disproven, beaten-in-the-ground false claim that Minor v Happersett provided a birther definition of “natural born citizen.”
20. He makes a valid point in noting that “…the federal lower court in Wong disagrees with Lynch as to which rule [jus soli, jus sanguinis] is the better rule.” But of course he ignores and flatly denies what is obviously and proven true, that the Supreme Court found Wong to be not only a “citizen” (as he claims) but also natural born, and therefore a natural born citizen.
So as is typical, he grasps at the lower court’s opinion while denying the Supreme Court’s overriding and refutation of that lower court’s opinion. Why? He likes what the lower court said. He doesn’t like what the Supreme Court said.
Only in Mario Apuzzo’s mind does a lower court overrule the US Supreme Court — and only because that’s the result Mario wants.
21. He cites St. George Tucker as an authority in his favor when, as we’ve seen, Tucker clearly and absolutely refutes him.
22. He notes the 14th Amendment didn’t change the definition of natural born citizen. This is true, but it does nothing to help his thoroughly discredited claims of what that definition is.
23. He says, “Mr. Walker’s, Professor Hylton’s, and Professor Fallone’s comments about Minor are in error.” Once again, Mario knows better than any professor of law or legal expert in the country, or in history. That’s why he’s got such a great record in the courts.
Did I mention that he is zero for eight?
24. He appeals to “natural law” when it has been shown — in this very blog — that natural law does not support his argument. It was natural law, as understood in England before America was founded, that gave rise to our concept of a person born within the dominion of a country as being a natural born subject or citizen of that country.
25. He says “Such a child’s allegiance might be strong enough to make him or her a “citizen of the United States,” but not strong enough to make him or her an Article II Presidential and Commander in Chief “natural born Citizen.”
He is directly and decisively refuted by the Supreme Court, which stated that the “allegiance to the United States” of parents even temporarily here “is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Rep. 6a, ”strong enough to make a natural subject, for if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject.”
26. He repeats the disproven lie that the Court in Wong “confirmed” Minor’s nonexistent “definition.”
27. He admits that the Ankeny court “concluded that citizenship from the moment of birth is what made Wong a ‘natural born Citizen.’” This is one of the very few things he says that is actually true.
28. Finally, he falsely accuses Jake Walker of “misinterpretations, misquotes, quotes taken out of context, and generally shoddy scholarship that demonstrates a lack of understanding of United States legal thought,” and “grasping at whatever little quote [he] can, regardless of the context, and insisting it says what [he says] it does,” when it is obvious to anyone who does the research that that’s what he himself is guilty of.
So it’s falsehood after falsehood after falsehood. And I’m not talking about things that are alleged to be falsehoods, I’m talking about PROVEN falsehoods, where anybody can look up the evidence and conclude that Apuzzo’s statements are false.
Every time he does this, he only highlights the enormous, known falsehood of his claims.
There are places that put up a jar of beans and run contests: Guess the number of beans in the jar. I thought of having a contest where people guess the number of known and demonstrable falsehoods in Apuzzo’s post.
Mario always says that William Rawle is just expressing his opinion and doesn’t cite authorities. But Dr. Ramsay also doen’t cite any authorities and is just expressing his opinion. The difference is Rawle was an attorney familar with the law.
BTW, did you know that when William Rawle returned to the United States in 1783, he traveled on a handwritten passport issued to him by Benjamin Franklin (he went ot see Franklin in Paris).
In the months before the start of the Constitutional Convention, Rawle helped found the “Society for Political Inquires”. The society membership include Franklin (who was elected its president), Thomas Paine (who wrote the societies by-laws), Benjamin Rush, George Clymer, James Wilson, Governour Morris and Robert Morris (the only man to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution). The Society met twice a month at Ben Franklins house.
Mario Apuzzo writes:
But the Fourth Circuit provided its reasoning, adopting the reasoning of the District Court (“We affirm for the reasons stated by the district court.”). And one reason given by the district court is that per Wong Kim Ark “it is well settled” that those born in the U.S. are natural born citizens.
The court gives its reason, and appeal to SCOTUS authority is sufficent reason.
The opinion merely states that it is not binding precedent. But a lower court is still free to take notice of the decision and its reasoning, even if it is not bound to do so. And there is little doubt that any federal district court or state court will do so. A federal circuit court opining on and affirming President Obama’s status as natural born citizen is HIGHLY significant, whether or not the court publishes that decision.
Until a court specifically tells Mario that his arguments have no legal merit he will continue to push his nonsense. Oh wait, that already happened didn’t it? Never mind. Let’s face it. He will continue to spout nonsense no matter what.
I find most of Apuzzo’s arguments tedious, irrelevant quote mining. And, he’s never answered a question asked of him repeatedly. I’ll ask it again:
What does he think of Chief Justice Fuller’s dissent in Wong Kim Ark, which complained that the majority’s decision allowed the children of aliens, as long as they were born in the U.S., to be eligible to be elected President. It’s right there in the dissent. It’s a pretty big elephant in the room. Apuzzo has always ignored it.
In other words, who’s interpretation of Wong Kim Ark should we take seriously? Mario Apuzzo’s or that of the contemporary Chief Justice of the United States when Wong Kim Ark was decided?
The answer is no contest. And all of Apuzzo’s bloviations are shown to be just that.
It’s not just Chief Justice Fuller, in the appellant brief the Government said that the lower court had declared Wong a natural born citiizen. But in fact Judge Morrow in his decision never calls Wong natural born.
“The question presented by this appeal may be thus stated: Is a person born within the United States of alien parents domiciled therein a citizen thereof by the fact of his birth? The appellant maintains the negative, and in that behalf assigns as error the ruling of the district court that the respondent is a natural-born citizen”
@ Sterngard Friegen
Did the majority decision in the WKA Case establish that a child born in the country of alien parents satisfied the Article II natural born Citizen requirement to be president?
Yes, the court affirmed the lower courts ruling that Wong was a citizen by birth in the United States. And as you can see by the appellant brief and the dissenting opinion this made him a natural born citizen and eligible for the Presidency.
BTW, Chief Justice Fuller never cited the Minor decision has having defined the term natural born citizen.
To reiterate, the Dissenting Opinion flatly stated that one ramification of the Majority Decision was that Wong or someone like him could run for President.
Of course, they saw that as a revolting development, and mentioned it almost sarcastically as evidence that the Majority were wrong. But obviously they understood what the Decision meant, and, lo and behold, that is exactly what every court has held that it meant for over a hundred years.
The opinion of dim-witted hyper-partisan sophistic legal whores notwithstanding.
I wasn’t going to reply to a question directed at Sterngard, but since others have already responded, I’ll add a bit.
Ike, as others have noted, the answer is “Yes” (qualified only as to two categories: children of diplomats and hostile aliens).
And we can KNOW the answer is “yes” by noting how Justice Gray defines “natural born citizen” under the common law and “born . . . in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the Fourteenth Amendment to mean the same thing.
In his opinion, Justice Gray devotes at least 12 pages to the meaning of “natural born citizen.” In summary, he writes:
Then, speaking of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, he writes:
So the Supreme Court makes clear that the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t create some new category of “Fourteenth Amendment Citizen.” Rather, Justice Gray shows how the Amendment incorporates formally the common law meaning of “natural born citizen” as to the same jus soli rule and excepting the same categories of persons from that rule (while affirming and extending those common law citizenship rules to non-whites). So, per Justice Gray, “natural born citizen” and “born . . . in the U.S. and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” mean the same thing! So since Mr. Wong was found to fall under the Fourteenth Amendment by virtue of his U.S. birth, he thus equally was a “natural born citizen” under the common law.
And that such is the import of the majority opinion is made clear by Chief Justice Fuller’s dissent, who complains how the majority opinion effectively makes a person like Mr. Wong eligible for the presidency!
John Woodman,
This is perfect for you:
“Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, simply saying something is so does not make it so.” District U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land in Rhodes v. MacDonald.
That’s right. And the great thing is, I’ve provided plenty of other writing, genuine analysis, and references to original sources here at this site, so that the interested reader can look up all the points made on both sides, consult original sources, and see for themselves what an enormous pile of absolute, bald-faced garbage your enumerated claims really are.
It would be ironic if Mario Apuzzo would someday find himself arguing his Birther nonsense before Judge Land in Georgia. However, it will never happen because Mario will never be admitted to practice outside of New Jersey.
Spoken like someone who knows he cannot discredit Woodman’s thorough, factually supported debunking of your exercise in selective quote-mining.
You will never win with those arguments because they are so easily and thoroughly refuted. Better come up with some better cherry-picked cases and quotes or find yourself forever relegated to Taitzland, with an unbroken string of defeats and a hefty sidebar of sanctions to go with it.
Hello Mario dear,
Still failing and flailing I see, just like the good old days at CAAFLOG…
Remember…? This one still gives the folks the giggles
Mario meets The Supremes a play in one act
Justice Alito: Mr Apuzzo, I would….
Mario: Esquire
Justice Alito: I beg your pardon
Mario: It’s Mr Appuzzo Esquire, I’m a lawyer you know.
Justice Alito: I am fully aware you are a lawyer Mr Apuzzo, you’re here arguing a case.
Mario: It’s important to get the terminology right, I paid good money for the Esq.
Justice Scalia: OK already, we get it, the Esq is given lets move on.
Justice Alito: Thanks Tony, moving on, Mr Apuzzo, your case is one that seeks….
Mario: I object
Justice Alito: What ! What do you mean you object, I’m trying to describe your case how can you object to that?
Mario: They are here !!!
Justice Scalia: What, what are you talking about, who is here..?
Mario: Them, those two, over there in the black robes
Justice Thomas: We all wear black robes, that’s all I’m saying and it’s not dicta.
Justice Roberts: Sammy, what’s he saying, look can we hurry up, she who must be obeyed has a long Honey-Do list for me for Christmas
Justice Alito: Mr Apuzzo, just WHAT or WHO are you objecting to?
Mario: Those two there, (points wildly)
Justice Alito: From your frenetic semaphore I take it you mean Justices Sotomayer and Kagan
Mario: Yeah, them two, shouldn’t be here
Justice Kagan: I got this Sammy, OY, paisan, what’s your problem with me, ’cause I’m a woman, ’cause I use Jewish words or ’cause I’m from Noo Yawk. Well, spit it out, don’t keep me waiting.
Mario: You didn’t recuse yourselves that’s why AND YOU KNOW WHY !!!
Justice Kagan: No Joisey, I don’t “know why” why don’t you enlighten Sonia, me and the boys
Mario: You were nominated by the Usurper so you’re tainted, begone by the power of Vattel vested in me.
Justice Sotomayer: Vatell…Vattel, what’s he babbbling about, ¦anyone..?
Justice Kennedy: I seem to remember something from. .no not that’s it ..no…Don’t they make childrens toys? Is this a consumer safety case? I thought it was an electoral issue?
Mario: NO not Mattel, Vattel, Vattel he is the most significant contributor to the Constitution and defined Natural Born Citizen, its’ all in my briefs
Justice Ginsburg: I remember, part of a pop quiz back in ’56 at Harvard, “Who was cited the LEAST in the Federalist Papers but had a minor input on international relation definitions in the Constitution”, no one got it, we couldn’t even agree how his name was spelled or his nationality. Nasty ideas but a creature of his time.
Justice Breyer: Oh no..Johnny, he’s a bloody Birther, what in the name of Beelzebubs left nut are we doing with this. We had this chat over 2 years ago
Justice Kagan: A Birfer…A Joisy Birfer..A Joisy Birfer who thinks he can tell ME to recuse myself? Sammy, did you set this up?
Justice Alito: I’m sorry, a friend asked if I could have a look, I owed him a favor, what can I say. Maybe when I saw all the clerks sending his brief around as a punk’d email I should have looked a little closer.
Mario: I demand they recuse themselves it’s a plot by Soros.
Justice Scalia: Shut it….Sammy, I get it, I understand but really, Birfoons in the court, we had this out when that Mad Cow Orly was around, no Birfoons except at the Christmas party for light entertainment.
Justice Alito: Sorry all, I’ll make it up for everyone in the Christmas present
Mario: But..
Justice Roberts: Can it “esquire”, frivolous case, inherently valeless, a waste of this courts time, what say you ? Show of hands..OK done
Mario: But my case..it’s a Konstitutional Krisis.!!
Justice Roberts: Can it or the sanctions here will make Orly swoon. Bailiff, escort “Esquire” from the courts and if he gives you any trouble……
Mario: (voice receding) Let me FEEEENISH
Hey Trevor,
Talking about Mattel. You just reminded me. I’m sure it will help him. Thanks.
Hey, Mario. I have a couple of questions for you.
First, you’ve never answered this one.
If Emer de Vattel was the source of the concept for “natural born citizen,” why did the Framers of the Constitution choose a term that was virtually identical to “natural born subject” from the English common law?
Part B: Why didn’t they use Vattel’s terminology — and say “a native or indigene?”
And here’s another question for you as well:
If the Framers of the Constitution were referring to Vattel’s concept, then why is it that Vattel and his book The Law of Nations were not referred to in relation to citizenship even ONE SINGLE TIME
If Vattel was the most important source for the constitution, how come the first 2 amendments, the right to free speech and the right to bear arms, were directly at odds with Vattel who believed in neither?
Good question.
Trevor
Thanks for posting that again. It is hilarious. It reminds me of a parody I wrote about the meeting between then President Elect Obama and VP Elect Joe Biden with SCOTUS in January 2009 that got Orly’s panties in such a wad.
Reality Check,
“Orly’s panties”? Now, you really should get thee to a therapist.
Mario
As someone whose panties are perpetually in a wad you should understand that colloquialism. You never answered my question. Are you banned at Redstate?
Reality Check,
Now you really have me frightend. Now you have me wearing panties. I think you better take my advice.
Re: Redstate, not that I am aware.
I’m stayin’ out of this discussion!
John Woodman at June 23, 2012 10:04 p.m.,
1. A “natural born Citizen” is not “virtually identical” to a “natural born subject.” The distinction is based on: different forms of government; participation in government; who is sovereign; sharing of sovereign power; consent to citizenship and the obligations and duties that comes with it, to name a few.
A “subject” is subject to laws. A “citizen” has power and rights which he or she exercises for the purpose of controlling and pursuing his or her happiness.
Just as you badly blunder in taking a “citizen of the United States” for a “natural born Citizen,” now you badly blunder in taking a “subject” for a “citizen.”
2. Many of the Founders and Framers were fluent in French. In fact, they studied many books that were written in French. Vattel in French said: “Les naturels, ou indigenes.” The words are interchangeable. The first English translation of Vattel translated these word thus: “The natives, or indigenes.” Again, these words are interchangeable. When quoting Vattel, Chief Justice Marshall, concurring and dissenting in The Venus, referred to the original citizens of a society as “citizens.” When referring to their children, he called them the “natives or indigenes.” See Chief Justice John Marshall in The Venus, at p. 289. Note that any prize case such as The Venus, Justice Marshall showed that the court must first start with the question of what is the national character of the parties and only after having established that national character, then consider questions of commercial domicile in a foreign country in which one may be found during time of peace and intentions to remain there or come home to one’s nation once war has broken out.
But the historical record shows that the Founders, when writing the Constitution, actually translated “naturels” into “natural born.” Indeed, the Founding generation knew that “les naturels, ou indigenes” meant “natural born Citizen.” Here is some strong historical evidence of this.
“But the French “naturels” was also translated into “natural born.” In a 1781 treaty between France and the United States, “naturels” was translated into “natural born.” In 1781, France and the United States entered into the “treaty of amity and commerce.” Article III of the treaty as written in French said: “Les consuls et vice consuls respectifs ne pourront etre pris que parmi les sujets naturels de la puissance qui les nommera. Tous seront appointes par leur souverain respectif, et ils ne pourront en consequence faire aucun trafic ou commerce quelconque ni pour leur propre compte, ni pour le compte d’autrui.” Treaty of Amity and Commerce, Article III, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, Friday, July 27, 1781 (underlined emphasis supplied). This memorial and plan of convention were entered only in the manuscript Secret Journal, Foreign Affairs. The following translation, in Charles Thomson’s hand, was the paper considered by Congress. It is in the Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 25, II, folio 21. Here is the translation into English of Article III: “The respective Consuls and Vice Consuls shall only be taken from among the natural born subjects of the power nominating them. They shall all be appointed by their respective Sovereign, and in Consequence of such appointment they shall not exercise any traffic or commerce whatsoever either on their own account, or on account of any other.” English translation of Treaty of Amity and Commerce, Article III, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, Friday, July 27, 1781 (underlined emphasis supplied). So the French word “naturels” was translated into either “natives” in various English translations of The Law of Nations or as Thomson did in 1781 into “natural born.” For more information see
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2539663/posts ; Absolute proof the Founders knew and accepted Vattel`s French “naturels” to mean “natural born” , accessed at http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2010/10/absoloute-proof-founding-fathers-knew.html.
Then in the 1797 English translation, the word “indigenes” was changed to “natural born citizens.” Hence the sentence read as: “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” Vattel, Section 212.”
Source: From my brief filed with the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania in Kerchner and Laudenslager v. Obama.
So if “naturels” means “natural born” so does “indigenes.” So there is no problem with Marshall using “indigenes” rather than “natural born Citizen.” The words meant the same thing.
The Republic rejected calling its members “subjects.” Rather, it called them “citizens.”
Hence, when describing the members of the new republic and with reference to Vattel’s The Law of Nations, the Founders said “natural born Citizen,” “natural born” coming from “naturels,” and “citizen” coming from “citizen” replacing “subject.”
Note that the 1797 English translation of Vattel Section 212 eventually inserted the correct translation. That translator would have been in a position to know how the Founding generation defined a “natural born Citizen” and from where the term came. That translator specifically made a direct link from Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 to Vattel’s Section 212. Hence, he changed “natives or indigenes” to “natives, or natural-born citizens.” This is incontrovertible evidence that Article II’s “natural born Citizen” has a direct link to Vattel’s Section 212. On the contrary, there does not exist any contemporaneous historical evidence linking the “natural born Citizen” clause to Blackstone’s “natural born subject.”
