Posted on 07/24/2011 5:58:31 PM PDT by skimbell
That's clear enough. Now go ahead and mangle it.
The documents already discovered are clear enough and Ditto.
All of the founders were eligible for British citizenship/subjecthood had they chosen to retain it. They were no strangers to divided loyalties. None of them had been born American citizens. They all knew people of similar backgrounds to their own in whom loyalty to Britain had won out.
On this you are absolutely right. The Founders Knew very well that they were NOT "Natural Born Citizens" and that is why they included a very specific exemption for themselves.
"...or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution..."
I am astonished you seem unaware of this yet persist in discussing this issue.
Some of their great leaders had been born abroad: John Paul Jones, Lafayette, Pulaski, Kościuszko, Steuben, de Kalb. Not to mention Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, John Witherspoon, James Wilson. Others were the children of those who were born abroad.
Again: "...or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution..."
It's clear that they didn't want non-citizens or those who weren't citizens from birth to be elected president.
As the Citizenship always followed the father, they would have considered anyone born to a foreign father as a foreign subject. Wives of American men were automatically naturalized until 1924. (If I remember correctly.)
It's also clear that they didn't demand that the parents or grandparents of a prospective president be American-born. Did they require that a president's parents be US citizens at the time of the president's birth?
Yes. That is the only thing they DID require.
I don't think you can maintain that with any degree of certainty.
I don't think you can possibly interpret it any differently.
My point is that there isn't some principle of hostility and mistrust towards those whose parents weren't citizens that comes before the actual words of the Constitution.
On the contrary. They welcomed Productive Foreigners with open arms. I have read the debate in Congress regarding the Naturalization Act of 1790. They WANTED foreigners to come to America and become useful citizens. They ENCOURAGED immigration of Foreigners. They had but ONE absolute requirement. The FATHER must take up residence in the Nation. They SPECIFICALLY banned basic citizenship for the Children of a foreign father, UNLESS he came to America to remain and be a citizen.
You can't reduce the Constitution to some principle that you like. You have to go by the actual wording and the understanding of those words, and they don't give you the certainty that you want and believe you have.
A term of art has meaning beyond the definitions of the individual English words. "Natural Born Citizen" is a synergistic composite that means more than just being born with a possible claim on American Citizenship, it means being born with an unquestionable claim on American Citizenship, because they wanted Unquestionable Allegiance to one and only one Nation; The United States. The one thing about the founders that I am certain of is that they were not fools. To argue that their Check on Foreign influence in our government means they would partially permit it is to assert that these men are simpletons who made a barrier that is no sort of barrier at all!
As the Supreme Court ruled early on, every word and phrase in the US Constitution serves a purpose, and that purpose is not trivial. Letting Half Foreign people rule our country is stupid as the current occupant has amply demonstrated. We wanted no part of Monarchistic interbreeding with Ruling Relatives in other Nations. The Founders knew all about this European practice and wanted no part of it. They knew fully well of the entanglement to be caused by having rulers of Mixed Allegiance, because they had seen the folly of these experiments in Europe! Why on earth would you think they would have welcomed such nonsense here?
Or it could be that Beck, Levin, Limbaugh and Coulter--not to mention just about every American jurist--find this theory to be too ridiculous to take seriously. The pieces of information you've selectively read on blogs might form a coherent theory in your head, but to most people it just comes across as the ravings of a crank.
I mean, in that paragraph alone, you pass off as fact a paranoid, half-baked theory from the blog of some guy who not long ago was claiming George Bush and Joe Wilson were conspiring to commit treason.
Just ignore the Obots unless they address the words of our Justices and Constitution. They are idiologues, and good at redirecting issues when the truth is a threat.
I feel they must be answered so as to encourage others to learn the truth for themselves. As long as they have opposition, Unknowledgeable people will see the issue as still in dispute until they weigh the facts for themselves. Lies must be opposed with the truth. If unopposed, the lies become the new truth. We must all hold up a beacon of light with which to guide men to their own honest reckoning. I say we should engage the defenders of Obama at every opportunity. We should force them to stare into the abyss of their own falsehoods until they can no longer bear the sight of it. Light makes the cockroaches scatter, and that's what we need most right now.
If they go unanswered, their lies may gain strength.
You left out Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers. Seriously, with the media weapon trained on someone, who can withstand that kind of abuse? Apart from that, you are putting forth argumentum ad populum. Don't you know that is a FALLACY well beneath the dignity of an intelligent person?
