Your “citizenship” is your claim on/to a nation that is also that nation’s claim on/to you.
It’s similar to property claim/title concepts, such as in real estate and vehicles, for examples most have experience with. Or, given the number of single parents, very common to issues of adoption, inheritance, etc.
Who and what then has the right to claim you and vice versa or pass along to you such claims and entitlements, such as they may be, as a result of your birth?
Is it the Monarch/Emperor/Government who/that owns claim to all territory and those living there? Yes.
Does citizenship also come from one or both parents? Yes, from one or both.
Thus, a child can be and often is claimed by the nation that owns the territory where that child is born.
And, a child is also claimed by each parent and each parent’s nation via their citizenship.
Essentially, a child could be born in a country that neither parent is a citizen of. What then? Who has claim of citizenship and vice versa?
Do all of the King’s subjects and their children belong to the King, no matter where his subjects give birth? Sure, that’s not uncommon.
Does the King claim all children born in his Kingdom, regardless of what nation their parents might belong to? You bet.
Are their international legal claims that have supported or been reasons to go to war over regarding these examples throughout history at the time of our founding? You betcha.
Nations have over time developed a vocabulary to precisely define each type of citizenship based upon the circumstances of that child’s birth, whether they recognize them or not and what the rights and privileges of each might be and international laws and treaties that state them.
Knowing this, having experience with the concepts and issues noted and with history, the FFs chose a precise definition/class/standard of citizenship to avoid all legal or allegiance issues/problems/contentions, and keep it in the family, so to speak.
Of those, the FF chose the highest standard, the only one that avoids all such potential issues.
The only classification/definition that can possibly do this a condition where all claims have the same ultimate source: a child born in the country that both parents are citizens of.
No matter how anyone or any nation defines citizenship or the basis for any and all claims by parent, child or nation/ruler, that child is a Natural Born Citizen of that nation and NO OTHER.
For the single, most powerful person in their new government, with 1/3 of its legislative power, the power to sign treaties and bills into the laws that govern us, and with control over the nation’s armed forces, they went with the highest standard and so noted it in the eligibility requirement.
This is what I was taught in 5th grade. It is backed up in my life experience. It is supported by common sense.
You and all the others who come here to blow fog on this issue will not talk me out of this belief until you counter the above logically.
But you won’t, because you can’t.
And, you won’t because you have to:
1) cover up whatever was done to elect obama and
2) force the lesser standards on US to ram amnesty down our throats again for those who broke in and now claim citizenship via adverse possession.
Logically, NBC is a three input AND gate where the inputs are nation and citizenship of mom and of dad.
The only one that comes up true is where all inputs are the same.
That's a Natural, NOT native, Born Citizen.
I, too, learned this in Elementary school...and this is what I said to my family members when I first heard of Barack Obama in Jan or Feb, 2008 before is birth certificate was ever mentioned. What concerned me was his father was a student here on visa. Therefore, he was not eligible to run for President.
Of those, the FF chose the highest standard, the only one that avoids all such potential issues.
Once again, you are taking the wrong approach to history.
History is not a record of what you think the Founding Fathers did, because it makes perfect sense to you to do it that way.
History is not a record of what I think the Founding Fathers did, because that's how I would do it.
History is a record of WHAT THE FOUNDING FATHERS DID.
Period.
You can't determine what the Founding Fathers did by theorizing, or saying, "This is what the Founding Fathers would have done."
You can't determine what the Founding Fathers did by saying, "This is the only way that makes sense."
Anybody can say, "The Founding Fathers would have done THIS."
And BELIEVE it.
And use it to claim anything.
Because the Founding Fathers would never have wanted people to live in poverty.
So they were totally in favor of taxing some in order to keep others from starving.
After all, it's a matter of life and death. And it's not fair that some should live and some should starve to death or be malnourished.
And the Founding Fathers were intelligent, fair people.
And the Founding Fathers would never have opposed people who loved each other having the right to marry each other.
Would they?
And the Founding Fathers wanted everyone to have the right to health care. So they were absolutely in support of something like Obamacare. They just didn't have enough tax revenue to make it happen in 1776.