3. The Constitutional Convention was conducted in secrecy. The “natural born Citizen” clause was not debated in the Convention, so we are told. You also say that the state conventions did not mention either Vattel or The Law of Nations in reference to citizenship. So what? Nor did they discuss the English common law’s or Blackstone’s “natural born subject” in reference to citizenship. We know that citizenship is a vital and fundamental part of his The Law of Nations. Various U.S. Supreme Court and lower court cases have cited Vattel when defining U.S. citizenship. Are you going to even say that the law of nations is not in the Constitution when the big elephant is sitting right in Article I, Section 8, Clause 10? I guess such an important clause as giving Congress the power to “define and punish. . . Offenses against the Law of Nations” just magically appeared out of thin air. I guess you are going to foolishly tell us that no one in the conventions would have even cared about what all that meant or that they did not know what the law of nations was all about. And what is better yet, where do you think the Founders and Framers would have gotten their knowledge of what that law of nations was? Did they just invent it in their own minds? The historical record is replete with references to the Founders and Framers looking to Vattel for an explanation of what the law of nations was. In any event, there is plenty of other historical evidence, including case law from our U.S. Supreme Court, which informs on the meaning of a “natural born Citizen” and which directly links that term to Vattel and not to Blackstone or the English common law. You can visit my blog at http://puzo1.blogs.com for that evidence.
Thank you for that. Here are some quotes regarding Vattel form Justice Scalia:
Finally, consider this:
“As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory, subject only to those limitations expressed in the Constitution or constitutionally imposed by Congress. That power to exclude has long been recognized as inherent in sovereignty. Emer de Vattel’s seminal 1758 treatise on the Law of Nations stated:
‘The sovereign may forbid the entrance of his territory either to foreigners in general, or in particular cases,or to certain persons, or for certain particular pur- poses, according as he may think it advantageous to the state. There is nothing in all this, that does notflow from the rights of domain and sovereignty: every one is obliged to pay respect to the prohibition; andwhoever dares violate it, incurs the penalty decreed to render it effectual.’
The Law of Nations, bk. II, ch. VII, §94, p. 309 (B. Kapossy & R. Whatmore eds. 2008).”
Here is more reference to Vattel:
“In Mayor of New York v. Miln, this Court considered a New York statute that required the commander of any ship arriving in New York from abroad to disclose “thename, place of birth, and last legal settlement, age and occupation . . . of all passengers . . . with the intention of proceeding to the said city.” 11 Pet., at 130–131. After discussing the sovereign authority to regulate the entrance of foreigners described by De Vattel, the Court said:
‘The power . . . of New York to pass this law having undeniably existed at the formation of the constitution, the simply inquiry is, whether by that instrument it was taken from the states, and granted tocongress; for if it were not, it yet remains with them.’ Id., at 132.
And the Court held that it remains. Id., at 139.”
Arizona v. United States, 567 U. S. ____ (2012) (J. Scalia, concurring in part and dissenting in part) , accessed at http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/372443/supreme-court-decision-on-arizona-immigration-law.pdf .
Note that Justice Scalia referred to Vattel’s treatise as a “seminal” treatise. Compare Ankeny v. Governor of Indiana which hardly even knew who Vattel was.
Mario,
1. You claim there’s a big difference between “natural born citizen” and “natural born subject,” but the only differences you indicate are those between subject and citizen.
Yes, I know that you’ve persistently claimed that “natural born” does not mean “natural born.”
The problem is, literally NONE of the evidence you’ve presented backs up your claim! And this isn’t just a bald assertion on my part, it’s been PROVEN, in case after case after case.
Literally every piece of evidence you’ve presented so far has been FACTUALLY shot down. And if anyone doubts it, there is the past discussion and references, not only here but at CAAFLOG, etc., that document the fact.
You claim, nonsensically:
A “subject” is subject to laws. A “citizen” has power and rights which he or she exercises for the purpose of controlling and pursuing his or her happiness.
So, like, a “citizen” isn’t subject to laws? Wow. I had no idea.
And a “subject” doesn’t have power and rights which he or she exercises for the purpose of controlling and pursuing happiness? Again, I had no idea.
It’s a real mystery, then, why some of the Founders complained that the Constitution did not “declare the common law of England to be in general force,” because they wanted the a guarantee of the rights that were guaranteed to those who were British subjects.
2.
a) Founders were fluent in French — so what? I have already dealt further, in the draft of my final article, with the FRENCH LANGUAGE meaning (French, by the way, is a language which I speak as well) and the meaning of “naturels’ in that language.
b) 1797 translation of Vattel — already dealt with here, and frankly produced the biggest laugh of the blog.
c) That translator would have been in a position to know how the Founding generation defined a “natural born Citizen” and from where the term came. That translator specifically made a direct link from Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 to Vattel’s Section 212. Hence, he changed “natives or indigenes” to “natives, or natural-born citizens.” This is incontrovertible evidence that Article II’s “natural born Citizen” has a direct link to Vattel’s Section 212. On the contrary, there does not exist any contemporaneous historical evidence linking the “natural born Citizen” clause to Blackstone’s “natural born subject.”
Literally unbelievable that you could make this claim, when “natural born subject” in colony and state laws gave way to “natural born citizen,” used exactly the same way in those states, and when Massachusetts used the two terms LITERALLY 100% INTERCHANGEABLY. Also literally unbelievable that you could make the claim that the anonymous BRITISH translator “specifically made a direct link” from the AMERICAN Constitution to Vattel, having some supposed inside knowledge of the thoughts of the AMERICAN Founding Fathers, when you’ve already been laughed back to New Jersey once on that one.
d) “I guess such an important clause as giving Congress the power to “define and punish. . . Offenses against the Law of Nations” just magically appeared out of thin air. I guess you are going to foolishly tell us that no one in the conventions would have even cared about what all that meant or that they did not know what the law of nations was all about. And what is better yet, where do you think the Founders and Framers would have gotten their knowledge of what that law of nations was?”
Pop quiz time!
What well-known legal treatise uses the words “Offenses Agains the Law of Nations” as the title of an entire chapter?
a. Vattel’s “Law of Nations,” or
b. Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England?”
The historical record is replete with references to the Founders and Framers looking to Vattel for an explanation of what the law of nations was.
Okay. And it contains not one single word about the Founders and Framers EVER looking to Vattel for an explantion of what CITIZENSHIP was.
So once more, we find you have not one single significant valid point.
So, like, a “citizen” isn’t subject to laws? Wow. I had no idea.
That’s because you look back on statements like that of John Adams describing America as “a government of laws, and not of men” and you read way too much into them.
And a “subject” doesn’t have power and rights which he or she exercises for the purpose of controlling and pursuing happiness? Again, I had no idea.
John, again your problem here is you view history too broadly. You take into account things like the Magna Carta and then purport to see a connection between the principles of liberty seen therein by Lord Coke and the principles of liberty expressed in writings like Jefferson’s Declaration.
If you’d read the Birther blogs more carefully, you’d know that what the Founders and Framers were doing was casting off all English common law notions in favor of a more Vattelian model.
(All one can say in the end is that the Birther handling of caselaw is rivaled only by their handling of history.)
Lol.
All one can say in the end is that the Birther handling of caselaw is rivaled only by their handling of history.
Yes, and they have about the same track record with history that they do in the courtroom.
@ BrianH
Technically speaking, the difference between British subject & American citizen:
The subject didn’t have rights, only what privileges the Monarchy allowed them.
In America, we the people {citizens] are subjects to noone, and are only bound by the laws we create for ourselves.
There was a big difference between the liberties of Coke and the liberties of Jefferson. Jefferson’s was from the American experience starting back at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.
It’s true, the Founders & Framers of America’s Freedom Charters were breaking the chains that had bound them to the British Crown. In order for the new nation, the united states of America, to be on par with the rest of the nations of the world the founders turned to Vattel’s work as one of their sources to achieve that goal.
Er, of course a subject had rights in England. That’s been the case since the Magna Carta (remember when you birther’s were trying to tie your BS into the Magna Carta) The monarch had certain obligations to the people, the person had obligations for the crown, but in return for fulfilling those obligations the subject received freedom and protection from oppression. A free man who had broken no laws could tell the monarch to go take a hike. Outlaws were men who had been declared outside the protection of the law.
From Wiki
“The 1215 charter required King John of England to proclaim certain liberties, and accept that his will was not arbitrary, for example by explicitly accepting that no “freeman” (in the sense of non-serf) could be punished except through the law of the land, a right which is still in existence today.”
Hell, even in Rome a tradesman felt able to go up to Caligula, who was busy standing in amongst the statues of the Gods in order to get some worship, that he was making an ass of himself. Caligula just laughed.
You have a seriously warped idea of how the Monarchy really worked.
Again, “technically speaking”:
“Mr. Locke, in his treatise on government discovers the weakness of
this position, That every man is born a subject to his Prince [British King], and
therefore is under the perpetual tie of subjection and allegiance;
Every man being born free, says another distinguished writer [Vattel], the son
of a citizen, arrived at the years of discretion, may examine whether
it be convenient for him to join in the society for which he was
destined by birth. If he finds that it will be no advantage for him
to remain in it, he is at liberty to leave it, He further says,
“There are cases in which a citizen has an absolute right to renounce
his country, and abandon it for ever”; And among
other cases in which a citizen has this absolute right, he mentions
that, when the sovereign, or the greater part of the nation will
permit the exercise of only one religion in the state;”
“Does this qualify: We do have the 1771 writings of Samuel Adams using Vattel’s Book 1, chapter XIX in his argument against Locke pointing out the failing of English Common Law’s “perpetual subjecthood”.”
Rambo Ike, perpetual bullcrapperer.
The subject didn’t have rights, only what privileges the Monarchy allowed them.
Total, complete, absolute nonsense!
One of the big gripes of some about the new Constitution was that it didn’t explicitly provide the guarantees of RIGHTS that the people — call them subjects, citizens, or what you will — had enjoyed under the English common law.
This was why the very FIRST alterations that had to be made to the new Constitution, an entire series of ten patches on the bright and shiny new Constitution, was the BILL OF RIGHTS, which was added almost before the ink was dry.
This is funny!
The colonists couldn’t have been enjoying too many rights as subjects of the Crown or they wouldn’t have fought for independence.
The general mood of the Colonists as to the rights of British subjects was captured brilliantly in the lines given to Ben Franklin’s character in the theatrical (and later movie) presentation “1776:”
“raising my hand” me wanna guess da Pop quiz.
Answer: c. Blackstone stole it from Vattel
Explanation: Blackstone didn’t include it till his 4th book was released in 1769. That’s more than a decade after Vattel work was published [1758] giving Blackstone plenty of time to study “The Law of Nations”. Also, as Tocqueville wrote, “Blackstone was an inferior writer & lacked a liberty mindset”.
Woodman: “Okay. And it contains not one single word about the Founders and Framers EVER looking to Vattel for an explantion of what CITIZENSHIP was.”
Does this qualify: We do have the 1771 writings of Samuel Adams using Vattel’s Book 1, chapter XIX in his argument against Locke pointing out the failing of English Common Law’s “perpetual subjecthood”.
Oh, great. Another birther rabbit-trail. Give me a source.
He’s probably talking about ARTICLE SIGNED “VALERIUS POPLICOLA.”1
[Boston Gazette, October 28, 1771; the text is also in W. V. Wells,
Life of Samuel Adams, vol. 1., pp. 427-432.]
From
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/2sdms10.txt
The part attributed to Vattel is
Of course citing this shows once again that he has no idea what he is on about because in this he quotes Vatted in support of Locke, not to refute him, as a simple reading of the piece will assert. Whats more he names Locke, but does not name Vattel at all. If Vattel was so respected Addams would be shouting his name from the rooftops
Which only shows that this guy is talking about stuff he has not read in the first place. And he does not give links as he knows that if you read the thing you would realise his interpretation was bogus.
I’ll not post the whole lot if it as it is too long, but the relevant piece of writing can be found with a simple text search of that link I gave above.
I do google-fu good.
@ Suranis
I’ll straighten this up. I can see how it would be easy to think I meant that Adams was using Vattel to refute Locke. In the past I read the whole page of Samuel Adams writings which is different than the source [book] you’re using, but the words, not the footnotes, are the same. This isn’t the 1st time I’ve pointed out Vattel’s writings on ‘citizenship vs subject’ being cited by Samuel Adams.
Adams is writing that Locke in his writings was pointing out the weakness of the perpetual subjecthood and what is related to it. Adams immediately follows that up in the next paragraph using Vattel as his argument against what Locke said about it.
Now here where you try to be slick: In that book you’re using, which is different than my source, it show at the bottom of the page you copied from: Footnote 2 Mr. Vattel, law of nature and nations. Then later at the end of the chapter it shows again with a set of footnotes: Footnote 2 is: Mr. Vattel, law of nature and nations. On mine it’s footnote 1.
In alot of the writings of the founders and other philosophers Vattel’s work, the Law of Nations, is cited rather than his name. That was the reason I read that whole page on Adams’s writings.
None of what you’re saying makes a great deal of sense. It would help if when you cite somebody, you would provide the source.
A bald faced lie. That footnote on that paper is the only mention of Vattel in the entire collection of Adams papers as displayed on that page.
And that’s about as much time as I want to give to your bullshit about “your book” that you don’t even name. For all we know its a 5 page book you wrote yourself.
Word search is a wonderful tool.
Oh and as for Touqueville, here’s the context of the quote, from Wiki. TLDR Alexix was a royalist and disliked Blackstones emphasis on parliment
Gosh, another guy stating that the US adopted the common law, and from one of Blackstone’s successors no less.
Fancy that.
And it gets worse
So yeah, you are full of shit.
Your comment made me think there was yet another way to measure the relative influence of Blackstone and Vattel: Search for used and antique copies of their books.
Abebooks is the premier source for finding such copies. It turns out that a search for Commentaries on the Laws of England by Blackstone produces MORE THAN THIRTEEN TIMES as many results as a search for Law of Nations by Vattel.
Was Vattel significant? Certainly, or we wouldn’t still have 342 copies of his book on the used book market.
But Blackstone, by comparison, was a giant.
Incidentally, this ratio — more than 13 to 1 — is very close to what we know from Professor Donald Lutz’s research is the ratio at which the Founding Fathers quoted Blackstone above Vattel. Except that ratio is even a bit stronger, with almost 16 Blackstone quotes for every 1 Vattel quote.
@ Suranis
In the response to you above I forgot to mention that Vattel, in parts of his work, wrote in opposition to Locke.
“At the time of publication, the common law of England was still, in some ways, in its infancy, with people uncertain as to what the law was. ”
Very good, this is something I have mentioned without going into details. Now try to grasp this picture and maybe you’ll understand the colonial experience in law starting with Jamestown & Plymouth Rock was different than what was going on in England: In the colonies only certain parts of the English Common Law was being used. Mostly law & justice was based on trial & error and whatever their particular religious beliefs were. They formed their own charters, compacts, covenants, and even constitutions which evolved over a 150 year period to the state constitutions during the revolutionary period. Hence, what the real influence was on the writing of the US Constitution.
In England, everyone was confused on the English Common Laws. It was Blackstone circa late 1750s who 1st started organizing it so it would make sense. Nowhere in the world was it being studied or taught in any universities and that includes Oxford and Cambridge. At those 2 universities Canon & Roman Civil Law was the courses offered. So it wasn’t till the late 1760s with the release of Blackstone’s Commetaries that people actually were getting an understanding of it, and by that time the colonists had 150 years of their own experience of constitutional-styled laws to go by. It was like what Jefferson said about the Declaration; “an expression of the American mind”. With the US Constitution is was an expression of a 150 years of American law experience in the colonies.
Holdsworth, who held the Vinenarian Chair at that time was getting paid to do PR work. Furguson is embellishing the facts. It’s true that the Commentaries were studied by many of the founders that didn’t detest Blackstone, but not to the extent that Furguson says, and many times it was to argue against English Common Laws.
Who cares? As I mentioned above and which you didn’t even try and deal with, in that paper Adams was quoting Vattel IN SUPPORT OF WHAT LOCKE WAS SAYING. One of the implications of that is that Adams held Vattel in lower regard than Locke.
And you brought it up…
A|s for the rest of your vomit, I’ve already dealt with it this morning. Since it is obvious that you never even read it, here it is again, becasue it takes your fantasy and turns it on its head
Yes, John Jay. the author of THAT LETTER, was an admirer of and was profoundly influenced by Blackstone’s Commentaries.
This means that for the whole of the United States, Blackstone’s Commentaries WAS the law. It was the only book studied, it layed the foundation of the entire legal profession. A chapter title of the book, Of Offenses against the law of Nations, MADE IT INTO THE TEXT OF THE CONSTITUTION.
Blackstone was not studied in “many” universities. He was studied in ALL of them. No less than 2 revolutionary heroes, St George Tucker and James Kent, referenced the commentaries in their treatise on American Law. Vattel was referenced by nobody.
Really, you are twisting in the wind at that point and are less than nothing. You cling to maybe 5 referenced to Vattel in the history of the supreme court and ignore the fact that Blackstone is quoted 10 to 12 times A YEAR in the supreme court.
And you cannot point to a single word from anyone that states they were not using the definition of natural born as quoted in the commentaries.
You are the perfect example of what Robert Hienlien said, you cannot teach a pig to sing. You just waste your time and you just annoy the pig.
Apologies to the noble pig for comparing it to you.
Are you claiming the above is from Vattel in opposition to Locke? It is hard to tell because you gave no citation. Yet it is easy to find where it come from. It is from the Wikipedia article of William Blackstone.
Let’s take it a little further shall we. The phrase in question, plus one more sentence was cited in the Wikipedia article as coming from the paper, Blackstone and His American Legacy by Albert S. Miles, David L. Dagley and Christina H. Yau, Australia & New Zealand Journal of Law & Education, 2000, page 46, which happens to be the abstract (the authors are from the University of Alabama) In the abstract we find the paragraph that was cited:
So, in the abstract, what to the authors say the paper is about?
You claimed a quote from Vattel showing that Blackstone was not used (without citation or backing) when, actually, your quote was a paraphrase from an article demonstrating how Blackstone was very influential. I am not even sure where Vattel or Locke had anything to do with the quote you lifted from Wikipedia.
Warden mentioned in my comment above is L.C. Warden, The Life of Blackstone. It appears to be available in many university libraries, especially those with law schools.
