Again, with the "Natural Born Citizen"

 It's getting to be that time again, when politicians who are not legally entitled to seek the US presidency will nonetheless seek the US presidency.  It is up to *you*, as US citizens and electors, to understand why these politicians are ineligible and to *refuse* to support them in their illegal quests.

The US Constitution *requires* that the President and the Vice-President of the USA be natural born US citizens.

But, what does "natural born US citizen" mean?  What requirement or requirements does one have to meet in order to be a "natural born US citizen"?

Some people -- generally Democrats or other leftists, but also GOPers who want to obfuscate the fact that their favorite politician is not a natural born US citizen – will say, “The Constitution does not define the term ‘natural born US citizen’”, as though that means anything; and with the generally unspoken assertion that the term therefore means nothing, or they will explicitly say that therefore we cannot know what it means.  Same difference.  But, this pseudo-argument is absurd in at least three ways:

1) The US Constitution defines almost none of the terms it uses. One of the few terms it does define is ‘treason’, and that is because it is redefining the term more narrowly than it had been understood since 1066.

2) To say that since the Constitution doesn’t define some term it uses, and thus that the term’s meaning is unknown or obscure, is to say that the Framers mindlessly put things in the document without knowing what they meant by those terms.  You know, sort of like Nancy Pelosi’s infamous “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it”.

3) To say that since the Constitution doesn’t define some term it uses, and thus that the term’s meaning is unknown or obscure, is to say that *all* terms used in the document are of unknown or obscure meanings.

Some people – much the same people as above, and for much the same reasons – will say that "natural born US citizen" means *anyone* born in the USA.  But, does that assertion stand up to scrutiny?  Are “anchor babies” natural born US citizens, and thus legally able to occupy the offices of President and Vice-President?  Are “birth-tourism babies” natural born US citizens, and thus legally able to occupy the offices of President and Vice-President?  I don’t know whether it’s still common, but some years ago it was popular with the more affluent subjects of (Communist) China to travel to the US just before their babies were due to be born, so as to take advantage of an at-the-time relatively recent supreme Court (capitalization intentional, as per the Constitution) re-interpretation of the first sentence of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. 

Are these people – Chinese “citizens”, born to Chinese “citizens”, reared in Communist China -- *really* natural born US citizens and legally able to occupy the offices of President and Vice-President?  Of course not, that’s absurd!

So, if merely being born on US soil does not suffice to make one a natural born US citizen, what does?

Here are the conditions that one’s birth must meet to in order to make one a natural born US citizen:

1) One must be born under the *sole* jurisdiction of the USA;

2) One’s parents (note the plural) must be US citizens at the time of one’s birth;

2a) which implies that one’s parents must be married to one another, as bastards “have no father”.

Concerning “birth tourism” babies and “anchor babies”, while indeed born in the USA, they fail on both counts.

Concerning Nikki Haley, Kamala Harris, Marco Rubio, while indeed born in the USA, they also fail on both counts.

Concerning Ted Cruz, he also fails on both counts – he was not even born in the USA, his father was not a US citizen at the time of his birth, and, get this, he wasn’t even legally a US citizen until he was 16 years old.

Concerning Barack Obama, we don’t know *where* he was born; he himself has given conflicting accounts.  But, we *do* know that his father was not a US citizen at the time of his birth.  Thus, Barack Obama is *not* a natural born US citizen, and his occupancy of the office of US President was unconstitutional, and thus illegal.

EDIT: 2023/12/28 (the following is a response I made to on GAB to someone's question about the natural born US citizenship status of certain politicians) --

Cruz's mother was a US citizen; his father was not. Cruz's US citizenship was conferred as a matter of US naturalization law -- he is a *naturalized* US citizen. And, in fact, he wasn't legally a US citizen until his mother submitted the requisite paperwork pursuant to US naturalization law when he was 16 years old.

When the Constitution was written, a (married) woman's citizenship was *automatically* the same as her husband's; this was under the legal doctrine called 'Coverture'. In the early 20th Century, the citizenship status of a married woman was de-linked from that of her husband. Had Cruz been born previous to this de-linkage, his mother wouldn't have been able to petition for automatic naturalization for Ted, as being married to a non-citizen, she would no longer have been a US citizen.