The pieces of information you've selectively read on blogs might form a coherent theory in your head, but to most people it just comes across as the ravings of a crank.
Argumentum ad hominem. ""Cranks" produced it, therefore you should not listen to them." Another childish argument.
I mean, in that paragraph alone, you pass off as fact a paranoid, half-baked theory from the blog of some guy who not long ago was claiming George Bush and Joe Wilson were conspiring to commit treason.
Yes, because he was wrong about one thing, he must be wrong about everything. Another Ad hominem through the proxy of Phillip Berg. (I assume you refer to him) Do you have any arguments that are NOT FALLACIES?
How about just proving your case on the weight of evidence? Hmmm?? You want to poke a hole in a theory? Find a fact that proves the theory wrong!
Spaulding wrote: “We may some day find out why the “pundits” won’t talk about it, but ask yourself why Beck, Levin, Limbaugh, Coulter,... assiduously avoid the words of Chief Justice Marshall, or Chief Justice Waite, or Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, or why [...]”
Because actual experts have already gone over it. You are merely pretending an expertise you do not have. For example, you list Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes on your side. Justice Hughes’ parents were British subjects at the time of his his birth, so according to the two-citizen-parent theory, he was not a natural-born citizen eligible for the presidency. If Justice Hughes agreed with your theory, why did he in June of 1916 resign from the U.S. Supreme Court to run for president?
Spaulding wrote: “The most thorough explanation of McCain’s ineligibility can be found at U of Arizona’s Rogers Law School, Prof. Gabriel Chin, in July of 2008, and reported extensively in the liberal press, ‘Why Senator John McCain Cannot Be President: Eleven Months and a Hundred Yards Short of Citizenship.’”
Had you read that paper you would know that even Professor Chin, arguing against McCain’s eligibility, accepted that natural-born citizen means citizen from birth.
“Larry was joined by Ted Olson, whose wife would certainly have been horrified had she survived 9/11, in submitting a brief clarifying the meaning of natural born citizenship.”
Where do you get off putting your crank theory on the late Barbara Olson? The lawyers who agree with you are a few losers such as Leo Donofrio, Mario Apuzzo, and Orly Taitz.
Spaulding wrote: “Obama was never eligible and every congressman knows it.”
You are wrong about Obama’s eligibility, and you are just plain lying when you put your theory on those who do not hold it.
Until you responded, I had no idea who Blade was referring to, and have never read Phil Berg's blog. I once heard him speak in a video of a press conference addressing eligibility at the National Press Club in Dec 2008, and noted his refusal to address jus sanguinis (inherited allegiance), even when asked, clearly showing an agenda. I had just read about Calvin's Law and David Ramsay, where Berg was clearly ignorant of what makes citizens and subjects so very different. The British applied jus sanguinis to make the child of natural born subjects, regardless of his place of birth, a natural born subject also. Thus Obama was, as he said, born a subject, probably natural born, of the Crown. There is little point attempting to ferret the truth from someone like Berg who obviously has an agenda, but Blade is clearly a follower.
The speaker after Berg at the conference was the then little-known Orly Taitz, who began her presentation by acknowledging the potential importance of mysterious documents from Kenya, but explained that the lack of a citizen father disqualified Obama regardless of where he was born. That was a clear and unequivocal statement, “QED” if you will, and I set out to see if her statement was valid.
Give credit to all the bright attorneys, and the hundred or so paid Obots, many of whom live here at Free Republic, for clouding the issue, but her statement is well supported. In fact, the Obots probably helped the non-paid bloggers, Bushpilot and rxsid by exposing so many of the devices designed to mislead. Taitz, I believe, decided that she was not equipped to do battle with the likes of Larry Tribe and Bob Bauer, or with hundreds of presumed constitutional scholars who share Obama’s socialist agenda, and went after the more tangible low hanging fruit, as many famous gangsters have finally succumbed to tax evasion or some peripheral transgression. Her exposure of obviously phony Social Security numbers and hundreds of what are probably money laundering addresses may some day pay off.
As Obot Blade noted, Beck, Levin, Limbaugh, and Coulter, don't address the words of Marshall, Waite, Ramsay, Madison, Gray, Hughes, or Bingham, but I have never heard any of them argue that what Jusitice Waite said in Minor v. Happersett was not true. They wouldn't dare. Nor do I believe they hold that view. The objective is to quell discussion of the real issue, the Constitution. The decisions of Marshall, Jay, Waite, and Wilson, have been peer reviewed again and again. It is nonsense to insinuate that any thoughtful pundit, particularly an orignalist, would not agree with the statements I quoted in my first comment. And they haven't, not one. They may be covering their fear of the progressive cadre by commenting on the quality of investigations into obviously suspect birth certificates, clues which were probably introduced as a false flag campaign to keep discussion focused upon what can probably never be proved, as documents will never be produced by Obama's FBI or CIA, and certainly not by Obama himself.