Rereading some of this, I thought this quote bore repeating:
Robert Ferguson notes that “all our formative documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and the seminal decisions of the Supreme Court under John Marshall — were drafted by attorneys steeped in Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. So much was this the case that the Commentaries rank second only to the Bible as a literary and intellectual influence on the history of American institutions”.
Mario,
For the record, John Marshall was not one of those early Americans fluent in French. After his mission to France he had “some” knowledge of the language, but the text of his citation to which you refer was taken from the 1787 American Edition of Vattel, word for word even down to the punctuation.
@ Dr. Con
Online sources: “A Dublin translation of 1787 is remarkably fluent and elegant, but it does not include the substantive notes of the original nor, more importantly, the notes added to the posthumous French edition of 1773 and intended by Vattel for a second edition he did not live to complete.”
From my own research on the different editions, only the 1797 London Edition is said to be the correct English translation with Vattel’s original & posthumous notes included [collected from a number of sources].
Of course it’s the only “correct” one, because out of all of the translations of Vattel, it’s the only one that says what you want it to say!
Did you ever think that if there are a bunch of translations of a passage, and say, 5 of them say “natives” and 1 says “natural born citizens,” that’s an expression of the opinion of 5 translators against 1 that “natives” is the proper word to use?
Aside from that, as someone who actually speaks French, and has researched the usage of the word “naturel” (used as a noun) the proper word to use in English is “native” (noun).
And I arrived at that conclusion completely, entirely, 100% independently of the fact that others had translated the word that way.
“Knock Knock, McFly”
John, you’re trying to do the same thing Lupin & Dr. Con did on their ‘footnote for mother’ & ‘set of blood relatives’. It doesn’t matter how we interpret the terms in the 3rd millinium. It only matters how the framers of the Constitution understood, translated and interpreted the term.
I thought I saw in one of the threads where Mario provided the proof that the founders/framers understood “naturel” to be “natural born”. From the congressional records of FRIDAY, JULY 27, 1781, translation by Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress. Read article III in French, then read the article 3 English translation near the bottom.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hlaw:@field(DATE+17810727)::
My guess is that many of the founders knew that “naturel” in Vattel’s work meant “natural born” possibly as early as the 1760-1765 time period.
You would guess? Which mean you have no evidence AND you don’t know that most of the framers could not speak a word of french.
Oh by the way. the framers only got a copy of Vattel in 1775. It you are thinking that is a little later than your 1765 date, well, gee, I guess it is.
But thats ok, considering that Machiavelli was mentioned more than Vattel. Or maybe you will find something in Machiavelli that only means something “in the original Italian, which magically you know because you are an expert in 15th century Italian as well as 17th century french.
(Yes Machiavelli wrote “The Prince” in Italian)
Of course “complete idiot” means the same thing in 17th century English as it does today. What a coincidence.
Yeah, I’ve read about that several times already. Like every single other birther claim out of dozens and dozens, the claim does not hold water. I deal with it in some detail in my final article.
I just can’t tell you, or readers, what complete, baseless garbage this and every other birther claim is.
It doesn’t matter how we interpret the terms in the 3rd millinium. It only matters how the framers of the Constitution understood, translated and interpreted the term.
And ALL translators — EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM — during the time before the Constitution was written, were unanimous in NOT translating Vattel using “natural born citizens.” It was a rogue translator — and a BRITISH one at that, across a vast ocean in London, England, who ten years after the American Constitution was written, used the phrase “natural born citizens.”
I thought I saw in one of the threads where Mario provided the proof that the founders/framers understood “naturel” to be “natural born”. From the congressional records of FRIDAY, JULY 27, 1781, translation by Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress.
I didn’t respond to this at the time, because I already had an article written which would be published in a few days, which would go into that exact matter in depth. This is included in Part 1 of my final article here.
My guess is that many of the founders knew that “naturel” in Vattel’s work meant “natural born” possibly as early as the 1760-1765 time period.
Yes, and you have to guess, because THERE IS NOT THE SLIGHTEST HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE CLAIM AT ALL. NOT ONE TINY LITTLE SHRED.
John, you need to fire up your ‘time machine’, travel back to the Constitutional Convention and let Jay and the other framers know they interpreted “naturel” from Vattel’s work wrong.
Since there no reply button below for Suranis I’ll respond here to his spin.
The 1758 original French edition and the 1760 English edition was being read by the colonists almost as soon as they were published. Jefferson had 1 of them early in the ’60s, John Adams writes in his diary in ’63 he is reading Vattel, James Otis quotes Vattel many times in a pamphlet in puts out in ’64, James Davis, a newspaper printer, does an 8 page magazine article on Vattel in ’64, and it continued on with colonists reading Vattel right up to the Constitutional Convention. Columbia university started teaching Vattel’s book in ’73, and by ’80 it was a text being used in many universities.
All total, there were 2 French & 2 English editions I’m aware of that the founders were reading for about a 25 year period prior to the Convention. There was another but I’m not positive if it was a new addition or the 1773 French edition, that Dumas added additional notes and literature specially for what he called the American situation, that he sent to Franklin.
John, you need to fire up your ‘time machine’, travel back to the Constitutional Convention and let Jay and the other framers know they interpreted “naturel” from Vattel’s work wrong.
There’s no evidence anywhere that the people at the Constitution Convention interpreted “naturel” from Vattel’s work in ANY way — right, wrong or otherwise.
It simply isn’t referenced in any records of the Constitutional Convention, in any correspondence having to do with the CC, in any subsequent memoir, or in any other way at all having the slightest thing to do with the term “natural born citizen.” At all.
If you think otherwise, produce the evidence.
As far as the Founders and Framers reading Vattel — sure, they read Vattel, and just about everything else they could get their hands on. The entire time you say they were reading Vattel, they were also reading Blackstone, and quoting him at a rate 16 times the rate at which they ever quoted Vattel.
There is simply no evidence at all to directly link Vattel to the phrase. None. Zip. Nada.
And yet here you and all these people swear up and down that the Founding Fathers relied on Vattel. And it’s a complete fable, an absolute fabrication.
You know what? Obama really is an alien. The name “Obama” isn’t really Kenyan. It’s Cardubian, and the Cardubians come from Gliese 667 Cc, a habitable-zone “superearth” which our astronomers have recently detected. “Obama” in Cardubian means “seller of food,” because that was the line of work his ancestors was in.
There’s about as much evidence for that theory as there is for the claim that the Framers of the Constitution relied on Vattel for the meaning of “natural born citizen.”
That’s really impressive. Unfortunately “many” (which means how many, two?) is less important than “all” Universities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blackstone
Yes, John Jay. the author of THAT LETTER, was an admirer of and was profoundly influenced by Blackstone’s Commentaries.
Its funny that when people actually do research they keep finding stuff that indicates that (stop me if you have heard this before) you are full of bullshit.
Have you actually read Wong Kim Ark yet?
John Woodman,
The only person getting laughed back to anywhere is you my, friend. You have no idea how much people laugh about you.
1. You want to argue with me about the difference between a “citizen” and a “subject.” Why don’t you take up your little protest with the Founders and Framers. After all, they are the one who decided that “citizen” would replace “subject” and that the English common law would not be incorporated into the Constitution. You even concede that Mason complained that the English common law was not incorporated into “that paper.”
2. You keep mentioning CAAFLOG. Show me one point where the CAAFLOG people won. There is none. If anything, they got a “FLOG[ging]” from me.
3. Regarding the anonymous English translator of the 1797 Vattel, instead of just laughing like a jackass that you are, why not bring forth an argument that addresses what I said.
4. Get it through your thick skull that it does not matter what the states decided about their own state citizenship and its impact on their property, inheritances, and voting. They were states, not the federal government. Lynch v. Clarke (1844) notwithstanding, state citizenship was not national citizenship, which had to do with political and military allegiance to the nation and not local issues such as property, inheritance, and voting.
5. So Blackstone also had an entire chapter on “Offenses Against the Law of Nations.” So what. Are you telling me that Blackstone’s law of nations was some English law of nations that was different from the law of nations that the rest of the civilized world recognized? And by the way, can you give me some evidence that the Founders and Framers cited Blackstone when referring to the law of nations. Additionally, can you give me one citation from the Founding era or shortly thereafter where a court cited Blackstone for the law of nations. I am not saying none exists but I do not recall seeing any.
6. You say there is no evidence that the Founders and Framers looked to Vattel for citizenship. That is a joke, right?. See:
a. In his own defense during the Smith-Ramsay debate of 1789, William Smith quotes Emerich de Vattel:
“The Doctor says the circumstance of birth does not make a citizen–This I also deny. Vattel says, ‘The country of the father is that of the children, and these become citizens merely by their tacit consent.’ [footnote omitted] I was born a Carolinian, and I defy the Doctor with all his ingenuity, arithmetical or political, to say at what moment I was disenfranchised—at what moment I lost my citizenship. The revolution which took place in America made me a citizen of America under the new government, though then resident at Geneva. I never by any act disqualified myself. There was never a moment when I was a citizen of any other country.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=sxS00wE2l5kC&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=%22Manner+of+Acquiring+the+Character+and+Privileges+of+a+Citizen+of+the+United+States%22+ramsay&source=bl&ots=RygvzaFnxH&sig=jbTmahSEVoMCMu6G4mhx9NiPqvg&hl=en&ei=FD62S-LhBsOclgeL2K1Y&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=vattel&f=false Now this is a member of the House of Representatives citing and quoting Vattel on citizenship in 1789 in his own defense. You would think that in defending himself, he would have cited and quoted the most authoritative source on the subject matter. Wow, Smith picked Vattel. It surely is telling that Smith picked Vattel and did not pick William Blackstone in his own defense.
b. Chief Justice John Marshall concurring in The Venus, 12 U.S. 8 Cranch 253, 289 (1814) (relies on Vattel’s definition of “natives, or indigenes” with the English translator of Vattel’s The Law of Nations in the 1797 English translation changing “indigenes” to “natural-born citizens”).
c. Speaker of the House Landon Cheves in 1814 (paraphrases Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”).
d. Justice Daniels in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1856) (cites and quotes Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”).
e. The unanimous U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162, 167 (1875) (provided a paraphrased version of Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” as found in Section 212 and said “there have been doubts” whether a child born in the U.S. to alien parents was a “citizen”).
f. Ex parte Reynolds, 20 F.Cas. 582, 5 Dill. 394, No. 11,719 (C.C.W.D.Ark 1879) (cites and quotes Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”).
g. United States v. Ward, 42 F.320 (C.C.S.D.Cal. 1890) (cites and quotes Vattel’s definition of a “natural-born citizen”).
h. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) (cited and quoted Minor’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” which is a paraphrase of Vattel’s Section 212).
So, as before, John Woodman, you lose again.
Regarding the anonymous English translator of the 1797 Vattel, instead of just laughing like a jackass that you are, why not bring forth an argument that addresses what I said.
Because the claim is ridiculous on its face.
Is that why John is referred to as a “researcher” and you’re referred to as a “buffoon”?
Hey, Mario Apuzzo — what about Chief Justice Fuller’s dissent?
Given Mario’s fondness for citing the dissent in various cases, I wonder why he would miss this one… Hmm…
Sterngard and Northland10,
What about Chief Fuller’s dissent? You have in the past and continue to accuse me of relying on dissents. Show me one dissent, other than Fuller’s, that I have used in support of my arguments. And now you want me to again rely on Fuller’s dissent. Moreover, you are the one who relies on the Fuller dissent to try to make Wong a “natural born Citizen.” Really pathetic.
How about you DIRECTLY CONFRONT the fact that the Dissent states that Wong or someone like him could run for President?
The only pathetic mind around here is yours, loser.
Thomas Brown,
You are the loser. You are relying on the losing side to try to make Wong a “natural born Citizen.” Loser.
That’s what’s so attractive about you, Mario: you think everybody else is stupid.
Your assertion that we are arguing from the losing side is a transparently misleading nugget of crap. In citing the losing side, we are citing not their argument but their understanding of the Majority decision.
This is not he same as relying on the argument of the losing side. That’s your game, and why your arguments expose you as a ninnyhammer.
Your troglodyte Birfer sycophants may buy it, but you’re not fooling anybody here.
Does their opinion that the decision implied that Wong or someone like him could run for President provide binding precedent? Of course not. But when they perceived that that’s what the decision meant, and every court decision since then has interpreted the Wong decision in exactly the same way as the Wong Dissent, and the Chief Justice inaugurated a man born with a non-citizen parent as President… those facts all align on the same side: that YOU ARE WRONG.
Which is why you have lost every Birther case, will lose every Birther case, and why those of us with brains can see that you are arguing pure nonsense.
Your habit of insulting people who agree with every court decision for 100 years can only be because you have a small, ugly mind.
If a flat-earther politely and calmly tried to convince the rest of the world that the earth is flat, people would be sympathetic to him, even while contradicting him. If the same guy, however, rants and offends and claims everybody who thinks the earth is round is a loser and an idiot, he would be scorned, ridiculed, insulted and eventually ignored.
Just like you.
Thomas Brown,
What sophistry. How do you get to the “understanding” of the dissent unless you rely on its “arguments?” Or you are just reading the dissent’s mind through some medium?
Now really!
Nope. Not at all. It’s Chief Justice Fuller’s understanding of what the majority opinion means. Which seems to differ from the understanding of a guy who defended DUI cases until he suckered a benefactor into subsidizing him for bloviating his ass off.
“Considering the circumstances surrounding the framing of the Constitution, I submit that it is unreasonable to conclude that ‘natural-born citizen’ applied to everybody born within the geographical tract known as the United States, irrespective of circumstances, and that the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the Presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not.”
“I submit that it is unreasonable to conclude that ‘natural-born citizen’ applied to everybody born within the geographical tract known as the United States, irrespective of circumstances, and that the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the Presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not.”
That’s pretty darn clear. It takes a birther to “misunderstand” it.
And I agree, to the extent that I believe — along with most other people who’ve studied the issue — that children of our citizens born abroad are eligible as well.
I think it is clear from both the majority opinion and the dissent that every justice sitting on the case understood that the if they ruled WKA to be a citizen at all he was natural born. Any objective reading would lead one to that conclusion.
Let’s look at what one contemporary thought about the United States v Wong Kim Ark and the presidency. An attorney from New York, William D. Guthrie gave a series of lectures titled “Lectures on the fourteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States”. He wrote this in 1898 just weeks after the decision in Wong Kim Ark and it was reprinted in The Literary Digest published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1899 as quoted here:
[Emphasis added]
Gee, that reasoning sounds very familiar doesn’t it, Mario?
The last sentence in Guthries’s lecture should have read
Google’s OCR missed several words including “Chinese”.
The quoted text begins on page 185 of The Literary Digest. I can found other documents published within the first ten years after the decision that agree that WKA could run for president. So far I have not found a singe article published in that period that agrees with Mario’s interpretation. Some opinions agreed with Fuller’s dissent but only in regard to making WKA a citizen at all.
How about he directly confront the fact that the Court said it was an “irresistible” “conclusion” that the allegiance of non-citizens to the United States
There’s an enormous problem with inviting or challenging Mario to confront anything, though. According to his entire historical pattern of behavior, we know in advance that he’s going to do one of several things:
So when one invites him to “directly confront” something, whatever results is not likely to really be a fruitful exercise.
In fact, debating with Mario in itself is not a fruitful exercise, except to the extent that it airs the arguments, gives people points on which to do some research for themselves, and further digs out the issue so that in the end it becomes undeniable that the birthers have no case, because they’ve come up with an entire mountain of claims, all of which have been shown to be untrue.
John Woodman,
No matter how “irresistible” such an idea may be to you, Justice Gray’s repeating what Lord Coke said without more does not equate to the holding of the Court.
You have not refuted my sources and arguments. You only say you have.
That reminds me:
I had forgotten that one. Thanks for reminding me.
Show me one dissent, other than Fuller’s, that I have used in support of my arguments.
For one, you’ve cited to the portion of C.J. Marshall’s dissent in The Venus where he quotes Vattel. For example, your post above on this thread made yesterday @7:47 p.m.
BrianH,
So that is my reliance on dissenting opinions. What a joke. If you will turn on your brain and read the darn thing, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote a concurring and dissenting opinion in The Venus. My citing to and quoting from Chief Justice Marshall in The Venus in reference to national character comes from his concurring opinion, not his dissenting opinion.
Your post asked for an example of having “used in support” a dissenting opinion other than C.J. Fuller in WKA. Citing to Marshall’s dissent to show Vattel was a recognized authority and that the opinion quoted Vattel’s statement on citizenship seems an example of “used in support.”
He wrote:
The portion relating to Vattel you referenced falls within this “I dissent” section, since Marshall appeals to Vattel on the point about intention to change domicile.
BrianH,
Who do you think you are kidding? Marshall first cites to Vattel on the first issue in any prize case, the national character of the parties. Then he goes further and addresses commercial domicile. He did not dissent on those issue. His dissent was on the claimant losing his ship and goods under the circumstances of the case.
You and others keep stating that WKA did not mention Article II, NBC language so it does not count. Marshall is not referring to NBC so this would not count either. Does this proper term rule only apply when it helps you?
The court also does not translate indignes as “natural born citizen,” despite that fact that your perfect translation that did so had been in print for over 30 years by the time of Venus.
Therefore, the court did not see the word as translating to Natural born citizen, a well known phrase in the constitution. They cited Vattel in terms of rights under international law, not in terms of citizenship.
Of course, none of the principles in the case were born citizens of the US in any case.
He was plugging Scala’s recent dissent even though it had nothing to do with citizenship.
@Mario A.
Needless quibbling.
Turning back to WKA, the salient point remains that C.J. Fuller, having participated in the arguments and intra-court discussion about the case, had a particularly advantageous perspective on its significance. So when he objects that under the majority opinion someone like Mr. Wong becomes eligible for the presidency, it’s a very good guide that the majority opinion does indeed mean that Mr. Wong was a “natural born citizen.”
And that’s true, whether or not you try to address that argument or continue to diligently avoid it.
@ BrianH
In the WKA, is this what you’re so proud of?:
Chief Justice Fuller: “Considering the circumstances surrounding the framing of the Constitution, I submit that it is unreasonable to conclude that “natural-born citizen” applied to everybody born within the geographical tract known as the United States, irrespective of circumstances, and that the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the Presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not.”
It looks like you’re cherry-picking the dissent [losing side] to prop up an illogical position. If you applied the dissent in chronological order of the points Justice Fuller was making by the time you got to that particular paragraph it would be nullified.