To the best of my knowledge, even to this day, US naturalization law makes a distinction between children born overseas to parents both of whom are US citizens in the first case, and to a US citizen man and non-citizen woman in the second case, and to a US citizen woman and non-citizen man on the third.

Now, in the case of Obama (presuming he actually was born in the US), even though he was (allegedly) born in the US, to a US citizen mother and to a father legally in the US, he was not born under the *sole* jurisdiction of the US, as his father was the subject of a foreign sovereign state. Thus, as he was not born under the *sole* jurisdiction of the US, he is not a natural born US citizen.

In the cases of Harris, Rubio, Haley and Ramaswamy -- neither of the parents of any of them were US citizens at the times of their births. Thus, even though born in the US to parents who were legally in the US, as their parents were not US citizens, they were not born under the *sole* jurisdiction of the US, and thus are not natural born US citizens.

In the case of Tulsi Gabbard, she was born in American Samoa to parents both of whom were US citizens. Now, as the US is the *sovereign* over American Samoa, even though A.S. in not a US State, she was indeed born under the *sole* jurisdiction of the US, and thus she is a natural born US citizen.

 

What if?

What if --

What if "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not *really* the ruler of the Iranian regime? What if the *real* ruler of Iran was the regime's late terrorist mastermind, General Qassem Soleimani?

What if there is no clear successor not only to the Iranian regime's terrorist-in-chief, but also none to the entire terrorist regime itself?

What if the Iranian people -- who clearly hate the regime -- are now able to overthrow it, as its various members flail about, each trying to assert his own supremacy?

What if Trump has just done more to promote peace in the world than any US president since Ronaldus Magnus (and certainly more that a certain "Nobel Peace Prize awarded" alleged president)?

The volcano gods are angry!

Douglas Wilson: Babylon and the Bolshevik Buttercups

But surrounding the whole thing, there has always been a mysterious bipartisan consensus, one dictated by an imperious zeitgeist, promulgated by the entertainment complex and media, and studiously obeyed by all the politicians. This zeitgeist was enthusiastically pushed by the left and sullenly obeyed by the right, and the whole culture steadily followed after it. When it has made enough of an appearance to be given a name, it has been called political-correctness.

If you want to know what powers this zeitgeist has, look no further than the immediately honored demand—driven by hidden chthonic powers—that a hapless congressman from East Toad Flats (R-AR) be found guilty of a career-ending gaffeous blunder because someone at the state fair barbecue recorded him telling a blonde joke. The cry goes up in the village and into the volcano he goes.

So this brings us to the recent presidential election. A mistake that many are making with regard to all of this is that they are trying to interpret everything in terms of policy. Now as I said at the top, policy matters and the new president will have to institute particular policies. He will have to govern, in other words. ...

But don’t let that distract you from what is really going on. What is really going on is a gigantic collision between the insiders and the outsiders. Nothing is more obvious than that the decree went forth from the zeitgeist that Trump was to be thrown into the volcano, as so many before him had been, and the villagers refused.

In case Gentle Reader is unaware, Wilson was/is a NeverTrumper.

Apparently, Obamacare doesn't cover 'pneumonia'

Google: Clinton+Pneumonia

Or does it now?

About that 'Reset' Button

Neo, commenting at Q&O:

Apparently, Hillary Clinton’s own “2nd Amendment people” have been busy shooting down this poor man, a former DNC staffer, Seth Rich, on the streets of DC as WikiLeaks now claims that Rich was the source of the leaked DNC emails.

The bumbling “experts” the Hillary campaign used to claim it was the Russians were completely wrong, as the former Secretary of State’s campaign risked inflaming relations with the Russians for domestic political purposes.

Hillary’s famous “Reset Button” with the Russians just keeps on paying dividends, doesn’t it?

Gateway Pundit: Julian Assange Suggests Seth Rich – Who Was MURDERED in DC – Was Wikileaks DNC Source!