Who is so foolish as to assume Marshall, Jay, Washington, Madison, Waite, Gray, Hughes, or Bingham didn't mean exactly what they said? Who is so naive as to trust those who resort to ridicule before trusting the clarity and reason of some of our greatest framers and justices?
I will never forget the sniveling major media, who sound today more and more like NPR, when they, and the corrupt US Attorney from Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, recieved a full confession from Dick Armitage about his complicity in releasing the CIA background of Valerie Plame, before Scooter Libby was even charged, and then proceeded to drag him through a two year show trial the Soviets would have admired. I believe, and hope, that is the reason for the silence of our pundits.
Those critical of the party in the USSR paid, often with their lives. We are approaching the USSR where composers like Dimitri Shostakovitch are threatened, his family threatened, and forced to compose politically motivated works to support the party doctrine. Thus far, our pundits, while they make statements about absurd conspiracies, have never defined what they mean, and certainly none has ever contested the content or wisdom of Vattel, John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton or Washington, who lauded Vattel as their greatest legal philosopher, or Waite, or Gray who cited Waite first in Wong Kim Ark, used to confuse so many, or Hughes, who tried to fool us and then, in 1939, cited Waite as the correct definition in Perkins v. Elg. Even Pat Leahy and Larry Tribe cite the Vattel definition. But until we secure free speech, I suspect that we won't hear about ineligibility from our "pundits."
You must all trust your power to reason - to think for yourselves. Even with the scrubbing by Google and justia.com, we can still find printed documents complete with references on paper, or on the “Wayback Machine” (though I've read that it too is being scrubbed.) Most won't have heard of Leo Donofrio's remarkable observation (after his exposure of our first illigitimate president, Chester Arthur) that Obama's radical legal comrades edited our supreme court cases to conceal, or at least, to delay the discovery that Minor v. Happersett established legal precedence for the term natural born citizen. Justia.com, as soon as they had been found out, hurridly replaced most of the documents, but the evidence was captured on the Wayback Machine archives. Minor's use of the Vattel definition absolutely established precedence, but our government and courts are crawling with progressives, admirers of Mao, Stalin and Castro. They are now modifying our State Department Documents so not to point to obviously at Obama's ineligibility. We will likely pass the next election cycle before what remains of our legal system is engaged to confirm Obama's fictitious presidency(a dangerous precedent according to Vattel, as citizens lose faith in the civil society when justice is not "speedy").
You don't need to be a scholar to read the amazing John Marshall's decisions. Try The Venus, 12 US 253. It is about the dispensation based upon citizenship of cargo captured during the War of 1812. His writing was direct and concise, more like Vattel’s than James Wilson's or Grotius’. Obama has opened the door for many to our true founders and framers, one perhaps of few creditable deeds. James Wilson, who found Vattel’s works short on Roman and Greek examples, pokes mercilessly at the pretentious English, and explodes any notion that we revered or depended upon English Common Law. He demolishes the claim by British jurists that they even have a constitution, or that the House of Commons represents the common people. Surprisingly, Vattel is fascinating to read. With a few exceptions, if you take the time, you will realize that Vattel provided the blueprint for our republic. We didn't adopt it wholesale, but it was the first book in George Washington's new office in New York, and a veritable handbook for Hamilton, besides being our first law book at our first law school.
What didn't we adopt of Vattel’s. For one, Vattel believed that a citizen who performed a function critical to the well being of his state should not be allowed to expatriate until he had trained a replacement. His success was partly a result of the civil society and he had an obligation. That idea might still appeal to many. Vattel, however, was adamant about the right to repudiate ones citizenship, to expatriate, while for the French, born to a Frenchman, they owned you for life. That is jus sanguinis in the extreme. We did not restrict emigration in our Constitution or by statue, but clearly required both jus sanguinis and just soli citizenship of just our president.