Justice Gray should have wrote: “becomes at the time of his birth a natural born Citizen”
Thusly spoken like a person who has never read Wong Kim Ark in his life.
Chronological order??? Heres the forst few paragraphs f the dissent, unedited.
“MR. CHIEF JUSTICE FULLER, with whom concurred MR. JUSTICE HARLAN dissenting.
I cannot concur in the opinion and judgment of the court in this case.
The proposition is that a child born in this country of parents who were not citizens of the United States, and under the laws of their own country and of the United States could not become such — as was the fact from the beginning of the Government in respect of the class of aliens to which the parents in this instance belonged — is, from the moment of his birth a citizen of the United States by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, any act of Congress to the contrary notwithstanding.
The argument is, that, although the Constitution prior to that amendment nowhere attempted to define the words “citizens of the United States” and “natural-born citizen” as used therein, yet that it must be interpreted in the light of the English common law rule which made the place of birth the criterion of nationality; that that rule
was in force in all [p706] the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established;
and
that, before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the adoption of the Constitutional Amendment, all white persons, at least, born within the sovereignty of the United States, whether children of citizens or of foreigners, excepting only children of ambassadors or public ministers of a foreign Government, were native-born citizens of the United States.
Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment is held to be merely declaratory except that it brings all persons, irrespective of color, within the scope of the alleged rule, and puts that rule beyond he control of the legislative power.”
So yeah. Fuller was talking about the fact that the ruling made Wong a natural born citizen from the first paragraph. Gotta love that chronological argument.
Forget about understanding 1700’s french when you can’t even understand 19th century English.
Chronological on the “points” he was making. Fuller was absolutely correct on his history.
If the Court had ruled that Wong was a natural born Citizen and qualified to run for the presidency then Fuller’s paragraph would of made sense, because they didn’t, it makes Fuller look like he is presenting a ‘strawman’.
Supreme Court Justices generally don’t present straw men arguments.
Both the majority and the dissent clearly understood that the ruling meant Wong Kim Ark was eligible, on meeting the other qualifications, to run for the Presidency.
Not that he would’ve gotten anywhere in doing so, at that point in history. But — along with a couple hundred million other Americans — he was eligible.
BrianH,
Maybe you are not familiar with the slippery slope argument. Many times dissents (and opposing counsels) will argue that the majority decision is ruling in a way which will lead to great calamity. The majority will usually just ignore what the dissent is complaining about or simply explain how it is not true. Hence, just because the dissent says something about the majority opinion does not make it correct, even in the words of many majority opinions.
Excuses, excuses. The majority and the dissent both understood the implications of the Court’s ruling.
@Mario A
Maybe you are not familiar with the slippery slope argument. Many times dissents (and opposing counsels) will argue that the majority decision is ruling in a way which will lead to great calamity. The majority will usually just ignore what the dissent is complaining about or simply explain how it is not true.
The reason the various opinions are circulated before publication is for the majority to be able to address the dissent(s) and vice-versa. It’s implausible to suggest Fuller fundamentally misconstrued the majority opinion in this regard and J. Gray just sat silent. And your position skids down the slope from implausible to ridiculous under the Birther view that the Minor court “defined” NBC in a way that excluded Mr. Wong as NBC from the get-go. Why would Fuller “sound the alarm” in the face of an earlier decision that supposedly precludes that concern?
No, the reasonable view, as John Woodman has noted, is that both majority and dissent understood the majority reasoning. And, quite consistently, the courts that to date have looked at the “two parent” argument in light of WKA have summarily dismissed the argument as lacking merit. They’ve seen what Fuller saw, too.
The only thing I would add is that stating this is “the reasonable view” is an understatement. It’s pretty much the only view. The majority clearly found, as an “irresistible” “conclusion,” that the child born on US soil of non-citizen parents was both a citizen and “natural born.” They stated that the same principle had always applied both in England and the US. They stated that the allegiance of non-citizens on United States soil was strong enough that if they had a child here, that child was (in the words of Coke) a “natural born subject.” The dissent clearly understood that the majority’s ruling meant Wong Kim Ark was eligible to run for President, and they said so. The only person I have record of in history who didn’t get that — quite possibly because he was deliberately avoiding getting it — was Alexander Porter Morse, the lawyer who (successfully) argued for the government in Plessy v Ferguson, the decision which upheld segregation and held our modern, integrated society back by nearly 60 years. Everybody else since then seems to have clearly understood what the ruling meant.
@Ike
In the WKA, is this what you’re so proud of?:
Chief Justice Fuller: “Considering the circumstances surrounding the framing of the Constitution, I submit that it is unreasonable to conclude that “natural-born citizen” applied to everybody born within the geographical tract known as the United States, irrespective of circumstances, and that the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the Presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not.”
I won’t say I’m proud of it; I didn’t write it. But it does raise the question why C.J. Fuller said that. From the anti-birther perspective, it’s an easy question to answer: Justice Gray’s majority opinion makes clear that “natural born citizen” under the common law and “born . . . in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” under the Fourteenth Amendment mean the same thing. So Fuller understood that by concluding that Mr. Wong fell under the Amendment, the majority was equally saying he was NBC for presidential purposes. (I explained this in greater detail in my post responding to your question to Sterngard Friegen.)
But from the Birther perspective, Fuller’s comment is very difficult to explain.
It looks like you’re cherry-picking the dissent [losing side] to prop up an illogical position.
Well, I could have added a few more cherries (like noting that it’s the dissent that appeals to Vattel, while the majority rejects the U.S. Government’s appeal to the “law of nations). But the anti-birther pie was already a blue-ribbon winner without adding more.
But rather than having me guess what “illogical position” you have in mind, perhaps you can be less murky and explain.
<If you applied the dissent in chronological order of the points Justice Fuller was making by the time you got to that particular paragraph it would be nullified.
Oh? Perhaps you can identify those points and then demonstrate this “nullification” of which you speak.
Justice Gray should have wrote: “becomes at the time of his birth a natural born Citizen”
It suffices that he equated common law NBC and “born” under the 14th Amendment. That’s why the dissent objects that the majority opinion makes a person like Mr. Wong potentially eligible for the presidency.
I have to double up on my anti-spin pills before I come in and read what you A@t#%Birthers are spewing on Woodman’s Blog.
If a grade schooler read this thread to learn about American political history they’d leave believing America never cut the umbilical cord to the British mother country, we’re all still perpetual subjects with no right to expatriate, and the English Common Law was our Constitution. It’s that bad.
What got me curiosity about the WKA case was seeing so much revisionist history being attached to it. I’m not a student of law, just a layman trying to comprehend it from a logical/common sense position. In doing that I got some surprises.
I checked Wikipedia, a A@t#%Birthers favorite, on WKA, and it said nothing about the Supreme Court ruling that Wong was a natural born citizen, and further checking three law sites produced the same results. What they did say was that SCOTUS was to determine a single question: was Wong a citizen of the United States? The majority of the Court ruled Wong was. It had nothing to do with natural born citizen or being eligible for the presidency.
You obviously haven’t read the case for yourself. If you have, you haven’t understood it. And if you’ve understood it, you certainly haven’t read it with anything other than a preconceived birther mindset.
The majority of the Court ruled Wong was. It had nothing to do with natural born citizen or being eligible for the presidency.
The majority opinion used the term “natural born” some THREE DOZEN TIMES. And this wasn’t in dicta, it was in the core rationale for the case.
They said the allegiance of non-citizen parents to the United States was strong enough to make a child who was “natural born.”
They said the exact same rule — which made every child “natural born” (subject or citizen, take your pick) had always applied in England, in the Colonies, and in America after the establishment of the Constitution, and that rule had never changed.
They specifically mentioned the natural born citizen requirement for Presidential eligibility.
And the dissent specifically said their understanding was that the majority’s ruling would make people such as Wong Kim Ark eligible for the Presidency.
The only way you can fail to understand the case is to point-blank REFUSE to.
For readers who are new to the subject, more information is available here.
@Ike,
If a grade schooler read this thread to learn about American political history they’d leave believing America never cut the umbilical cord to the British mother country, we’re all still perpetual subjects with no right to expatriate, and the English Common Law was our Constitution.
But this thread, like this blog, is ultimately about a Constitutional law matter: the legal and evidentiary claims and counterclaims as to Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility. And on the matter of Constitutional language, the United State Supreme Court in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark stated explicitly that such is to be understood by reference to English common law:
Ike, does the fact English is the language of our nation mean we are still British subjects? I doubt even you would make such a silly claim. Likewise, the fact that our jurisprudence shares a ‘common language’ and heritage stemming from England — and we here note that, just as our American courts do — doesn’t mean we’re still British subjects.
I think a fifth grader could grasp that much. Are you smarter than a fifth grader?
Omigosh! We never cut the umbilical cord to the English mother country. We’re still speaking THEIR language!!!
And our beloved “Star Spangled Banner” is really an English tune. And when our children are made to sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” to whom are they REALLY showing allegiance? Country? Or Monarch?
Oh, the shackles of British Tyranny bind us still!
To ANACREON in Heav’n, where he sat in full Glee,
A few Sons of Harmony sent a Petition,
That He their Inspirer and Patron wou’d be;
When this Answer arriv’d from the JOLLY OLD GRECIAN
“Voice, Fiddle, and Flute,
“No longer be mute,
“I’ll lend you my Name and inspire you to boot,
“And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me, to intwine
“The Myrtle of VENUS with BACCHUS’s Vine.
My country, Ireland, has famously had an adversarial relationship with England. But English Common law remained in forced till overturned by an act of our parliment when we won our independance. And did also in Kenya, which is why Kenya had to pass a law nullifying the British nationality act.
That’s also why Just soli remained in force in Ireland till 2004, because the Irish parliment never passed a law overturning it. Australia overturned Jus soli in 2002. England herself overturned it in 1984. By the way, even under the rules of the new law passed in Ireland, Obama would still be a Natural Born Citizen.
So that’s a random 4 other countries that used British common law as the basis of their own once they became independent, and that doesn’t change the fact that they are independent countries.
And unless you can find where the US parliment passed a law stating the Common law was not in force, it remained so.
“At common law, which the framers were familiar…”
Now do yourself a favour and actually read the damn case.
We jumped ship, not because we did not want to be English but because of the arrogance of the Crown and Parliament that was denying us rights due an Englishman (and, found in English common law). We had no problem with English common law but with King George and Parliament’s denying us protection of the same law. The Constitution is filled with terms straight out of common law but not defined (haebeus corpus) while others we chose to specifically redefine (treason).
When a part of a country separates, it does not mean they suddenly “throw the baby out with the bath water.” When the south jumped ship, they did not stop being American. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America was, in large part, a cut and paste of the US Constitution with some changes for areas such as states rights, slavery, appropriations issues and the like.
A change in government does not require removing all traces of the previous but adjusting those parts that were the cause of the grievance and making adjustments to fit the different situation. Neither the situation or grievance had anything to do with defining Natural Born Citizenship, so, lacking any discussion from the founders, it is highly doubtful they would have done anything different.
“I checked Wikipedia, a A@t#%Birthers favorite, on WKA, and it said nothing about the Supreme Court ruling that Wong was a natural born citizen, and further checking three law sites produced the same results. ”
From wikipedia:
The Lynch case was also cited as a leading precedent in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)[37], which similarly held that the child born here of two Chinese parents was a birthright US citizen, and that decision also used the phrase “natural born”.[38]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_born_citizen#Court_decisions
[37] U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) 169 U.S. 649, 42 L.Ed. 890, 18 S.Ct. 456.
[38] “In Chancery-Lynch v. Clarke and Lynch”. The New York Legal Observer. http://tesibria.typepad.com. Heard July 6, 7,8,10, and 12, 1843.
@ Majority Will
Did you read the hypothetical a couple paragraphs above your [38] on Wikipedia? That’s what I was pointing out. There never has been a decision.
That’s why everyone is dancing around the question I asked: “Did the majority decision in the WKA Case establish that a child born in the country of alien parents satisfied the Article II natural born Citizen requirement to be president?”
Something to ponder on: If you were looking to get straight & honest opinion on the WKA Case, which one of the following 3 do you believe would provide you with the best reasonably intelligent opinion?: John Woodman, me, or Justice Paul John Stevens?
Justice John Paul Stevens disagreed with the attempt by the Wong Kim Ark majority to rewrite the Constitution: “A refusal to consider reliable evidence of original intent in the Constitution is no more excusable than a judge’s refusal to consider legislative intent.”
Rambo Ike says: “That’s why everyone is dancing around the question I asked: “Did the majority decision in the WKA Case establish that a child born in the country of alien parents satisfied the Article II natural born Citizen requirement to be president?””
The answer is yes.
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: “All of our Presidents have, to date, been born in the 50 states. Notably, President Obama was born in the state of Hawaii, and so is clearly a natural born citizen.”
Did the majority decision in the WKA Case establish that a child born in the country of alien parents satisfied the Article II natural born Citizen requirement to be president?
Yes.
As for the Stevens quote:
Boy, you sure are desperate, aren’t you?
Your pretty little theory is shot all to pieces, irretrievably disproven, and you’re prepared to pull out anything — anything — you can find that you think might have even the remotest hope of retrieving it.
It’s dead, Jim.
The quote from Stevens that you reference seems to have been an absolutely general comment on original intent from a speech that John Paul Stevens gave at Northwestern University. In the speech, he referenced several cases. United States v Wong Kim Ark, as far as we can tell, was not one of them.
Once again, you — birthers — will take any quote out of context and use it to proof-text your stupid claims, while completely ignoring, dismissing, or denying legitimate, on-topic quotes that definitively refute you.
As Jim has already noted:
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: “All of our Presidents have, to date, been born in the 50 states. Notably, President Obama was born in the state of Hawaii, and so is clearly a natural born citizen.”
More on the speech by John Paul Stevens.
The speech was reported in a Chicago Daily Law Bulletin dated approximately September 2006 (“a couple of months ago” from the post referenced, which was made on November 4th.)
It would therefore appear to have been made in spring or summer of 2006.
The quote you reference was included in a poorly-reasoned December 2006 blog post on US v Wong Kim Ark by Worldwide Church of God writer (remember wacky radio preachers Herbert T and Garner Ted Armstrong from the 1960s and 70s?) Bob Barney, writing as “PA Madison,” and has since been picked up by birthers and falsely associated with the Wong Kim Ark case.
You really don’t honestly research anything, do you, Ike? If it’s birther, you believe it. If it disconfirms your pet beliefs, you deny it and falsely claim that those of us who are telling the truth are “cherry picking,” “illogic,” and using “spin” — just as you’ve done in this thread.
@ John Woodman
Problem is there are a boatload of sites who are applying what Justice Stevens said to the WKA Case – including law sites.
http://www.federalistblog.us/2006/12/us_v_wong_kim_ark_can_never_be_considered/
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/exclusive-are-children-born-of-illegal-immigrants-us-citizens
After read a number of sites addressing the WKA Case I noticed they were using that statement from Justice Stevens.
I’ve read enough to understand it’s bad law and should never be used as a legal precedent.
You shouldn’t lie. There hasn’t been any Supreme Court decisions that ruled an child of aliens was qualified under the Constitution to be president.
I remember the Armstrongs back then. I think they were on a Cincinnati AM station late at night.
Problem is there are a boatload of sites who are applying what Justice Stevens said to the WKA Case – including law sites.
I agree with you that it’s a problem when a boatload of sites falsely associate a quote from a Supreme Court Justice with a case he wasn’t even talking about, and claim that he thereby opposed a particular ruling that he is never known to have said he opposed.
It’s called FALSE. It’s called MISLEADING. It’s called MISCONCEPTION. It’s called DARN POOR RESEARCH.
And in some contexts, it rises to the level of LYING.
I’ve read enough to understand it’s bad law and should never be used as a legal precedent.
You’ve read enough to develop an opinion that it’s bad law and should never be used as a legal precedent.
What about Daniel’s opinion in Scott v Sandford— you remember, the one that said Mr. Scott was just property, to be used at the whim of his master? Was that good law?
What about Minor v Happersett — which ruled that women had no right to vote? Was that good law?
I’ll be waiting for you to categorically and vehemently disavow those cases.
You shouldn’t lie. There hasn’t been any Supreme Court decisions that ruled an child of aliens was qualified under the Constitution to be president.
Asserting something doesn’t make it so. The truth is, the US Supreme Court in US v Wong Kim Ark both acknowledged the implications of natural born citizenship for Presidential eligibility, and found Wong to be not only a citizen, but “natural born”. The dissent also understood that the majority was ruling Wong to be Constitutionally eligible to run for President some day. It doesn’t matter how many times you may claim that black is white. It doesn’t make it so.
Minors overall conclusion, that the right to vote is not part of the inalienable rights of citizenship, is still of immense importance today in American law, in my completely amateur opinion. For example, it allows states to deny convicted felons the right to vote, but they remain American citizens. And also it would allow the right to vote to be removed from people in mental institutions, who still remain citizens. So that part is still pretty valid law. Whether it is GOOD law is open to interpretation. Using that overall conclusion to deny women the right to vote wasn’t good law, in my opinion.
See Rambo Ike, that’s an example of a reasonably constructed argument. Note the use of real life examples to illustrate the point I’m making, for one thing.
“I checked Wikipedia, a A@t#%Birthers favorite, on WKA, and it said nothing about the Supreme Court ruling that Wong was a natural born citizen, and further checking three law sites produced the same results. ”
“Did you read the hypothetical a couple paragraphs above your [38] on Wikipedia? That’s what I was pointing out. There never has been a decision.”
Yes, and you’re still wrong. Moving the goal posts is blatantly dishonest and idiotic. Relying on birther sites for any kind of research or proof of authority is asinine and willfully ignorant.
I moved nothing. Like any subject/issue I’m trying to understand I researched it in the most fair way I know how. That included reading a total of 10 sites plus Gray & Fuller. I skipped over any site who I thought had a current stake. That included Mario, Donofrio, Woodman, and some others.
If you take notice, many of the sites reviewing it were before Obama. The Federalist Blog is dated 2006, and the Wikipedia article you posted shows the Yale Law Journal at the time [1898] reviewing it.
You read the hypothetical and what it said at the end. So are you saying your own article is wrong too? It comes down to unless I agree with Woodman & you I’m wrong also. Now I got it.