One wonders how poor Hillary finds the fortitude to soldier on when people around her keep turning up dead.

The Washington Post: WikiLeaks offers reward for help finding DNC staffer’s killer

Edit--

On the other hand (and don't be all shocked if this comment is deleted)

If Rich really was the Wikileaks mole inside the DNC, then why not just say so? Rich is dead, so it's not like Assange really needs to continue protecting his source. Assange should fish or cut bait.

The other way they get their rocks off

Jihad Watch (linking to the UK's Daily Mail Online): US-backed Syrian “rebels” screaming “Allahu akbar” behead small boy as “spy”

I fully expect that they raped the boy before murdering him to make their snuff film.

Here is a comment that well expresses exactly what I was thinking when I saw the (pre-murder) photo --
"Look at their friendly smiling faces.

Take the little, soon to be brutally murdered, boy out of the picture and any immigration officer would only see nice young syrian refugees who need our help and support.
…
They’re amongst us already.

By the thousands."

THAT is the face of Islam ... smiles while preparing for brutal murder.

George Washington Adams

With respect to the unbridled ambition of Ted Cruz to illegally follow in the illegal footsteps of the Obamanation, consider George Washington Adams (lived 1801-1829) --

Could Ted Cruz, born Dec. 22, 1970 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, be constitutionally ineligible for the presidency? If he were alive today, one of America's most distinguished presidential historians, J.J. Perling, would say yes.

We know that because he made that very judgement about another very distinguished American who was in the pipeline for the White House. He made it in the book, "The Presidents' Sons: The Prestige of Name in a Democracy," published in 1947 by The Odyssey Press, New York.
...
Now, here is the tale. It is just one example from history, the story of another, would be president, who was disqualified over the so called "birther issue." ...

He was born on the 4th of July [Ilíon: I don't know whether the quoted author has made a factual error or is speaking metaphorically, as in "Yankee Doodle"]. He graduated from Harvard University and studied law under Daniel Webster. His name was George Washington Adams. Both his father and grandfather were presidents of the United States.

Yet, according to the belief of legal experts at the time he could never be president himself. Why? He was born in Berlin, Germany while his father served in the American diplomatic corps as the U.S. minister to Prussia.

Keep in mind, both his mother and father were U.S. citizens. His father would soon become ambassador to the court of St. James. He would become secretary of state and not just any secretary of state, but the one who would craft and conceive of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, the most enduring foreign policy position in American history.

H[is father] would later become the sixth president of the United States and his mother, Louisa Catherine Adams, would become one of our greatest first ladies.

John Quincy Adams ruled his son's life from a distance, sending letters ordering every moment of the day.

Louisa, the mother, took great solace in the fact that her firstborn, George, would not have the pressure of presidential expectations. He couldn't.

Their correspondence reveals their belief that the Constitution did not allow him to be president because of his birth in Germany.

...

Writes J.J. Perling, "George Washington Adams could never have been an occupant of the Presidential chair: the Constitution of the United States restricted that office to native born citizens, and George Washington Adams had been born in Germany."

Constitution Society Presidential Eligibility

1947, J.J. Perling, The Presidents' Sons: The Prestige of Name in a Democracy, Odyssey Press, New York — George Washington Adams could never have been an occupant of the Presidential chair: the Constitution of the United States restricted that office to native born citizens, and George Washington Adams had been born in Germany [on April 12, 1801 in Berlin, the son of John Quincy Adams, then on the diplomatic team to Prussia]. [Understanding of scholars at the time.]

So, I turns out that I was mistaken about how the Founders understood "natural born citizen"; that is, their understanding was far more restrictive than I had understood it to be. By the understanding of the Founders -- and after all, that *is* what matters with respect to understanding the US Constitution -- John McCain was *also* not a natural born US citizen, as I had previously believed.

And, even into the mid-20th Century, it was commonly understood, by everyone, that persons such as Barack Obama (and Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio) are not natural born US citizens -- when I was a child, I learned from my mother the core understanding that formed the basis of my rejection of Obama's, and now Cruz', (false) claim to be a natural born US citizen.