See that?
It's all nonsense, of course.
But it shows how this approach - "This is what the Founding Fathers wanted" - can be used to justify ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING.
Obamacare. The welfare state. Gay marriage. Anything you like.
There is not a person alive today who knew any one of the Founding Fathers personally. Because the last Founding Father died about 180 years ago.
Our world is vastly different from theirs. Many of our assumptions are vastly different from theirs. And this is true whether the person doing the assuming is conservative, liberal, or anywhere in between.
So if we don't determine what the Founding Fathers did based on what they "must" have done, or what they "would" have done, how do we determine what they did?
We determine it BASED ON THE HISTORICAL RECORDS OF WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DID AND SAID.
That's the only way.
You can't start with your 21st-century THEORY of what YOU would have done, and put that on the Founders.
Because they never operated according to 21st-century logic.
They operated WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR WORLD AND WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR THINKING.
NOT YOURS AND NOT MINE.
So we have to go to the HISTORICAL AND LEGAL RECORD.
And the historical and legal record is this:
We were English colonies.
Although there were certainly some settlers from all over Europe, we weren't French colonies, or Dutch colonies, or Swiss colonies.
We were ENGLISH colonies.
We derived our entire legal system and our entire legal world view, as well as pretty much all of our law vocabulary, from the English system.
Is this not so?
It is so.
This has been commented on many times, by many people, including the United States Supreme Court.
Founder Alexander Hamilton noted that when you want to understand the terms written in the Constitution, you should look to the legal vocabulary of the country that gave us our legal terminology.
The US Supreme Court has noted that the Constitution is written in the legal language of the English common law.
This is a fundamental principle of our law.
In fact, as noted by Vice-Chancellor Lewis Sandford in 1844, there is an entire long LIST of legal terms used IN OUR CONSTITUTION that appear no place OTHER than in the English common law.
Well into the 1800s, the backbone of legal training in this country was the ENGLISH COMMON LAW, with the primary text being Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England.
For a great many American lawyers, Blackstone's Commentaries on the English common law were the ONLY legal training they received.
This is AMERICAN lawyers I'm talking about. In the 1800s.
Is this not true?
It is completely and absolutely true.
And there is really no question among historians or legal scholars that this is the case. This is not controversial.
So back to: What does the historical evidence say the Founding Fathers meant by "natural born citizen?"
That evidence is very clear.
The term "natural born" was WELL KNOWN from the phrase "natural born subject."
We changed "subject" to "citizen," so it is ABSOLUTELY OBVIOUS that "natural born citizen" would mean the same thing as "natural born subject," except for the difference between "subject" and "citizen."
Birthers claim we got the term from a Swiss philosopher who wrote a book in the mid 1700s.
But we didn't. There's not the slightest historical evidence to support the idea.
Nor is there any real historical evidence to support the idea that "natural born citizen" required citizen parents.
There were a few - a VERY few - people who thought the children of non-citizens weren't citizens.
Birthers latch onto the extremely few, who were widely and totally contradicted by pretty much everyone, including every major legal authority of early America.
It was completely a fringe opinion, held only by the likes of Samuel Roberts (who, again, gave no reason for his opinion and was flatly contradicted by far more authoritative sources) and David Ramsay (who, again, was voted down 36 to 1 by our first House, including the Father of the Constitution and half a dozen other signers of the Constitution).
If birthers really wanted to adhere to the Founding Fathers' position, they would acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of what that position actually was.
But they don't. They don't CARE what the Founding Fathers actually, really and truly thought, wrote and said.
Because their adherence is not to the Founding Fathers, but to their idea of what THEY would have done IF THEY had been the Founding Fathers.
So it's not an adherence to our history or our law or our Founding Fathers at all.
It's an adherence to THEIR OWN OPINIONS AND THEIR OWN PREFERENCES.
This is really no different from liberals trying to rewrite the Constitution according to their preferences.
I'm not for ANYONE trying to break the Constitution and rewrite according to his or her own personal preference.
The Constitution is what it is. The Constitution is sacred. We aren't allowed to rewrite it based on our own personal preferences.