John Woodman said: “The majority opinion in Wong Kim Ark used the term “natural born” some THREE DOZEN TIMES. And this wasn’t in dicta, it was in the core rationale for the case.”
How intellectually dishonest can you get. Maybe Mr. Woodman can quote for us when the Court used “natural born” as part of “natural born Citizen” rather than “natural born subject.”
In essence, every single time — since they quite clearly made the point that CITIZEN and SUBJECT were PRECISELY ANALOGOUS terms, by approvingly quoting Justice Gaston, who said exactly that:
I quote the Supreme Court in Wong:
The Supreme Court of North Carolina, speaking by Mr; Justice Gaston, said:
Before our Revolution, all free persons born within the dominions of the King of Great Britain, whatever their color or complexion, were native-born British subjects; those born out of his allegiance were aliens. . . . Upon the Revolution, no other change took place in the law of North Carolina than was consequent upon the transition from a colony dependent on an European King to a free and sovereign State; . . . British subjects in North Carolina became North Carolina freemen; . . . and all free persons born within the State are born citizens of the State. . . . The term “citizen,” as understood in our law, is precisely analogous to the term “subject” in the common law, and the change of phrase has entirely resulted from the change of government. The sovereignty has been transferred from one man to the collective body of the people, and he who before as a “subject of the king” is now “a citizen of the State.”
You continue to maintain what is utterly false — that “natural born citizen” is a completely unrelated “term of art” to “natural born subject.” In other words, you claim that “natural born” means something entirely different from “natural born.”
You do so without being able to provide one single quote from the entirety of American history, legal or historical, which backs up the claim.
And then you accuse others of “intellectual dishonesty.” Well, as far as intellectual dishonesty goes, I will admit that you’re the expert.
John Woodman,
You said in discussing Wong: “They said the allegiance of non-citizen parents to the United States was strong enough to make a child who was ‘natural born.'”
First, you are dishonest because the statement was made by Coke and Blackstone in reference to an English “natural born subject,” not an American “natural born Citizen.” You try to hide this fact by just using “natural born,” rather than the full clause “natural born Citizen.” Your really are hopeless, Mr. Woodman.
Second, are you suggesting that such weakened allegiance (conflicting and dual), inherited by being born to alien parents, was in the eyes of the Founders and Framers sufficient to make one eligible to be President and Commander in Chief?
Mario Apuzzo, Esq. says: “Second, are you suggesting that such weakened allegiance (conflicting and dual), inherited by being born to alien parents, was in the eyes of the Founders and Framers sufficient to make one eligible to be President and Commander in Chief?”
Well, yeah, or did you forget that at the time of the Constitution ALL the citizens of the newly formed United States could trace back their origins to being alien. Why would a country COMPLETELY made up of aliens, be worried about the children of aliens being born here when they ALL could trace their ancestry to the SAME THING?
Jim,
We have been at this for almost 4 years and you still are not aware of the Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 grandfather clause? Pathetic.
Mario,
We’ve been at this almost 4 years and you still are not aware that your arguments are “without merit” and hold no sway in American law or history? Pathetic…but very funny when you keep further proving that the President is eligible.
Jim,
Instead of going ad hominem, why not recognize, or at the least, address the historical truth of the ‘grandfather clause’.
Well Ike, I never mentioned citizens at all. Why don’t you and Mario address the fact that the country at the time of Constitution was totally made up of aliens that could trace their ancestry to other countries and in many cases were not even born in their new country? Wouldn’t they be more open-minded to aliens and foreigners than say England or France who could trace back their leadership hundreds of years? In fact, wouldn’t they understand that in order to help the success of their new country, they would need the help of an influx of aliens to provide skills and fill needs for the new country? The US had very little in the way of a Navy or merchant marine when the Constitution was ratified. By the time the War of 1812 rolled around, how do you think they were able to provide the needed men to man those ships? Aliens. Now, why would a country who needed/wanted an influx of aliens be as closed as you and Mario want? They wouldn’t.
The fact that they used the words of English Lord Coke, in order to back their statement with his authority, does not change the fact that they were clearly and absolutely speaking of the United States, which they quite specifically and explicitly told us. It is you who is dishonest for claiming otherwise, and this is clear to anyone who actually reads the case rather than just relying on your word because they want the particular result you’re selling.
And the Court had ALSO already told us, clearly, that the only practical difference between a citizen and a subject was that one owed his allegiance to a king, and the other owed his allegiance to the collective body of the people:
Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States. His allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Rep. 6a, “strong enough to make a natural subject, for if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject.
It’s plenty clear enough for anybody but a birther to get it.
Oh, it’s totally clear. Mario just can’t admit it or he’ll lose the admiration and adoration of the birthers…which is kind of pathetic.
Mario Apuzzo, Esq. says: “How intellectually dishonest can you get. Maybe Mr. Woodman can quote for us when the Court used “natural born” as part of “natural born Citizen” rather than “natural born subject.””
United States v Wong Kim Ark – 169 U.S. 649 (1898)
In Dred Scott v. Sandford, (1857) 19 How. 393, Mr. Justice Curtis said:
“The first section of the second article of the Constitution uses the language, ‘a natural-born citizen.’ It thus assumes that citizenship may be acquired by birth. Undoubtedly, this language of the Constitution was used in reference to that principle of public law, well understood in this country at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, which referred citizenship to the place of birth.”
In United States v. Rhodes (1866), Mr. Justice Swayne, sitting in the Circuit Court, said:
“All persons born in the allegiance of the King are natural-born subjects, and all persons born in the allegiance of the United States are natural-born citizens. Birth and allegiance go together. Such is the rule of the common law, and it is the common law of this country, as well as of England. . . . We find no warrant for the opinion
2 Kent Com. (6th ed.) 39, 42. And he elsewhere says:
“And if, at common law, all human beings born within the ligeance of the King, and under the King’s obedience, were natural-born subjects, and not aliens, I do not perceive why this doctrine does not apply to these United States, in all cases in which there is no express constitutional or statute declaration to the contrary. . . . Subject and citizen are, in a degree, convertible terms as applied to natives, and though the term citizen seems to be appropriate to republican freemen, yet we are, equally with the inhabitants of all other countries, subjects, for we are equally bound by allegiance and subjection to the government and law of the land.”
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE FULLER, with whom concurred MR. JUSTICE HARLAN dissenting.
The argument is, that, although the Constitution prior to that amendment nowhere attempted to define the words “citizens of the United States” and “natural-born citizen” as used therein, yet that it must be interpreted in the light of the English common law rule which made the place of birth the criterion of nationality; that that rule
“was in force in all
Page 169 U. S. 706
the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established;”
There you go Mario…no problem.
Jim,
Thanks for proving that you have no case.
Just providing some quotes, which also do not contain “natural born Citizen,” is not going to cut it.
You were not able to provide any qoutes from Wong which show that the majority considered Wong to be a “natural born Citizen.”
He just gave you a series of quotes which contain “natural born citizen,” and you claim they don’t.
Once again, you’re clearly the expert when it comes to intellectual dishonesty.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!! OK Mario…using your argument, you just shot down your own case of the President having to be born of 2 citizen parents. Here is the quote you like to use from Minor:
“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.”
Notice that it says natural-born citizens, not natural-born Citizens as you are requiring. So, by your own standards, you have shot down the ONLY SCOTUS opinion that you think agrees with you! Good job Mario, shooting down your own case!!!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
@ Jim
So what you’re saying here is that the children born in the country of citizen parents are the natural-born citizens, and children born in the country of alien or foreign parents are not natural-born citizens.
Now I got it.
BrianH,
Wong did say that “[t]he interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is necessarily influenced by the fact that its provisions are framed in the language of the English common law, and are to be read in the light of its history.” But a “natural born Citizen” appears no where in the language of the English common law.
That’s because “citizen” appears nowhere in the language of the English common law.
Is it so difficult to understand that “wet” when applied to a Labrador means the same thing as “wet” when applied to a cocker spaniel, and “natural born” when applied to “citizen” means the same thing as “natural born” when applied to “subject”?
@Mario A,
A few questions suffice to show how utterly you fail to think through a case:
1) Why, under your supposition that the Minor court formally defined “natural born citizen” in such a way as to exclude Mr. Wong, does Justice Gray spend 10 – 12 pages exploring the meaning of “natural born citizen” and “natural born subject?” Under your view, this whole discourse shouldn’t be in the opinion at all.
2) Why, under your view that this case was just about Mr. Wong’s status under the 14th Amendment, does Justice Gray cite to Lord Coke, Calvin’s Case and several other English authorties? What do those have to do with the 14th Amendment? Your take on WKA leaves this completely unanswered.
3) If the English term “natural born subject” has no relevance to the meaning of the term “natural born citizen,” then why does Justice Gray discuss cases involving the former to explain the meaning of the latter?
Do you understand what “precisely analogous” means and what an “argument from analogy is?” I don’t think you do. Either that, or you’re doing a great ostrich head-in-the-sand-act on these points.
And a point and question remaining from my prior post to you:
Once you’re challenged to move from your typical quote-mining to analyze the rationale of the decision and explain why Justice Gray cites to the authorities he cites and how they fit into his overall argument, you encounter grave difficulties.
Edit: “later” and “former” should be flipped in the first paragraph of my question 3).
[JW says: I’ve edited the sentence for you, making that change.]
John Woodman,
You are trying to prove that Wong Kim Ark held that Wong was not only a “citizen,” but also a “natural born Citizen” by relying upon Chief Justice Fuller’s dissent. Your reliance on that dissent is misplaced.
First, we should note that you have to resort to relying on dissents to prove that Obama is a “natural born Citizen.”
Second, it is not disputed that a naturalized person is not eligible to be President.
The First Congress in the Naturalization Act of 1790 allowed children who were born out of the United States to “citizen” parents to be “considered as natural born citizens.” Of the 79 members of the First Congress, 20 had been delegates to the constitutional convention, with eight of these being members of the Committee of Eleven which included the “natural born Citizen” clause as part of presidential eligibility. Based on the language of this act and who was responsible for enacting it, one could reasonably argue that it was the Founders’ and Framers’ intent and desire that such children could later in life be eligible to be President.
Justice Gray said in Wong Kim Ark that citizenship “at birth” granted by Congress by statute to a child born abroad to “citizen” parents is nevertheless naturalization at birth. Accord Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S. 815(1971) both the majority and dissent said that all means of obtaining American citizenship which are dependant on congressional enactment are forms of naturalization). Chief Justice Fuller, understanding what naturalization at birth meant, complained in his Wong dissent that under Justice’s Gray’s majority opinion, children born abroad to “citizen” parents were not eligible to be President because the majority gave place of birth (“born in the country”) such a controlling effect which Fuller even said had the effect of excluding from citizenship all those born out of the United States.
If Fuller’s presidential eligibility comment was truly relevant to the majority’s holding as you allege, please state or explain:
(1) where in the majority decision the Court said that Wong was an Article II “natural born Citizen” and therefore eligible to be President.
(2) given Fuller’s criticism of the majority disqualifying children born out of the United States to U.S. “citizen” parents from being eligible to be President, please provide where in Justice Gray’s opinion he addresses why the Founders and Framers would have permitted the children born in the United States of alien parents to be eligible to be President but the children born out of the United States to “citizen” parents not to be so eligible.
(3) why we have statements such as: See Charles Gordon in his, Who Can Be President of the United States: The Unresolved Enigma, 28 Md. L.Rev. 1, 31-32 (Winter 1968) (says that Wong had nothing to do with defining a “natural born Citizen”); and Ankeny v. Governor of the State of Indiana, 916 N.E.2d 678 (Ind. Ct.App. 2009), transfer denied, 929 N.E.2d 789 (2010) (in Footnote 14 the court said that while “[w]e note the fact that the Court in Wong Kim Ark did not actually pronounce the plaintiff a ‘natural born Citizen’ using the Constitution’s Article II language”).
You are trying to prove that Wong Kim Ark held that Wong was not only a “citizen,” but also a “natural born Citizen” by relying upon Chief Justice Fuller’s dissent. Your reliance on that dissent is misplaced.
First, we should note that you have to resort to relying on dissents to prove that Obama is a “natural born Citizen.”
No. It’s quite clear from the majority opinion that the Supreme Court found — as an “irresistible” “conclusion” — that Mr. Wong was not only a “citizen” but also “natural born.” Therefore he was clearly a natural born citizen, and eligible to the Presidency on meeting the other qualifications.
That the dissent recognized that as well and complained about it is simply icing on the cake, so to speak.
Most of this stuff we’ve gone over before. As far as the status of children born overseas to US citizens, as I recall the majority does seem to imply they would not be eligible. To that extent, I would have to agree with Fuller that that part of the opinion — which is some form of dicta, by the way, since it was absolutely not required for the case at hand — doesn’t make sense. Nor does anybody else seem to agree with it.
As far as Charles Gordon is concerned, again, we’ve been over it before. You persist in preaching whatever peripheral statement you might find that you can use to back up your bogus claim, while avoiding numerous clear and direct-to-the-point statements form the exact same sources that disprove it utterly. As Charles Gordon, the source you quote, said in the very work that you quote:
“It is clear enough that native-born citizens are eligible and naturalized citizens are not.”
John,
Are you SURE Mario’s not working for the President? It seems to me that he is constantly and continually providing more and more proof that the President’s eligible. Maybe he was hired or is working on his own to undermine the birther movement.
I don’t know, but the net result is that the Vattel birther doctrine is no longer publicly viable. Whether intentionally or not, he has systematically destroyed its entire foundation.
While following up on some of Rambo Ike’s source, I found an interesting statement on methodology when looking at how founders rhetoric is or is not translated into political action. From the introduction of The Locke Republican Debate and the Paradox of Property Rights in Early American Jurisprudence,” David Schultz, 13 Western New England College Law Review 158 (1991) [emphasis mine]:
@ Northland10
You don’t point out my sources you’re following up on.
There is something in your Law Review I need to straighten out, and its not only there, it’s something I see all the time, and have alluded to it without explaining it.
On pages 6 & 7 the writer gives credit to Locke for Jefferson’s adoption of Locke’s views on the right to revolution and a natural rights philosophy and even the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence indicated that the Founding Fathers read and were influenced by Locke. The problem is that wasn’t Locke’s. It comes from the Puritans. It’s was in their Massachusetts laws of 1641, and they got it from the Bible. Locke was 9 yrs old at that time.
Here’s another: In his Book 1, Chapter 1, Blackstone cites Locke for “without law there is no freedom”. Again, that’s not Locke’s. It comes from Greco-Roman, probably Solon or another early Greek philosopher.
Correction, I copied too much of it
Should read:
On pages 6 & 7 the writer gives credit to Locke for Jefferson’s adoption of Locke’s phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence indicated that the Founding Fathers read and were influenced by Locke.
So how many times in the congressional debates did they quote the puritans?
Thought so
Tricks are for leprechauns.
The delagates [founders/framers] to the Constitutional Convention were well educated on the 150 year history of colonial law in America and the history of laws & politics of the world in general. There was no need to quote the Puritans, only what had evolved and what was presently enforce at that time of the Convention.
Too much sucking on that “Stone”. It’s got you full of blarney.
Sure, and the fact that they were quoting a phrase from Locke that HAPPENED to have been spoken by the purtitans proves that they were really quoting the puritans. Despite the fact that like all good English gentlemen they would have despised the Puritans as those who ran the oppressive Theocracy that was the English commonwealth, and were pretty much responsible for the return of the monarchy.
The fact that the phrase would have been far more well known to come out of the mouths of Locke than anyone else at the time.
And I noticed that you could not refute the simple fact that the Puritans were quoted one time less than Vattel in the congressional debates, that is not at all.
And by the way, Your racial slurs are pretty pathetic. Do you know what you have to do to kiss the blarney stone? You have to twist yourself backwards and hang upside down into a hole in the floor. Which is probably what you have to do to your mind to believe that Yes means no and when the Framers were saying one thing they were meaning something else due to your “secret knowledge”.
Hatred is a terrible thing.
I was referring to the comment I made above [click here to go to the comment], regarding your quote:
My original response (which you should read in full by following the link I provided… the highlighted/different color text), was regarding the fact that your quote was from a Wikipedia article on William Blackstone and was a paraphrase from a law journal article discussing how Blackstone’s commentaries were influential in the creation of the Constitution.
As for the my comment here on the Locke article. I was not commenting on the entire article but on a statement of their methodology in their research and conclusions. It is the statement, “but must also explain how such rhetoric was translated into political action and into the creation of political/legal institutions indebted to a particular political philosophy,” that had bearing on the whole discussion of “founders intent.” In my opinion, many Birthers have not been good at showing how any of the perceived rhetoric was ever translated into political action (such as the reliance on the John Jay statement).
You appeared to have gone off on a tangent without realizing the original point of my comment. This may explain how you can easily misquote various items (such as your quote showing that “Vattel wrote in opposition to Locke”).
Wow! I just took a trip into the ‘spin zone’.
http://www.redstate.com/ironchapman/2012/05/24/english-common-law-and-american-law-a-digression/
Jake Walker is good at what is known as 1/2 truth propaganda. Must of been hanging around that phoney Erickson too long.
He did get 1 thing right. The Justice Story quote is the absolute truth:
“The common law of England is not to be taken in all respects to be that of America. Our ancestors brought with them and adopted only that portion which was applicable to their situation.”
Walker is light on American colonial history. He needs to follow that fine thread from the Mayflower Compact to the US Constitution & Bill of Rights.
“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 [p168] 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. ”
Minor V hapersett. I’m sure you’;ve heard of it
So the bits that they Took includd the Naturakl born citizen bit.
What you’re doing is the same as trying to make a shamrock look like a tara brooch.
It’s very plainly stated: “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.”
And besides, your credibility fell into the abyss of deceit with this: “Oh by the way. the framers only got a copy of Vattel in 1775. It you are thinking that is a little later than your 1765 date, well, gee, I guess it is.”
You let it stand as a testament to what you’re all about. Should I call you a pig?
I never called you a pig. I just used a quote from Hienlien about trying to teach a pig to sing, and then apologized for any insult done to the Pig from the implication that it might be in any way be like you.
How do you like the fact that I turned that insult back on you?