If the son and grandson of US presidents is not, and cannot be, a natural born US citizen because he was born in a foreign land -- while his father was serving as a minister in the US diplomatic corps -- then by what twisted logic does the bastard son of an alien (Obama) or the son of an alien born in a foreign land become a natural born US citizen? What? Because it's too much bother either to understand the truth of the matter or to uphold and enforce the US Constitution.

Have we not seen these past seven years what failure to uphold and enforce the US Constitution leads to?

Making History

Smitty at The Other McCain: PowerLine Laid Out On Fainting Couch Over Ben Carson USMA Story And Small Arachnid, But Mostly Ben Carson -- quoting 'American Elephant': "So, Ben Carson is now the first black presidential candidate in history to have his college records investigated by [the] media."


Wintery Knight (drawing on Ben Shapiro): Leftist POLITICO lies in order to smear black conservative Ben Carson


By the way, this episode provided Vox Day an excellent opportunity to display his intellectual dishonesty: Your "Get-Out-of-Racism-Free" has now expired -- He quotes Politico, knowing it's Politico, treating it as honest reporting rather than as a lying smear-job, and concludes: "I'm looking forward to hearing that Carson isn't a surgeon at all, but is actually a janitor at Mercy Medical in Baltimore."

Edit: and here is Vox Day doubling-down in a pretense of blamelessness ... you know, just like "social justice warriors" always do.

Who stands where on the victimization totem pole?

GayPatriot: "So, we had to purge all Confederate Battle Flags because Dylann Stormdoor was a southern white supremacist; can we please ban that horrible rainbow flag now? Or does gay privilege trump white privilege?"


Douglas Wilson: Pretty Sure It Is Not You

What were they thinking?

John C. Wright: Fire Gates

What was the board of directors of the Boy Scouts of America thinking when they selected Robert Gates to be President of the BSA? I mean, considering what he did to the military as Obama's Secretary of Defence (*), what in the hell did the Board imagine he'd try to do the the BSA?

Yet, this is no new thing; and, frankly, I'm more than a little surprised that the BSA has held out against Big Gay as long as they have, unlike the GSA, which long ago was subverted by organized lesbianism (**). For, even when I was a Scout, way back in the 70's (***), it was my opinion that the bureaucracy of the BSA wasn't really opposed to the destruction leftism was unleashing on the nation.

As one of the commentors on Wright's blog noted, the BSA have a hard time getting adult men to volunteer as leaders. This was true when I was a kid (it's the reason our troop folded) and I expect it's even more a problem today. At the same time, like all charitable organizations, landing a sinecure in its bureaucracy is a magnet for the sort of people we call "do-gooders", and worse, "social justice warriors". As with *all* charitable organizations, if both these sorts are not consciously and deliberately excluded, they will eventually take over -- aand then actively exclude those who do not share their twisted mind-set -- and they will deliberately subvert the original goals of the organization. This is what happened to the GSA.


(*) which title is itself Orwellian. The proper titles are 'Department of War' and 'Secretary of War'.

(**) You knew that, right? You knew that when you bought those over-priced cookies (that aren't all that tasty, anyway) you were financially subsidizing an organization whose sole remaining goal is to turn your daughters into miserable man-hating lesbians, right?

(***) My troop disbanded after I and a friend (the son of the previous Scout Master, and brother-in-law of the last Scout Master of the troop) were awarded Eagle rank in 1975. I had also been inducted into the Order of the Arrow a few years previous.

By nature, I'm not a joiner. I joined the Scouts when I was 11, because my "cousin", the one whose life I saved later that year, asked me to join his troop. When I was 12, I wanted to quit, but my father wouldn't let me (though my younger brother quit a year or two after he joined) ... This was probably related to his forcing me to go by myself into various utility offices, when my age was still in single digits, to pay the family's bills: he thought I was "shy" and he was trying to make me not shy.

In truth, I'm not at all shy; I'm reserved, which is a very different thing: until I think someone (or something) is worth my time, I prefer to keep him/it at arm's length. People always seem to want more from me than I can give them; keeping them as a distance is an attempt to minimize their disappointment in me.