Even if Glen Beck didn't either dare, or understand the significance of Vattel, Marshall, Waite, Bingham, he provided introductions to many of those others, including Sam Adams, for whom Vattel was next in importance to the Bible, and quoted hundreds of times in speeches, newspapers, and pamphlets, because Vattel’s republic was what we fought for. That Obots should be paid to disrupt discussions about our founders when so many who believe in our Constitution are out of work a result of our leader's adoption of Cloward Piven and rejection of our Constitution is disconcerting enough. Let them talk to each other, which they have done so often, and sometimes comically, as they flood the threads to dilute serious discourse. But I do agree with you, correct them where readers might be misled.
Thanks Blade. You are correct. I thought my comments were too long as it was, but this point, as DiogenesLamp pointed out, is worth clarifying:
Charles Evans Hughes was born to British Citizens. He had an illustrious law career and was appointed to the Supreme Court. He was previously governor of New York. As you say, he resigned from the court to run against Woodrow Wilson.
As much as we might have preferred an alternative Wilson, Hughes was challenged by a Missouri Attorney, Breckenridge Long, who later became Sec of State and an Ambassador for FDR. Long was an excellent attorney as well, and exposed Hughes ineligibility for failing to have two citizen parents in a legal brief, “Is Mr. Charles Evans Hughes a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ within the Meaning of the Constitution?” published in the largest legal newspaper in the country, “Chicago Legal News,” Vol. 146, p. 220 in 1916,”
Sharon Rondeau of Post and Email wrote an excellent article about Hughes and Long which you can find at her site. The Long brief can be found on Scribd.com - search for Breckenridge Long.
One of the remarkable aspects of this is that Hughes thought he could get away with it. He was warned by Long, who was clearly prepared to demand legislative and legal action had Hughes won the election. This is rather like Professor Chin's analysis of McCain's ineligibility. Presumably (who knows these days) an officer of the court, which most legislators are, has a responsibility to initiate legal action if they know a crime has been committed.
Hughes later served as Harding's Sec of State and was appointed Chief Justice where he cited Minor v. Happersett in Perkins v. Elg, in which Marie Elg could, having been born in NY of two naturalized parents, even though she returned to Sweden with her mother at an early age, was declared eligible, should she chose, and satisfied the residency and age clauses, run for the presidency. Hughes tried to suppress the Constitution, but later confirmed the clause which would certainly have generated a challenge had he prevailed in the election.
Interesting to ask if Obama's legal defense team studied both the Long and Chester Arthur cases to see how best to conceal his ineligibility. There are many similarities between Arthur's and Obama's concealment campaigns. Arthur had an associate in the press who even wrote a book questioning Arthur's jus soli eligibility. Arthur concealed, and later burned what constituted his birth records - he was born in Vermont in 1829. But Arthur did hold office where Hughes never did. Could Hughes have been prosecuted for accepting campaign donations knowing he was not constitutionally eligible. One certainly hopes that Obama will be, though the entire Democratic party is complicit, as are the Republicans, who knew all along.
Thanks for the question Blade, and thanks again to Sharon Rondeau for her excellent research and writing.
...with you on our side....
....how can we lose?
Far be it that someone should deceive in the pursuit of power. He was assailed on this very point by Breckenridge Long. I suppose the answer to your question would be related to whether or not the rules were supposed to apply to him or someone else? Your argument is a version of a false choice fallacy. That He must disagree with the premise is the only proffered answer, while the alternate choice which you didn't mention is that when the desire for power overtook him, he might have become a hypocrite. Contemplate that possibility now.
http://www.thepostemail.com/2010/04/05/obama-not-the-first-to-have-presidential-eligibility-questioned/
"....You are wrong about Obama’s eligibility, and you are just plain lying when you put your theory on those who do not hold it."
There is certainly lying going on, but Spaulding is not the one perpetuating it. What you need is a good dose of Diogenes' Lamp to bring out the Honesty in you.
You have put forth one big argument from Authority. Do you have a LEGITIMATE argument perhaps?
...with you on our side....
....how can we lose?
I am not trying to be defeatist, I am trying to educate people to the severity of the danger we may face if steps are not taken to mitigate it now. I am pretty deep in technical know how, and what I see as possible is frightening to contemplate. We are incrementally ceding power to a governmental structure that will eventually acquire capabilities such that they will be effectively unstoppable by any armed opposition.
I have every intention of going down with the ship, I am just wanting to forestall the need for the ship to go down. We need to be realistic about what may be required to stop it.
So my great-grandfather couldn't become a citizen unless his father came over and became a citizen, and my great-great-grandfather couldn't become a citizen unless his father came over and became a citizen, and my great-great-grandfather needed his father to come over and become a citizen before he could become a citizen?