In any case, as is obvious because I out it in bold, the point I was making was that the court held, just like US V Wong Kim Ark did 6 years later, that the framers took their definition of Natural born citizen from English common law. Of course you would not have a clue about that as you have never read Wong or Minor in your life.. This dealt directly with your silly claim that because they did not take English common law in its totality, therefore they must have rejected it wholesale.
Of course in rejecting parts of English common law they had to directly pass laws rejecting those parts of english common law. Now you tell me where they passed a law rejecting the Common Law definition of Natural born subject and inserting the Vattel version, or even discussed doing so. Oops, you cant. All you can point to is a letter by John Jay, who was an admirer of Blackstone and later promoted James Kent to the state Supreme court, after Kent writing that natives could become President.
As for your sneer on Vattel, first of all it took you 2 weeks to notice that my credibility is shot, second you were the one that (random example of your legion of lies) tried to claim that Addams used Vattel to speak against the position of Locke, and when I found the paper in question it actually turned out that Addams was actually quoting Vattel IN SUPPORT of Locke. And three, I was actually referring to when one of the framers got his first copy of Vattel,
Fourthly that edition of Vattel you love never had your definition of NBC in it. It used “Indignes,” as quoted by “Venus”, who deliberately did NOT use Natural Born Citizen as a translation. But then you’ve never read Venus either. I have.
Suranis: I never called you a pig. I just used a quote from Hienlien about trying to teach a pig to sing, and then apologized for any insult done to the Pig from the implication that it might be in any way be like you.
How do you like the fact that I turned that insult back on you?”
——————–
~~This ongoing character attack ad nauseam displayed by you only serves to show you rely on it to provide cover for your ignorance of historical truth. Trying to wing it won’t get it.
—————-
Suranis: “This dealt directly with your silly claim that because they did not take English common law in its totality, therefore they must have rejected it wholesale. ”
~~ Here you create a fallacy [strawman] so you could lie about what I said [nothing new, you’ve done it before] thus giving the appearance that you’ve debunked me. My actual words were “that parts of the English Common Law was used”. Hence, everything else you’ve said regarding this is mindless chatter of an ignorant deceiver.
————————
~~Here you really do confuse the shamrock with the tara brooch by claiming Jay’s admiration for Blackstone. What did the founders admire about Blackstone? Hint: I submit it was the same for Vattel. The real issue here is who would the founders logically have turn to when the issue of subject defined by English Common Law was compared to citizen as defined by Vattel?
———————–
Suranis: “..first of all it took you 2 weeks to notice that my credibility is shot, second you were the one that (random example of your legion of lies) tried to claim that Addams used Vattel to speak against the position of Locke, and when I found the paper in question it actually turned out that Addams was actually quoting Vattel IN SUPPORT of Locke.”
~~1st of all it hasn’t been a week and also there is no reply buttons for me to respond on many of your posts. Then replay your spin again on Locke & Vattel. Get it right: Vattel was not being used for or against Locke. Adams used Vattel’s position against what Locke was pointing out about the failure of being a perpetual subject. I’ll post some more about this at the bottom.
————————-
Suranis: ” And three, I was actually referring to when one of the framers got his first copy of Vattel,”
~~No you weren’t. You said the framers, meaning all. Franklin, like the rest had copies in the 1760s. What this was was a special edition Dumas sent to Franklin called the “Amsterdam Edition” with an added preface, notes and other literature that Dumas said was specially for the American situation. [from the 1916 International Edition by the 2 French writers.] They claim this edition was also used during the Constitutional Convention.
——————————-
Suranis: “Fourthly that edition of Vattel you love never had your definition of NBC in it.”
~~Here you’ve been duped by many. They tell you that the 1797 English translated edition that had natural born citizen was 10 years after the Constitution so it couldn’t count,what they leave out is it was a correct translation of the French editions published before the Constitution, precisely the 1773 that had the original notes, and Vattel’s later notes he planned for his 2nd edition.
———————
Straightening out one more of your deceits on footnotes:
http://www.archive.org/stream/writitngssamadam02adamrich/writitngssamadam02adamrich_djvu.txt
The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 – 1773)
collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing
G.P. PUTNAM S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
January, 1906
[October 28, 1771]
Every man being born free, says another distin
guished writer, the son of a citizen, arrived at the
years of discretion, may examine whether it be con
venient for him to join in the society for which he was
destined by birth*. If he finds that it will be no ad
vantage for him to remain in it, he is at liberty to
leave it, preserving as much as his new engagements
will allow him, the love and gratitude he owes it. 1
He further says, ” There are cases in which a citizen
has an absolute right to renounce his country, and
abandon it for ever ” ; which is widely different from
the sentiment of the historian, that “allegiance is not
local, but perpetual and unalienable ” : And among
other cases in which a citizen has this absolute right,
he mentions that, when the sovereign, or the greater
part of the nation will permit the exercise of only one
religion in the state ; which was the case when our
1 Mr. Vattel, law of nature and nations. [in the paragraph]
ancestors forsook their native country.
—
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/2sdms10.txt
The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 – 1773)
collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing
This text was prepared by Bill Stoddard, and Regina Azucena
March, 2000 [Etext #2092]
[October 28, 1771]
Every man being born free, says another distinguished writer, the son
of a citizen, arrived at the years of discretion, may examine whether
it be convenient for him to join in the society for which he was
destined by birth. If he finds that it will be no advantage for him
to remain in it, he is at liberty to leave it, preserving as much as
his new engagements will allow him, the love and gratitude he owes
it.2 He further says, “There are cases in which a citizen has an
absolute right to renounce his country, and abandon it for ever”;
which is widely different from the sentiment of the historian, that
“allegiance is not local, but perpetual and unalienable”: And among
other cases in which a citizen has this absolute right, he mentions
that, when the sovereign, or the greater part of the nation will
permit the exercise of only one religion in the state; which was the
case when our ancestors forsook their native country.
[End of letter]:
1 Attributed to Adams by Wells and by Bancroft, and also by the
annotations of the Dorr file of the Gazette.
2 Mr. Vattel, law of nature and nations.
3 Hooker’s Eccl. Poi.
——–
These are the books, some that I read 8 years ago on a related matter . I belive they all are from the 1906 collection of Gushing.
http://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Adams%2C+Samuel%2C+1722-1803%22
1st of all it hasn’t been a week and also there is no reply buttons for me to respond on many of your posts.
This happens if replies have gone too many levels deep. You can always respond by “replying” to the parent post of the one you’re dealing with.
Is that your excuse for your behavior when you were banned from Doc Cs for general unplesentness? And then when you started calling me a leprechaun?
😀
I called you a liar and I said you were full of shit. All of which was pretty accurate considering you were lying and were generally full of shit. At some point people give up the right to politeness. Crying that I was calling you names won’t help make whatever I was saying incorrect.
Anyway Lets deal with the Parts of my answer that you decided to talk about rather than the bits you ignored because you cant deal with them. I’m nice like that.
No I was responding to the fact that You ignored the point of me quoting Minor, that Minor flatly stated that the Framers used the terminology of the common law. You tried to sidetrack me on your NBC Bullshit I stick to my guns
In short I just provided a citation that the “parts of English common law” that Stevens was talking about included the NBC part, whereas you tried to imply they rejected that part as they “Only took what was applicable to themselves” while giving no citations that they did so and generally refused to give any proof at all for that you were saying. Just saying “Its like this because it is” does not work. That’s why you birthers are now 140 cases to zero.
So you submit something but provide no evidence whatsoever for it. That’s so typical of you. If Jay had been thinking Vattel he would have used the same phrase that Venus used when quoting Vattel 40 years later. Indignes.
As for your question, considering they cited William Blackstone no less than 16 times more than Vattel, and never quoted VATTEL AT ALL in any issue when it came to citizenship, and James Madison expressly rejected parentage as a factor of citizenship both on the Floor of Congress and later in his book called “the founders constitution, and no law book published after the framing included Vattel’s definition of citizenship but rather included Blackstone’s, then the answer is obvious.
The answer is Blackstone.
You were the one that at first claimed that Vattel was being used to refute Locke, because you wanted to persuade the ignorant that Locke was not a greater influence on Addams and the rest of the framers than Locke was, and therefore in the Deceleration of Independence they were not quoting Locke. You tried to cover this lie by not providing a link to the papers in question, and was then scuppered when I found the papers in question AND FOUND THAT ADDAMS WAS ARGUING FOR LOCKE’S POSITION and using Vattel as just a supplementary thinker in support of Lockes position.
You then tried to say that Vattel argued against Locke, which I pointed out was a stupid Argument considering the point of the discussion was whether or not ADDAMS was arguing for Lockes position, which he was. It also is a strike against your notion of Vattels influence by the way if Addams went for Locke and against Vattel.
And it was a week. There’s proof on this very page Timestamps, remember. I’ll leave someone that cares to compare the timestamps and figure it out. You are not worth the effort. And there was nothing stopping you treating a new thread for your “reply” like every other reader of this blog has done from time to time.
What I showed was the only confirmed time that 3 editions of Vattel came into the hands of members of congress. You declared magnanimously that there were others, and as usual gave no proof whatsoever for what you said. Therefore I, as usual, provided proof of my case and you provided fresh air.
Listen, there was no need to quote it again twice as I already did it above. You are trying to prove something I already had no problem revealing???
But hey, I’ll just help you see how much a fool you are by quoting the 2 paragraphs before that, where Addams NAMES Locke, calls him “this great man,” and then pointedly refuses to even name Vattel, just calling Vattel a “distinguished” writer, not a great one. Oh my, doesn’t that prove once again that Addams held Vattel in less regard than Locke??? How can this BEEEE?!?!?!
And by the way you never read a word of this, and if you did you never understood it. Now grow up.
Responding to Suranis’s imbecilic babble on July 3, 2012 at 7:29 pm:
I didn’t ignore what you quoted from the Minor Case. I even agreed with you by requoting it. It set a legal precedent for who was and wasn’t a natural born citizen. The Minor Case agreed with the 1797 english translation of the French editions of Vattel’s writings on citizen published before the US Constitution was written.That should be the end of it.
Though I don’t agree with the Wong Case and I believe it should be overturned, it did set a precedent for a child born in the country to alien citizens was a regular citizen [not natural born]. That’s the end of it.
You constantly confuse Common Law with English Common Law. As Justice Story stated:“The common law of England is not to be taken in all respects to be that of America. Our ancestors brought with them and adopted only that portion which was applicable to their situation.” To take that further: The Charters the Kings gave out to those traveling to the New world such as the Puritans [Separatists] were writing their own compacts & covenants within those charters to live under [common laws that evolved over time]. Just a note here on the Puritans. Though they would of hated and maybe even hung somebody like me, they still were important contributers to some of what led to America’s founding. They started Harvard University, and Joseph Story started its Law school.
The question that begs answering is why did the colonial lawyers circa 1720s start sailing to England to try and get an understanding of the English Common Law? It wasn’t being taught or practiced in the Colonies. Mostly it was local customs & religious beliefs throughout the different colonial areas that determined laws & justice. You pasted from Wiki {?] a part that I repeated: “At the time of publication, the common law of England was still, in some ways, in its infancy, with people uncertain as to what the law was.” That was true. It was mass confusion from Lord Bracton [13th century] up until Blackstone finished his Commentaries [1769] that people really started to understand it. By that time the American colonies already had close to 150 years with mostly their own trial & error experiences with Common Law. It’s easy with the commonality of language and common kindred/brethren to get the wrong impression.
I have no idea what kind of psycho-nonsense you’re trying to convey with timestamps, 2 weeks or 1 week. My 1st post in this thread was 6/26 today is the 4th = 8 days. Your post was the 27th, my reply was the 3rd = 6 days. Maybe in your Druid educated mind 6 days = 2 weeks, but not where I went to school. Vattel arguing against Locke in Adams writings is your imagination running wild. Too much sucking on that Stone with your tartan on can cause the mind to hallucinate.
Not only are you trying to twist up the lie you originally told: “Oh by the way. the framers only got a copy of Vattel in 1775. It you are thinking that is a little later than your 1765 date, well, gee, I guess it is.”, which I got a good laugh out of, now you compound the lie by saying “What I showed was the only confirmed time that 3 editions of Vattel came into the hands of members of congress.” Only 1 of those copies stayed with the 2nd Continental Congress. Franklin sent 1 to the Philadelphia Library and the other to the College of Massachusetts Bay. Also I’ve already pointed out in another thread the quoting of Vattel and by who during the Convention – that’s in the congressional records.
Not only did I read Samuel Adams [those books] but a good number of the writings from the other founders some years ago on a different subject matter.
“Also I’ve already pointed out in another thread the quoting of Vattel and by who during the Convention – that’s in the congressional records.”
They also referenced Blackstone’s Commentaries at the Convention – that’s in James Madison’s Notes on the Federal Convention.
This ongoing character attack ad nauseam displayed by you only serves to show you rely on it to provide cover for your ignorance of historical truth. Trying to wing it won’t get it.
Remember saying that? 😀
Yes you did by quoting the part after I highlighted which was that part where Minor said flat out that the framers refereed to the terminology of the common law, not to translations of de Vattel that didn’t exist yet and where there was no great case law that had sprung up before previous 100 years as you try to keep saying. As is refereed to in my answer to your next piece of idiocy
(And you didn’t quote the part where they said they were not saying anything about children born to Aliens either. Surprise surprise.)
Suure. Thats why the exact same justices as ruled in Minor wrote in Wong Kim Ark 6 whole years later…
So the same judges as ruled in Minor concluded 6 whole long years later that the constitution must be read in terms of the ENGLISH common law. So when the same judges say “common law” and later clarify it as meaning “English common law”, what does that mean?
IT MEANS YOU ARE WRONG. And it means that you have never read Wong in your life, just the collected sentences trickled on you from Mario.
And 100% of those Judges thought the Wong ruling made Wong eligible for the presidency. And Justice Fuller in his dissent never denied or argued against the fact that the constitution should be read in terms of English common law, which would have been the first thing he would have been screaming about if it wasn’t true.
Not that you have a clue anyway, since you have never read Wong Kim Ark.
And in the part of the same thing I quoted, which you would never quote if someone was threatening to chop off your right arm, it was noted that Blackstone’s commentaries right after its publication was in the hands of every single lawyer in the country. For most of them Blackstone was the only law book they ever owned.
And you dribble on and on and on about different meanings but you never ever point out where someone said they were taking a different meaning of words from English common law and Blackstone. Even where they discussed Blackstone they never said “we reject blackstone.”
Its typical of Cults to assign different meaning to common-day words so that their followers simply cant communicate with normal people anymore. Its the same here. You can yammer about sekret knowledge, but without pointing out concrete examples where the other guy is shewing concrete examples demonstrating clearly clearly you are wrong, you lose 140 court cases.
This ongoing character attack ad nauseam displayed by you only serves to show you rely on it to provide cover for your ignorance of historical truth. Trying to wing it won’t get it.
And it was you who said that Adams was using Vattel to argue against Locke in his writings, not me. Its not my fault someone lied to you about that and landed you in it. Remember this
That you saying that Samuel Addams was arguing against Locke in an attempt to prove John was wrong. That’s you lying your big fat ass off, not me.
Really? Because what you said was and I quote
So you GUESS and POSSIBLY??? From the way you are talking you had rock solid proof. In other words, you don’t know Jack shit. Whereas I provided some proof of what I say.
As for Jefferson owning a copy of Vattel in 1960 (random example of something you said in the very next post of yours, not replying to me as all you gave me was silence), there’s only 1 source I’ve found that says that… and that’s Mario Apuzzo’s blog. A trustworthy source there.
When looking to the writings of a real Historian, we find that Jefferson DID own a copy of Les Driot des Gens… BUT HE OWNED THE LATER EDITION. That shoves your 1960 date right out of the running, considering the book was published in 1758.
http://books.google.ie/books?id=MFSm22FPS-sC&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=did+jefferson+own+a+copy+of+vattel&source=bl&ots=YFvCoGMpp3&sig=z0oxgUGnNhDO_srHBax3tZuo3w8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QBH1T7PWI9SzhAe3lZnqBg&ved=0CE0Q6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=did%20jefferson%20own%20a%20copy%20of%20vattel&f=false
Have a read. In addition, it also says that That Jefferson only made a “brief annotation” to his copy of Vattel and that was on the subject of cross-referencing him with another work, Jen Brodins “Six Livres de la Republique.” But but that means that Jefferson was also looking at the ideas of another french writer… oh no! And comparing Vattels ideas with Brodin’s!?! Gasp! How can this be??? And finally he says that Jefferson’s greatest influence was… oh dear… Plutendorf’s “Of the Law of Nature and Nations.” NOOOOOOOO!!!
I guess that means that Jefferson is out of the picture of someone worshiping Vattel that same way that Samual Addams is. Shall we go through your list of dates and find out how every other framer counted writers other than Vattel as their greatest influence? I’ve got time, considering this only took me 5 minutes to debunk. Which means that you never bothered even trying to debunk this.
And yeah a Vattel was quoted a grand total of once. No-one is disputing that.
Dude, if that’s in any way true, birtherism has scrambled your brains. I am able to debunk your scholarship with just a quick glance at those same writings. What can you say when the very writings you claim to back you up say the exact opposite?
And by the way, thanks for not even mentioning My quotation of the same Samuel Addams paper you are quoting from. Locke. “This great man” I guess you found it too difficult to deal with. And considering I dealt with everything you wrote (aside from the time issue, which you are probably lying about as well but I really could not care enough even to look) I guess that means that you are… well lets leave the silly insults to you. All I did was call you a liar and full of shit.
Which may or may not be the truth, because can you really be a liar if you are just repeating what Mario told you, and you are just too full of hate to even consider finding out whether its the truth or not? Interesting philosophical question there.
My compliments on your finely-tuned use of “shewing.”
😀
By the way the discovery (to you) that Jefferson’s greatest influence was Plutendorf’s “Of the Law of Nature and Nations” screws you 6 ways to Sunday. Because every time you read Jefferson and read him writing “law of nations” and think he is referring to Vattel, you now know he is actually referring to Plutendorf. Hows that for reading something in its proper historical meaning?
Not that you will ever admit that. Its far more important to hate.
Bravo to you, for helping advance my position.
It’s apparent from this one and your earlier comments you struggle to comprehend what you read.