Chester Arthur vs Barack Obama

The is the content of a note I sent a co-worker explaining why Bobby Jindal (*) is not Constitutionally qualified to occupy the office of US President --

Jindal isn’t a natural born US citizen for the same reason that Obama isn’t - at the time he was born, his parents were not US citizens.

In the case of Obama, what is commonly accepted (*) as the truth about his birth almost mirrors what the Democrats alleged about Chester Arthur when they wanted to disqualify him from being Vice-President (and President).
* Both Arthur and Obama were the sons of men who were originally subjects of the British Crown;
* Both Arthur and Obama were the sons of women who were (natural born) US citizens, each from a long line of citizens;
* Both Arthur and Obama were alleged to have been born outside the territory of the US - not that this matters to the issue of being a natural born citizen:

- In the case of Arthur, it was his political enemies who alleged it;
- In the case of Obama, it was he himself, and his wife, who have alleged it … when it served his purpose;

* A major difference:

- Obama’s father never was a US citizen, therefore, Obama is not, and never can be, a natural born US citizen;
- Arthur’s was a naturalized US citizen - the point of dispute, the point on which the Democrat’s case to disqualify Arthur hinged, was whether Chester Arthur’s father was naturalized before or after Chester’s birth:
. that is, if, as the Democrats alleged, Arthur’s father was naturalized after his birth, then Arthur was not a natural born US citizen, and thus was Constitutionally ineligible to be either Vice-President or President;
. on the other hand, if, as Arthur alleged, his father was naturalized before his birth, then Arthur was indeed a natural born US citizen, and thus was Constitutionally eligible to be both Vice-President and President;

(*) Since he refuses to make the actual records available, no one outside a small circle even knows where he was born … and *where* never was the issue, anyway.

(*) and Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz ... and Barack Obama

Someone has to

Someone has to ... do the jobs Americans won't do

'Even-handedness' vs 'moral equivalency' Is there a difference?

Answer: almost never.

Whether we're talking about alleged-President Obama reacting to the murder of Israelis by Arab terrorists by "counseling" both terrorists and Israelis to "be calm" (*), or whether we're talking about the police arresting and charging with disorderly conduct both the man who is attacked and the violent woman who attacked him (**), or whether we're talking about the school administrators who do nothing for weeks or months as you are daily physically bullied, but immediately implement their inane "zero-tolerance policy" the minute you defend yourself, it's all the same: the "authorities" almost never care about justice; they care about keeping things quiet, and if the cost of keeping things quiet happens to be your limb ... or your life ... they'll generally gladly pay it.



(*) as 'Wintery Knight' observes, this is like telling both the rapist and the victim of the rapist to refrain from raping one another in future.

(**) Fortunately for him, he is 'hispanic', and so the charges were eventually dropped

'to gruber'

Douglas Wilson:"To gruber someone is to dismiss the stupid peons out there with a supercilious arrogance, and with the critic blissfully unaware of the tiny bubble of self-congratulatory hubris he lives in."

'Everyone is excited about the millions of dollars'

Adventist Mission Doctor Speaks Out on the Ebola Crisis and Foreign Aid -- The leftists who control the government of the US aren't really interested in helping the people of Liberia stamp out this disease. Rather, this is just one more excuse to waste money. The leftists will never forgive Reagan for bankrupting the USSR ... and they fully intend to return the favor.

When the leftists are making omelettes ...

"When the leftists are making omelettes, the last thing you want to do is stand there looking like an egg."

The Obama Error

Christopher Chantrill at American Thinker: Rectification of Names: Let's Call Obama Era What It Is

Might I suggest calling the time of alleged-President Obama, that ol' blame duck, 'The Obama Error'?

Contrast and compare

Mark Steyn: Holiday Memories You'll Cherish Forever -- The Republic is dying: it is, in fact, being murdered by the leftists (appointed and elected) in government.

The Man Who Wasn't There

Mark Steyn: The Man Who Wasn't There (cont)

There is no place for racists on the Supreme Court

Michael Egnor: There is no place for racists on the Supreme Court