A term of art has meaning beyond the definitions of the individual English words. "Natural Born Citizen" is a synergistic composite that means more than just being born with a possible claim on American Citizenship, it means being born with an unquestionable claim on American Citizenship, because they wanted Unquestionable Allegiance to one and only one Nation; The United States.
Yet for years Congress extended citizenship to those whom another country could claim as citizens: for example, the mothers of presidents like Wilson and Hoover. I don't know the precise details, but dual loyalties and dual citizenship were probably involved there as well.
The problem with "natural born citizen" as a "term of art" is that there are different definitions of the phrase. Vattel wasn't the only source.
Spaulding wrote: “Is Mr. Charles Evans Hughes a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ within the Meaning of the Constitution?” published in the largest legal newspaper in the country, “Chicago Legal News,” Vol. 146, p. 220 in 1916,”
In which Breckenridge Long argued:
“Mr. Hughes was born before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, so the status of his citizenship must be considered as under the laws existing prior to the time of the adoption of that Amendment.”
The 14’th Amendment and the case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark settled the issue as far as the native-born. Breck Long was writing 18 years after the WKA decision, but considering a birth prior to the 14’th Amendment.
After Long’s 1916 essay, the two-citizen-parent theory went silent. In our time, no one advanced it, until 2008 when some people felt the need to deny that Barack Obama can be president. The first to dig up the long-dead theory seems to be Leo Donofrio, and it was October or November of 2008 when he started pitching it. If I’m wrong on that, please cite.
So the situation is that for all of Barack Obama’s life and quite some years before, all the standard sources on American law said that native-born citizens were natural-born citizens, potentially eligible for the presidency, and no one — including the participants here — was saying otherwise. Then when Obama runs and gets elected, some people start telling the rules different.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you can cite something you put out on principle, before the issue was Barack Obama. Perhaps you blogged about how /Black’s Law Dictionary/ had the definition of “natural-born citizen” wrong. Perhaps you posted an open letter to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) disagreeing with his 05 Oct 2004 statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “What is a natural born citizen? Clearly, someone born within the United States or one of its territories is a natural born citizen.” If so, just cite it, and if it checks out I will admit that you are a respectable contrarian, rather than the kind of cheater who tells the rules different when he doesn’t like who is winning.
DiogenesLamp wrote: “There is certainly lying going on, but Spaulding is not the one perpetuating it. What you need is a good dose of Diogenes’ Lamp to bring out the Honesty in you.”
You may have missed what I was saying there. I think Spaulding’s legal theory is pure nonsense, but on that I simply said he is wrong. Where he is lying is in putting *his* theory on *other* people, people who disagree, as in, “Obama was never eligible and every congressman knows it.”
“Obama was never eligible” is merely wrong. We all get stuff wrong from time to time. “Every congressman knows it,” is a lie; it is the sin of bearing false witness.
DiogenesLamp wrote: “You have put forth one big argument from Authority. Do you have a LEGITIMATE argument perhaps?”
If the cited authorities are legitimate, and actually say what the argument claims, then Argument from authority is “LEGITIMATE”. You might want to look that up. Furthermore, we are considering an issue of *law*, where the questions really are what authority controls and what does that authority say. For all of Barack Obama’s life, the legal authorities held that native-born citizens qualify as Article II natural-born citizens. If you disagree I submit that you should have stated so on principle, before the issue was this particular president. If in fact you did, please cite.
“So my great-grandfather couldn’t become a citizen unless his father came over and became a citizen, and my great-great-grandfather couldn’t become a citizen unless his father came over and became a citizen, and my great-great-grandfather needed his father to come over and become a citizen before he could become a citizen?”
I’ve heard birthers seem to imply that, but very few and possibly by mistake. Most of the two-citizen-parents faction of the birthers make it all about the parents’ citizenship on the child’s date of birth. On that they actually disagree with their favorite source, Emerich de Vattel. Vattel wrote in French, and thus never dealt with what our term “natural born citizen” means, and what he did write is not what this birther faction claims.
“Les Naturels ou indigènes font ceux qui font nés dans le pays de Parens Citoyens.”
The obvious translation of Naturels is “naturals”, so I looked is up in /Black’s Law Dictionary/, Ninth Edition. The most applicable of the given meaning is the native people. This is not just ‘native’ as in born here, as I am, but native as “Native-Americans” refers to American Indians. “Indigènes” obviously corresponds to “indigenous”, which again refers to more than one or two generations.