From the writings of ‘your real historian’: “Of these works, few more significantly influenced his [Jefferson] legal thinking than Pufendorf’s………”. Do you understand what the historian is conveying in this instance? It means that there were others that had a more profound influence. Butt, it get worse. ~grin~
Your historian points out: Jefferson had two [2] different editions of Vattel’s Law of Nations. The historian further adds that Vattel’s work modernized the study of natural law.
Next you have your historian stating about Jefferson what I’ve been pointing out about all the founders; They didn’t rely on any one philosopher, but instead researched many for support and to get a further understanding on any given subject. They already knew what they wanted from their 150 years of colonial experiences.
Going on what a researched on Jefferson in the past I would list the influences on him in this order:
The #1- I won’t mention because it always leads to anger on a Blog comprised of birds of your feather. #2- is Cicero, and the major Greek philosophers that influenced him. Paraphrasing Jefferson: Cicero is the world’s master philosopher. #3- Burlamaqui & Locke #4- Is a group on many including pufendorf #5-Would be those he read an had mostly contempt for. Blackstone would fit in the last group. Notice I didn’t mention Vattel in any of the 5.
YOu know, I I think I’ll leave that there as a shining example in the night of a paragon of pure self inflicted ignorance and willful stupidity. But I’ll alow myself 2 comments before cutting this deliberate idiot loose like everyone with any sense has done
“Do you understand what the historian is conveying in this instance? It means that there were others that had a more profound influence. ”
Buy a thesaurus, you dimwit. And yes the guy wrote it in 2008 so its modern language. Speaking of which, since Lupin is posting here now why don’t you go and tell him how he doesn’t understand french and you do.
Who the hell are you, Mitt Romney? A|re you so desperate that you are now arguing against yourself and with John Woodman? Because that’s exactly what John and everyone else has been arguing at you and which you have been flatly rejecting all along.
Its sad when you are so desperate to “win” and your position has become so untenable that you have to suddenly start arguing against yourself to be “right”.
@ Leprechaun
“Top o’ the morning to you”
A few comments from Ike’s ‘Conservative Curriculum for Truth’ to clear up any misdirection that a reader might have gotten from your spin:
Leprechaun: “When looking to the writings of a real Historian, we find that Jefferson DID own a copy of Les Driot des Gens… BUT HE OWNED THE LATER EDITION. That shoves your 1960 date right out of the running, considering the book was published in 1758.”
CCfTruth: Only thing necessary here is what I did many years ago in studying Jefferson’s writings. Put in your search bar: “list of books in Thomas Jefferson’s library”. You’ll find listed under “Natural Law” about a dozen books for Cicero, and 3 for Vattel. One of the Vattel books is the 1758 original Law of Nations & Natural Law.
~~~
Leprechaun: “That you saying that Samuel Addams was arguing against Locke in an attempt to prove John was wrong. That’s you lying your big fat ass off, not me.”
CCfTruth: It’s immaterial how I worded it. What is of the greatest importance and what the Leprechaun won’t focus on is the contrasting positions presented in Samuel Adams writings on subject & citizen. You be the judge. In creating a new nation where “we the people” are the sovereigns, which one would you choose?
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/2sdms10.txt
Scroll down about 1/2 way to: article signed “VALERIUS POPLICOLA.”1 [Boston Gazette, October 28, 1771]
~~~
Leprechaun: “…you were banned from Doc Cs for general unplesentness…” “….Lupin is posting here now why don’t you go and tell him how he doesn’t understand french and you do.” “Its sad when you are so desperate to “win””.
CCfTruth: It’s not about winning, it’s about finding out what is the truth. I was banned from Dr. Con’s Blog immediately after submitting a response to Lupin asking him to provide proof for his claims of “footnote for mother” & “set of blood relatives” in any of the French editions that the founders/framers would have had prior to the ratification of the Constitution. The closest proof I’m aware of that so far has been presented by Lupin is a footnote in a mid-19th century French edition – roughly 60 years too late. The 1797 English translated edition is reported to be the correct translation of how the English speaking educated minds understood the 1758 original French edition, and the 1773 2nd French edition that had all of Vattel’s original notes and later thoughts.
Maybe you should ask your buddy Lupin to provide proof that the founders were interpreting Vattel the way he is claiming.
Yo Leprechaun,
I forgot to add the website for the list of books in the Jefferson Library.
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/becites/main/jefferson/88607928_ch16.html
Thanks for providing that link to books in the Jefferson Library. Most illuminating. I could easily write an article on that topic alone.
Did you notice that neither of Jefferson’s copies of Vattel are translations that use the phrase “natural born citizens?” So it appears that he never even owned a copy with that phrase in it.
And did you notice that Jefferson also had some THREE HUNDRED books on the (mostly) English and American common law?
He had 8 books on Lord Coke alone.
Jefferson is the fellow who said, “One generation cannot bind another.” Listen, Ikey, if the entire cast of the Founding Fathers showed up tomorrow on the steps of the Capitol and said, unanimously (not that they were ever unanimous on anything), “We never intended that someone like Barack Obama should be President”, or, conversely, “We are overjoyed to see someone like Barack Obama be President”, neither statement would be binding on us.
What that distinguished group of 18th century gentleman thought, read, wrote or said is of great interest to study and reflect upon, but is not binding on anyone alive today, just as a parent can advise an adult child, but not dictate to them.
I would agree only partially with that. The existing law is the existing law; and the fundamental law of our nation is its Constitution.
That said — the Founding Fathers and Framers frankly knew that they did not have unanimous agreement on the issues that they settled amongst themselves in Philadelphia.
They also knew that they hadn’t gotten things perfectly right.
And they also knew that times change, and a law that may be right for one generation may not be right for the next one.
For all of those reasons, they gave us a procedure whereby the fundamental governing document that they cobbled together over a few months in the summer of 1787 could be patched, and fixed, as the circumstances and needs of future generations warranted.
It’s called Constitutional Amendment. And the process was almost immediately put into use, not once, but ten times in a row — with the first 10 Amendments which gave us the Bill of Rights.
Later Amendments would eliminate the institution of slavery in the United States — freeing millions of Americans — assure black people of citizenship and all of the rights contained therein, and extend to women the right to vote.
The original Constitution was NOT what we have now. And that is by design. What we have now is a patched, improved, better Constitution. One of the greatest things the Framers gave us was the ability to improve the original flawed document that they provided us with in 1787.
Maybe you should provide proof that any founder every said, specifically, that a natural born citizen must have 2 citizen parents. I can give you a specific statement that birth in the country is all that is needed. Can you provide the opposite.
In regards to your list, if his owning a book by Vattel shows his thinking, does that mean Thomas Jefferson is a Roman Catholic Muslim?
Well, John, I would have to agree only partially with you. Constitutional amendments are certainly an important way to make changes, but they aren’t the only one. Slavery was not really abolished by the Reconstruction amendments, but by the Civil War. Amendments 13-15 only ratified what had already occurred. Racial “separate, but equal” segragation was approved in the 1890s in Plessy v Ferguson and later annulled in the 1950s in Brown v Board of Education. Was the Constitution amended in the interim regarding race relations? No, it was not, but society changed and the law changed with it, even without an amendment. And women have achieved equal rights, even without the ERA.
So, it is possible for the law and the meaning of legal terms (including NBC) to evolve as society evolves, with or without constitutional amendments.
When you have something spelled out in the Constitution, that’s law. And it’s the fundamental law of the land.
Constitutional amendments are certainly an important way to make changes, but they aren’t the only one.
When a matter is clearly spelled out in the Constitution, it is.
Slavery was not really abolished by the Reconstruction amendments, but by the Civil War.
The Constitution permitted the existence of slavery; it did not mandate it. Congress always had the power to outlaw its existence.
Racial “separate, but equal” segragation was approved in the 1890s in Plessy v Ferguson and later annulled in the 1950s in Brown v Board of Education.
Neither segregation nor racial integration were spelled out in the Constitution as part of our fundamental law. Therefore, as a matter that our fundamental did not dictate, the existence of those conditions were left at the discretion of the People through Congress and our state legislatures.
And women have achieved equal rights, even without the ERA.
That rights were inequal was not a condition mandated by the Constitution.
There’s a difference between a matter clearly set forth in the Constitution, and one which the Constitution is silent on. One could well argue that the natural born citizen clause should not have been placed in the Constitution at all, but that that particular law should have been left to Congress, so that it could be repealed through Congressional act in the future if need be. But it wasn’t. It was placed in the Constitution.
James Madison actually made that argument at the Constitutional Convention, regarding the length of citizenship requirement for Senators and Representatives. He felt that it was not proper to enshrine the number of years one had to be a citizen before assuming one of those offices into the Constitution. He felt that the proper course of action was to leave that particular qualification to the discretion of the Congress.
That was a particular argument that Madison lost. Although he didn’t, one can guess that he might have made a similar argument regarding the nbc clause.
Brown v. Board of Ed absolutely did NOT leave segregation to the discretion of the people through Congress and the state legislatures. It overturned Jim Crow laws and said that atates must integrate the schools. So, I would maintain that the fundamental meaning of the Constitution DID change without any Amendments.
The requirement that the President be a natural born citizen is indeed in the Constitution, but NOT the requirement that the phrase be forever intepreted as those who wrote it interpreted it, assuming we could even know how they interpreted it, which we can’t with any certitude, since the matter was never debated during the writing or ratification.
The current law gives a pretty clear interpretation to the term, whether or not that is identical to the interpretation given 220 years ago. I think we agree on what current law says, as does everyone except a few who are mostly just grasping at straws out of prejudice or animus or are simply con men. As for what the law might say 220 years from now, I won’t lose sleep over that.
I don’t think we can “redefine” or “reinterpret” terms in the Constitution at will. If we can do that, then what stops us from “reinterpreting” “President” to mean “dictator?”
I don’t think the disagreement is very big in this case, however, as the current interpretation of “natural born citizen” appears to be exactly the same now as it has always been.
Having said that, it appears that the first Congress may have believed that they had been given some Constitutional discretion to determine what the term meant in regard to children born overseas to US citizen parents, since they quickly passed a law stating that such persons were to be regarded as natural born citizens.
However, it can also certainly be argued that the natural born citizenship of such persons was always the law, and that the 1790 Naturalization Act, like the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, was merely declaratory of the law as it already existed. And that may in fact be the proper interpretation of that particular clause of that Act.
I didn’t say you can reinterpret “at will”, I simply said that original intent is not the ONLY way you can ever interpret something, even if that intent were perfectly knowable, which it is not. The interpretation has to be guided by sound reasoning and the measured evolution of the law and society over time. For example, freedom of the press could not possibly have included electronic media in 1788, but it’s obviously sound law to extend the First Amendment to cover them. However, we do recognize that the broadcast spectrum is limited and while the government cannot limit how many newspapers a city can have they do regulated how many radio stations there can be. So, interpreting the Fiirst Amendment today cannot rely solely on original intent.
Now let’s look at Presidential eligibility, John. Did the Founders imagine a black or female President? I am fairly certain they did not. Yet, we would all (maybe even Mario) agree they are of course eligible. So the original intent (whatever it was) has to be modified with changes in society, And no Amendment is needed.
@ Northland10 [July 7, 2012 at 9:41 pm]
I see the master of the red herring is still at it, but I’ll play it your way, that is, from a layman’s perspective.
To me it looks like The Venus, Minor, and Wong {as distinguished from] were all ruled on in the fashion of Vattel’s Book I, Chapter 19, § 212. Is your “specific statement” a SCOTUS ruling, or an assumption of a court opinion?
As to your illogical analogy about Jefferson’s thinking & his books: Jefferson had a style, he often read books to understand his enemy. During his time as ambassador to France he read the Koran to understand the Barbary Coast pirates {Berbers] which served him well during his tenure as president. With Vattel & natural law it was different.
When will Lupin show up to defend his honor? Or is it time for him to be grenouille marche aveugle-pliée au mur pour le peloton d’exécution.
You asked Lupin to to provide proof that the founders interpreted Vattel a certain way. My response was to ask something that birthers have never provided. What evidence exists that the founders specifically mentioned that 2 citizen parents were required for natural born citizens. You are claiming they used Vattel in a specific interpretation, but have not shown they interpreted it the way you claim. However, we do know what Madison said:
Where does a founder ever mention, birth and both parents are citizens?
Here is a reminder. Minor was not written by the ones who wrote the Constitution and as it so happens, it does no say Apuzzo and D’onofrio claim. Birth in country with two citizen parents is one way but not the only way.
If I recall, The Venus opinion that is so well loved by some birthers was the dissent (yet, with Madison and his statement? He won).
@ Northland10
I feel my request of Lupin, who claims to be thee expert on Vattel, is reasonable.
To me it looks like The Venus, Minor, and Wong {as distinguished from] were all ruled on in the fashion of Vattel’s Book I, Chapter 19, § 212.
I don’t know that you’ve ever really read ANYTHING ever written at this site. You just don’t care for anything that fails to reinforce what you want to believe.
The case of the Venus has been accurately and succinctly analyzed here.
The other two cases, of course, have been EXTENSIVELY dealt with at this blog, including no less than FIVE articles on the Minor v Happersett claim.
Intelligent and honest people align their beliefs with facts and reality.
John,
Maybe I’m reading the wrong case when I said The Venus.
Your saying that Vattel was not cited in the majority opinion, but in Justice Marshall’s dissent.
Here’s what I read: In the Venus Case, Justice Livingston, who wrote the unanimous decision, quoted the entire §212nd paragraph from the French edition of Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations, using his own English, on p. 12 of the ruling.
Ike,
You would frankly save yourself a lot of time and deception if you simply accepted and believed everything I said.
Honestly.
The opinion in The Venus was not a unanimous one. Nor was it written by Livingston.
Members of the Supreme Court at the time were:
(The latter two Justices, incidentally, are in the running for the title of Most Insignificant Supreme Court Justice of All Time).
The majority opinion was written by Washington. Joseph Story concurred. Chief Justice Marshall wrote a “partial concurrence” which by my reading was much more dissent than concurrence. Livingston agreed with Marshall. Johnson declined to express an opinion.
I’m not quite sure how they decided what the majority opinion was. Maybe Todd and Duvall awoke from their naps long enough to say that whatever Bushrod said was fine by them.
John,
http://www.removerinos.com/natural.html
That’s the site from where I got what I posted. Have no idea where that fits on the political spectrum, but it does look to be on the Right.
After seeing everyone using the terms English Common Law, Common Law, and American Common Law my curiosity led to check if there were any court cases that used Vattel & Natural Law in the ruling. Besides those my search showed there were many. One case, Brown vs United States [1814], had both sides using Vattel and other Natural Law writers in there arguments.
RI:
It appears that you need to find better sources than something called “RemoveRINOs”. The name and the lack of any sources might be a clue that this is not a site on which you want hang your reputation. I know where the error on the Venus case originated but I will let you do your own research.
There are 2 Brown v Unites states cases
One in 1885 http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/113/568/
And the other in 1921
Neither mention Vattel.
A search for Brown v United states and 1814 comes up with nothing. Indicating you made it up or you unquestioningly swallowed someone else’s ****.
Come up with a link to the case or have “pathetic” added to the list of your other qualities.
{edit} Ahh found a case called brown V United states and it happened in 1814
http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/12/110/
Vattel is mentioned a few times in the case, never on citizenship. And according to the dissent
My my. Hardly the best opinion of the guy with the greatest weight on the constitution, is it. Rather the opinion is given as of him as a guy with some good ideas but fatally flawed on discussions of practical law. Like, for example, citizenship.
And I thought only supreme court judgements mattered to Birthers. Or you WANT us to consider the case of Lynch V Clarke…
And Blackstone is mentioned in supreme court decisions 10 to 12 times A YEAR, not the odd time, like Vattel.
Make that “read, accepted and believed.”
You actually “know” why Jefferson read particular books, do you? Is this from Tarot, or the ouija board?
You do know that Jefferson was not involved with writing, debating or ratifying the Constitution, right? So any wording in the document did not come from him.
As for “grenouille marche aveugle-pliée au mur pour le peloton d’exécution” your mangling of English is bad enough. Please leave French alone.
Simple question for Ike: If the intent was to say a President must be born in the US to two citizen parents, why not just say exactly that in those exact words? The Constitution doesn’t shy away from specifics and numbers: 2 Senators/state, jury trial for matters over $50, 25 years old to be a Representative. It doesn’t say: a “nice number” of Senators/state, a jury trial for “significant sums” or “old enough” to be a Rep. Yet, supposedly, all of a sudden, when it came to presidential parentage, they got all shy about saying the number 2.
By the way, Mario responded “They were too classy to name a specific number”. Yeah, right…..
@ Scientist
I’m in total agreement with you on that. The framers of the Constitution should of spelled out the natural born qualification for the presidency: 2 citizen parents on the soil. The fact that they didn’t has led to an agenda by the Obama supporters to turn our American citizenships into dime store novelties.
Reality Check
That wasn’t the only site, some of the other sites had it worded slightly different. Are you saying the other 3 cases are right?
RI:
Why don’t you give us a link with the entire unanimous opinion written by Justice Livingston in The Venus?
In answer to your question: no.
The Framers were certainly were not going to spell out two citizen parents, since their only intent was to exclude the foreign born (in the mistaken belief that some European junior royal was planning to come here and take over-though I doubt any were). They used a well-known phrase from the law and one with a plain English meaning. Did you ever see the movie “Natural Born Killers? Do you think the title characters’ parents were killers? No, they were not; the phrase simply means that they were born killers. When some one says, “Robinson Cano is a natural born baseball player”, they don’t mean that his parents were major league ball players (his mother was definitely not), they mean he is a born ball player of enormous talent. That’s what the phrase “natural born” means, whether applied to killers, ballplayers or citizens.
As for citizenship and dime store novelties, countries prosper by attracting new people to come and contribute their talents. Like Robinson Cano, for instance, or Ichiro Suzuki, either of whom would be a far more desirable President than the likes of a great many people born here to 12 generations of citizen ancestors.
You ought to take a break from birthin’ and hatin’ and watch some baseball. It has a lot to teach you.
@ John
John Woodman says:
“Thanks for providing that link to books in the Jefferson Library. Most illuminating. I could easily write an article on that topic alone.
Did you notice that neither of Jefferson’s copies of Vattel are translations that use the phrase “natural born citizens?” So it appears that he never even owned a copy with that phrase in it.
And did you notice that Jefferson also had some THREE HUNDRED books on the (mostly) English and American common law?
He had 8 books on Lord Coke alone.”
~~~~~
At first glance, with the large number of common laws books, it would seem to be a slam dunk, but just like Lutz’s Chart, a more thorough understanding is necessary.
Jefferson was a collector on all subjects. When he sold his collection to Congress in 1815 there were almost 6, 500 books and that’s not counting losing part of his books in a 1770 fire that he replaced.
The problem with trying to make a point about the number of english common law books is Jefferson was against the adoption of ECL in America and seen those writers of it mostly as an enemy. He wrote that Coke a dull old scoundrel and wished the devil had him.
True, both of the Vattel editions Jefferson had weren’t the english translation, but how did he interpret them is what’s important. Everything points to the 1797 edition as being how the founders/framers understood it or text would read differently.
Recently I read a political science review book on Jefferson and the Law of Nations. What I gathered from it was Jefferson treated it like a preacher thumping the Bible. It was his steady guidance which he constantly consulted regarding law from the 1760s on thru to the end of his political career.
Once again, I provide evidence, and you say the evidence doesn’t matter, and provide assertions with no evidence at all to back them up.
John,
You’re not providing evidence. You’re doing the same as me and making assertions without evidence, and I never said evidence doesn’t matter.
Even though the statements I’ve posted in the past on Blackstone & now Coke are true, it’s still cherry-picking and doesn’t reflect a true picture of the way Jefferson & some of the founders felt about the writers of the English Common Law. As one writer put it, “it was a love-hate relationship”. That I believe is a more accurate description based on everything I’ve read on it.
Book collecting was Jefferson’s Hobby and his books a prized possession. I collected baseball cards in my younger days – had thousands of them – many years I had all the Yankee player cards – I was a Yankee hater.
You’re not providing evidence. You’re doing the same as me and making assertions without evidence.
You’re kidding. Right?
For Leprechaun
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=12&invol=110
Already listed it and dealt with it, loser. And its funny that I forced you to actually give a link to one of your dumnass cases, which you always fail to do as if you do everyone actually reads the case like you don’t, and everyone keeps finding that your case says the opposite of what you think it says.
And one other point that I forgot to include above, this case like Venus discusses Vattel on the issue of property rights of citizens in warring countries. International law. Nothing to do with internal US citizenship law whatsoever. The only reason you like Vattel is that someone said to you that you can feel smart by “understanding” something that others don’t.
Which leads us to a final point for you, loser, since you don’t ever read any of the articles on the site.
Nul, excepté un naturel né Citoyen, ou un Citoyen des Etats-Unis,à l’époque del’adoption de cette Constitution, ne sera éligible à l’office de Président.
Nul ne sera éligible a l’office de président, s’il n’est pas né citoyen des États-Unis…
Aucun individu, autre qu’un citoyen né dans les États-Unis…
Nul ne peut être Président, a moins qu’il ne soit né dans les États-Unis…
All these are from the 1700s. These are all from french translations of the constitution.
Not a single french translation of the constitution used Indegenes for “natural Born Citizen”. So much for your bullshit that anyone who understood 18th century French would know indegenes means natural born citizen. It seems that the french didn’t know it at the time either. But Mario is right and actual 18th century french were wrong.
Loser.
Yo Leprechaun, Reality Check & Scientist
As I stated above, I was just checking to see if there were any courts cases that used Vattel and Natural Law in the ruling. I was surprised the results showed so many. Except for Wong I havent read any of the other cases. “How” Vattel was being used was not the intent of the search.
Ok, according to Babel Fish you correctly translated into French part of the Article II qualifications to be president. It’s nice to know that the french didn’t use Indegenes for natural Born Citizen. Thx for the info. So what is your point? The only one I’m seeing at this time forms at the top of your head.
Reality Check seems to be allergic to a question & prefers doing a Youie. Try again: Setting aside The Venus, are you saying the other 3 cases are right?
Have to laugh at Scientist’s left-handed logic and him some how having an inside track into knowing what the framers intent was. I’ll keep it in mind the suggestion of Baseball teaching me something. I wonder if Scientist ever played.
Rambo Ike
That is some real fancy tap dancing there. I knew immediately you were wrong about the Venus case so why waste my time on the other cases?
The premise of the entire two parent citizen argument is nonsense. Native born citizens are natural born. The only time where parentage matters is when the “under the jurisdiction clause” of the 14th Amendment is in play for a few exceptions. This is well settled case law.
Reality Check
Your handle is a misnomer, You don’t check, you twist. This wasn’t about what was right or wrong. As I’ve stated my only intent was to see if and how much Vattel was used in court cases. It had no bearing on the positions of Mario & his Minutemen or Woodman & his Turncoats.
I was surprised at how much Vattel’s writings from his book, The Law of Nations, was used. I have posted some, have alot more. Here’s another, from footnote 50 of the Columbia Law Review dated 2009:
COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW – JANUARY 2009 – Vol. 109:1
Text:
To appreciate how the Founders understood the law of nations, it is important to examine the writings of Emmerich de Vattel. Vattel’s treatise, The Law of Nations, was well known in England and America at the time of the founding.50 In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote to thank Charles Dumas, American agent in the Hague, for “the kind present you have made us of your edition of Vattel. It came to us in good season, when the circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to consult the law of nations.” A copy, Franklin explained, “has been continually in the hands of the members of our [Continental] Congress.”51 It has been argued that a copy that Dumas, through Franklin, gave to the Philadelphia public library “undoubtedly was used by members of the Second Continental Congress . . . ; by the leading men who directed the policy of the United Colonies until the end of the war; and, later, by the man who sat in the Convention of 1787 and drew up the Constitution of the United States.”52 Vattel described the law of nations in terms of the “necessary” and the “voluntary.” A necessary principle of the law of nations was “a sacred law which nations and sovereigns are bound to respect and follow in all their actions”; a voluntary principle was “a rule which the general welfare and safety oblige them to admit in their transactions with each other.”53 For Vattel, “the very object of the society of nations” was to promote “the peaceable enjoyment of that liberty which [each nation] inherits from nature.”54 To further this goal, “nature has established a perfect equality of rights between independent nations.”55 This equality and independence obliged nations to respect certain perfect rights that each held against the others.
Footnotes:
50- (“During the Founding period and well beyond, Vattel was, in the United States, the unsurpassed publicist on international law.”); Douglas J. Sylvester, International Law as Sword or Shield? Early American Foreign Policy and the Law of Nations, 32 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 1, 67 (1999) (explaining that in American judicial decisions, “in all, in the 1780s and 1790s, there were nine citations to Pufendorf, sixteen to Grotius, twenty-five to Bynkershoek, and a staggering ninety-two to Vattel”).
51- Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Charles Dumas (Dec. 19, 1775)
52- In 1978, the Supreme Court wrote that Vattel was the “international jurist most widely cited in the first 50 years after the Revolution.”
It had no bearing on the positions of Mario & his Minutemen or Woodman & his Turncoats.
Ike, I’m getting pretty tired of comments like that.
You have no idea the price I have paid for my patriotism, and it is frankly deeply, deeply insulting to have a bald-faced liar called a “patriot” and myself called a “turncoat,” even if it is by someone whose opinion I value no more than the opinion of a ant on the sidewalk.
Make one more comment like that one, and it will be your last at this site.
Allow me to add that as a person I find you completely lacking in common decency, even to the degree that I would expect to find in a drug addict lying in the street. If you imagine that you are a “patriot,” then I am sorry to say you have degraded and devalued the word beyond any possible recognition.
How about giving a link tot he article. Oh thats ok. I found it
http://columbialawreview.org/assets/pdfs/109/1/Bellia___Clark.pdf
And how about adding the first part of the paragraph
Wow, I cant think of a reason you would excise this part of it. It can’t be that its once again confirmation that the Framers would have looked to Blackstone for their concept of natural law, and that it clearly would not have include pesky things like internal US citizenship law.
And remember how you presented this as the notes to footnote 50
STUNNINGLY, in the real article. footnote 50 is rather different;
Amazingly the other cited footnotes are different to the version you gave! How surprising;
Yep, no reason at all that you would refuse to give the actual link to the article. And I haven’t even checked to see if you have altered the text of the article yet. What surprises would lie in wait if I did?
A down-at-the heels courtroom in a small town.
Clerk: Rambo Ike
Ike (stepping forward): Here
Judge: Mr. Ike, you are charged with going 73 mph in a 55 mph zone. How do you plead?
Ike: Your honor, Vattel considers speed limits to violate natural law.
Judge: Mattel? We are not playing games here, Mr. Ike.
Ike: No, your honor, not Mattel, Vattel.
Judge: Who?
Ike: Emer de Vattel, a Swiss philosopher, who wrote the US Constitution
Judge: Swiss? We aren’t here to discuss Mitt Romney’s bank accounts. And Madison wrote the Constitution.
Ike: Well, with Vattel’s help.
Judge: I went to law school and practiced law for 25 years and I never heard of Vattel. Though I got my granddaughter a Barbie for Christmas.
Ike: Well, your honor, according to Vattel, under natural law and American Common law, there is no speed limit. At least not for those with 2 citizen parents.
Judge: Oh, a wise guy. Who cares about your parents? You’re 45 years old, time to stand on your own two feet.
Ike: Your honor, I claim natural born citizen status under the law of nations.
Judge: The law of what?
Ike: The law of nations, your honor, like the book by Vattel.
Judge: I’ve had enough. $100 + costs on the speeding and 30 days for contempt of court. Bailiff!
Ike (being dragged from the court): I am going to appeal to the Hague. The judge is a usurper. He isn’t a natural born judge because his parents weren’t both judges….
Rambo Ike wrote:
I do check. I checked your quote from The Venus and found it was from a dissent by Chief Justice Marshall and not from a “unanimous opinion” written by Justice Livingston. I even check my own comments. When Mario objected that he was not denied PHV admission in Virginia I researched on my own and found his explanation of his problems that finally resulted in his approval to file an amicus brief in the 4th Circuit. I probably spent an hour searching for the facts on this. (I took Mario’s word that what he filed on this in this was correct). My reward for correcting my mistake is a veiled threat against me and being called an enabler, a manipulator, and a liar.
Frankly Rambo you bring very little to the table. At least Mario makes an attempt to argue his points even though he has to stand on his head to support his flawed assumptions. Mario also did one thing that impressed me. He defended the young lady Alexandra Hill who represented President Obama in New Jersey when that liar Dan Crosby at the Daily Pen told a blatant lie when he claimed she said that Obama’s birth certificate being a forgery at the hearing and Birthers started harassing her.
I can see why Doctor Conspiracy booted you. I suspect John Woodman is running out of patience too.
Oh just noticed my selection didn’t include the last citation of footnote 52 for some reason.
U.S. Steel Corp. v. Multistate Tax Comm’n, 434 U.S. 452,
462 n.12 (1978).
Sorry all
Are you aware that Vattel wrote a great deal more than just the single citizenship paragraph? Therefore, I would expect him to be quoted, especially in matters of international law.
Now that you found the article, can you explain the topic and thesis? Have you even bother to read part of it?
Though it may not have been your point, the article did help answer an earlier question of yours. Above you said:
The article explains on page 58-59:
So, the authors claim is that, for municipal law, such as search and seizure (or Natural Born Citizen), the founders would look to the common law. For laws regarding foreign relations, such as granting Letters of Marque, they would look toward the law of nations, of which Vattel was one writer.
You would know the point, loser, if you had actually read the article by John Woodman. Four of those translations were done by close friends of the framers. One was done by Thomas Jefferson’s NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR in 1788. If you think the guy didn’t nip over for a cup of sugar and to discuss the document he was translating with Jefferson himself you are off your noodle. Not only that, Jefferson was still in Paris when the translation was published, and he raised no objection to it.
So, since your silly argument is to claim “It doesn’t matter how we interpret the terms in the 3rd millinium. It only matters how the framers of the Constitution understood, translated and interpreted the term.” then the framers are once again calling you an Ape. But then we all remember you interpreting a document where Samuel Adams was citing Locke as Adams arguing against him. And your only defense was “well I did read it ya know.”
To quote “A fish called Wanda”
Leprechaun
Just to give ya an appetizer on the many holes – some big enough to drive a Mack truck through – I’m finding in what Woodman has billed as his final performance [a reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand].
The following is a statement [paragraph] from Woodman under his heading in Part 1: Wording from a proposed treaty between the United States and France (1781):
Woodman: “In fact, the incident clearly illustrates that not only the States, but the United States government itself, in the year 1781 — five years after the Revolution — spoke of their people as “natural born subjects.””
Problem 1- Any historian of the founding period would instantly spot the fallacy: “1781 being 5 years after the Revolution.” The Americans didn’t claim victory till Oct of 1781, and it wasn’t finalized till 1783 with the British giving up all claims to the Colonies.
Problem 2- As Mario has so accurately pointed out in his post on July 8, 2012 at 11:44 pm, Part 1: “Thomas Jefferson specifically obliterated “subject” from the Declaration of Independence and replaced it with “citizen.”” That was the official statement showing the break from being subjects of the British Crown to the start of their goal ‘as a rising nation’ [Franklin], to be recognized as a independent sovereign nation among the other nations of the world.
Problem 3- The incident DOES NOT illustrate the US Government seen the American people as any kind of subjects. It was only the secretary of the 2nd Continental Congress translating the words of the French Minister.
Due to John’s ongoing adding of more parts and some reediting, I’ll hold in reserve the additional flaws I’m finding till he makes his final curtain bow.
Oh, brother. That’s the best you can come up with?
Not that I’m surprised.
To use a biblical reference: You strain out a gnat, but swallow camels.
What does it matter whether the Revolutionary War had officially ended?
The English translation mentioned was the official document considered by the Continental Congress. Quoting the Library of Congress:
The point stands. And it stands further emphasized by the fact that, as you have so helpfully noted, the official record of the Continental Congress referred to our people as “natural born subjects” five years and three weeks after Thomas Jefferson described our people as “citizens” in the Declaration of Independence.
John
I read it agian. You’ve misconstrued the Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 25, II, folio 21.
This was a plan sent by the Minister of France, in french, for regulating the powers and duties of consuls and vice consuls. This was just the opening volley of what was to be an ongoing debate in Congress, as stated in the congressional records: “will require discussion in repeated conferences”.
The Secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson, translated it so the members of Congress that didn’t understand French could debate it. Nowhere in any of that congressional record does it say it’s the official position of the American government.
Provide evidence for your claim.
What claim? I didn’t say that they approved the agreement with France. But the document referenced was their official working document. According to the Library of Congress, the document referenced “WAS THE PAPER CONSIDERED BY CONGRESS.”
I’d call that an official document.
@ Suranis July 11, 2012 at 3:37 pm
I believe you really can’t think of a reason why I would leave out Blackstone.
Footnote 51 wasn’t necessary, my mistake.
You should check the text, there is a misspelled word.
The text is a clue as to why the founders turned to Vattel and not Blackstone.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
@ Suranis July 10, 2012 at 7:45 am
I still don’t understand your point.
You’re saying it’s french translations of the Constitution, and I was talking about english translation of Vattel’s text in Chapter XIX sect 212. [?]
Have you got yourself cleared up on Jefferson’s 1758 copy?
Did you notice the more significantly influenced?: nine citations to Pufendorf, sixteen to Grotius, twenty-five to Bynkershoek, and a staggering ninety-two to Vattel
Gee, I was talking about the way 18th century French and Thomas Jefferson’s Neighbor translated the term Natural Born Citizen. After all
Sadly, in Venus and every single English translation of Vattel I’ve ever read, including your perfect English 1797 translation, Naturel was translated as Native.
And as for your other BS, its STUNNING to me that a new country trying to figure out its place in the international scene would be looking at writers on international law How could that be?? And the Footnotes you deleted (which was more that just 51 LOL) showed that they looked far wider than poor old Vattel.
And not a single line you edited showed that they looked to Vattel for citizenship or rejected English common law. Indeed, the full document shows that they incorporated large parts of English common law.
But hey I know that because I looked through it and provided the link.
Oh and Jefferson didn’t have a copy of Vattel in 1758. Before you were claiming that the founders received copies in the early 1760s, and now you seem to be claiming that Jefferson got a copy of the book the year it was published by airmail.
If you have a shred of proof that Jefferson had a copy in 1758, or even that he had a copy of the 1758 produce it! Because the only documentry proof ever shown here shows that his copy of Vattel was one of the later editions.
Suranis said:
Sadly, in Venus and every single English translation of Vattel I’ve ever read, including your perfect English 1797 translation, Naturel was translated as Native.
If Ike would actually read what I’ve written on the subject, he would know that “native” (noun) seems to be the best English translation for the French word “naturel” (noun).
On the other hand, “au naturel” means “naked”. Perhaps that is what Vattel meant.
If Ike would read the sources he cites, that would be something.
@ Northland10 July 11, 2012 at 6:53 pm
I think you’re right, Vattel did write more than 1 paragraph on citizenship. Probably 2?
Topic & thesis? Check the INDEX that should help you.
Not saying you dropped in a red herring, but I can’t figure out how the pg. 58-59
explanation on interpreting the Constitution will help translate a French edition of Vattel into English. Must be above my pay grade.
Really? Did the authors claim the founders would look to the common law for natural born Citizen? Would that be the English Common Law?
I cant think why you didn’t give us the link to that article. It’s fascinating reading. Of course it cant be that Mario is simply throwing bits and pieces of any article he finds that mentions Vattel at you, and you are unquestioningly soaking it up like a sponge without actually reading the article.
PS those are full paragraphs and full sentences. And again, here’s the link. http://columbialawreview.org/assets/pdfs/109/1/Bellia___Clark.pdf
So Rambo, you do not know the topic it thesis of the article you cited. I asked you because I read the article, knew the topic and thesis, and was checking to see if you read and knew the topic. Apparently you never read it or have any clue what it is about.
Clueless pretty well describes most of the birthers.
Except it’s worse than that.
Last month we had a birther whom another poster here described as “being willfully ignorant.” I actually asked the person to please not describe the birther as “willfully ignorant,” but to give the guy a chance.
It turned out the description was an accurate one. In the end, I think I had to apologize to the person I asked not to describe the birther in that way.
Ignorant can be fixed. Willfully ignorant can’t be.
Ike always ha