“Parens” seems to translate to “parents”, but that might not be correct. I don’t speak French. I’ve heard from a French-speaker that in this context “Parens” can means blood relatives, and not just mother and father.
Vattel did not present “Naturels ou indigènes” as a special class under the law, precisely distinguishing by the dates their parents became citizens. Rather, they are the indigenous natives. They were born here; their parents were born here; their parents parents were born here; and so on for longer than we can trace. Vattel’s concept of a nation’s “Naturels ou indigènes” does not map well to a nation formed from settlers who rebelled against their homeland.
Don't be obtuse. (Unless you really can't help it.) The act being discussed applied to children.
Yet for years Congress extended citizenship to those whom another country could claim as citizens:
Yeah, so? "Citizen" does not mean the same thing as "Natural Born Citizen." Congress doesn't have the power to extend or give "Natural Born Citizen" status.
for example, the mothers of presidents like Wilson and Hoover. I don't know the precise details, but dual loyalties and dual citizenship were probably involved there as well.
Why do you not know that is completely irrelevant? Prior to 1934 the wife of an American was immediately naturalized upon marriage. Children born to the marriage were Automatically "Natural Born Citizens" if their father was an American.
Again, for the thousandth time, the 14th amendment DID NOT REPEAL the requirements of Article II. What was the law of eligibility Prior to 1868 was still the law regarding eligibility after 1868. The Reason no one has brought the subject up since 1916 is because we have not had an illegitimate Presidential candidate since then. (The Barry Goldwater Kerfuffle notwithstanding.)
Again, let me repeat lest you forget, the Amendment to Grant Citizenship to freed slaves did not make Children born to foreign fathers eligible for President.
But Britain (or Canada) would still have recognized the mothers as subjects. So far as I know Wilson's (and Hoover's) mother never officially renounced British nationality.
Hence the children would have dual citizenship. With regard to their mothers' British (or Canadian) subjecthood, they would have been born with a (theoretical) dual loyalty or allegiance. Hence, by some of the natural born citizen theories, Wilson (and Hoover) would have been ineligible for the presidency.
Why do you not know that that is completely relevant?
No it is not. All evidence of which I am aware points to Obama being ineligible by the fact of his Foreign Father. Even the Entire US Senate argued that John McCain is a "Natural born citizen" by virtue of Jus Sanguinis. I think 100 US Senators beats a full deck of Judges.
We all get stuff wrong from time to time. “Every congressman knows it,” is a lie; it is the sin of bearing false witness.
It is a supposition of undetermined veracity. I wouldn't call it a lie.
If the cited authorities are legitimate, and actually say what the argument claims, then Argument from authority is “LEGITIMATE”. You might want to look that up.
Sorry, they don't get to make up facts. The "Authorities" must make their own arguments from first principles. Truth by Dicta may cause orgasms in courts but in the real world it's just a stupid version of "Might makes right." Stare Decisis is not an argument. It's the Legal version of "Shut up! Because *I* say so."
Furthermore, we are considering an issue of *law*, where the questions really are what authority controls and what does that authority say. For all of Barack Obama’s life, the legal authorities held that native-born citizens qualify as Article II natural-born citizens.
No they have not. A Bunch of people keep CLAIMING that they decided this, but the cases they keep citing have nothing to do with Article II eligibility.
Science does not work a certain way because "Scientists" say so. They describe what Actually is, they do not create it. This is also the role that Judges are supposed to serve, except that nowadays Judges can actually make crap up and everyone just accepts it. The Fact that the Supreme court has 5/4 decisions on law ought to be evidence that Half the judges don't know what the hell they are talking about. Change the political makeup of the courts and you change the meaning of the laws. Forgive me if I have less than contempt for such a system of laws by expediency and whim.
If you disagree I submit that you should have stated so on principle, before the issue was this particular president. If in fact you did, please cite.
I never thought the silly bastard would win. I couldn't believe he even got on the ballot. Then I couldn't believe the country was so STUPID as to vote for him! I thought that long before it got to that point someone would point out the obvious. (that he was ineligible.) Why should I have written about an eventuality that I didn't believe had any chance of coming to pass? Apart from that, I don't have to justify my opposition in allowing an illegitimate man to slither into our highest office.
The liberals still love him or wish he was more liberal.
The founders spoke and read French. The Editions of Vattel given to them by Charles Dumas were all in French.Benjamin Franklin used the French Version of Vattel as a code book to communicate with agents in Europe. 
The Founders did not need the term translated. They translated it themselves into the phrase "Natural Born Citizen." Learn what you are talking about.
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