If you don't like what the Founding Fathers decided, then you can try to get a Constitutional Amendment to change it. They provided that process, because they knew things would need to be changed.
If you think the qualifications for President SHOULD be "born on US soil to two citizen parents," fine. Pass a Constitutional Amendment to make it that way.
But don't pretend that's what the Founding Fathers specified, because ACCORDING TO ALL PAST HISTORY AND LAW, INCLUDING THE ENTIRE OVERWHELMING WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE FROM EARLY AMERICA, THAT'S NOT WHAT THEY SPECIFIED.
Now, you have a choice.
You can either accept reality, and accept that the Founding Fathers had their own definitions, and you can't rewrite them, or you can stick your fingers in your ears and set yourself against both the truth, and the Founding Fathers themselves.
Knowing this, having experience with the concepts and issues noted and with history, the FFs chose a precise definition/class/standard of citizenship to avoid all legal or allegiance issues/problems/contentions, and keep it in the family, so to speak.
Of those, the FF chose the highest standard, the only one that avoids all such potential issues.
For the single, most powerful person in their new government, with 1/3 of its legislative power, the power to sign treaties and bills into the laws that govern us, and with control over the nation’s armed forces, they went with the highest standard and so noted it in the eligibility requirement.
This is what I was taught in 5th grade. It is backed up in my life experience. It is supported by common sense.
You and all the others who come here to blow fog on this issue will not talk me out of this belief until you counter the above logically.
But you won’t, because you can’t.
Once again, I note your reasons for believing the above.
"It is what I was taught in 5th grade."
"It is backed up in my life experience."
"It is supported by common sense."
Now note what you didn't say:
You didn't say that the historical evidence supports it.
And that was well left out, because the historical evidence does NOT support the idea.
So once again, we are back to: "My theory, and my 'common sense,' trump the historical record."
But they don't. The historical record is the ONLY reliable indicator of HISTORY.
Anything else is simply fantasy, and a denial of the truth of our history.
But let's go with your theory for a moment.
Your THEORY goes like this:
The Founding Fathers were wise.
Therefore, the Founding Fathers would have chosen - make that "chose" - only the highest possible citizenship qualification for President.
So the Founding Fathers did not tolerate any possible conflict of allegiance in a President. No one with any citizenship OTHER than United States citizenship could be allowed to serve as President, could they? Because possession of any citizenship other than United States citizenship is an indicator of a divided loyalty, a divided allegiance. Even if the person received that citizenship only because Italy (for example) grants citizenship to all children of its citizens worldwide, whether or not that person ever lived in Italy, spoke Italian, etc.
That is what we're talking about, right? By your theory, the current President, for example, is ineligible because he had British citizenship at birth, even though he has never permanently resided in Britain or Kenya and even though he doesn't even speak the Kenyan native language that his father spoke, and even though his British citizenship lapsed long ago.
So by your theory, having been granted foreign citizenship by some other country, at any point in one's life, is enough to permanently bar a person from the Presidency.
Now. Never mind that nowhere in the Constitution does it say that.
And never mind that nowhere in the entire history of our nation has any Founding Father, nationally-recognized legal expert, or court of any kind EVER stated that this complete lack of "dual allegiance" is in any way a requirement.
That, by the way, is absolutely remarkable, if your theory is true. A requirement exists, but no Founding Father or other nationally-recognized authority has EVER spoken or written about it or so much as acknowledged its existence?
Really???
The fact that NO SIGNIFICANT AUTHORITY IN OUR ENTIRE HISTORY HAS EVER MADE THE CLAIM YOU MAKE IN REGARD TO PRESIDENTIAL ELIGIBILITY - NOT ONE - to be a damn reliable indicator that the requirement DOES NOT EXIST.
Because thousands and thousands of pages have been written by the Founding Fathers, their contemporaries, nationally-recognized legal interpreters of the Constitution, foundations such as the Heritage Foundation, our courts, and the writers of textbooks.
THOUSANDS of pages.
And NOT ONCE has any of those sources ever made the claim you make.
Now that's logic. That's a demonstration: Your definition does not exist.
But there's another way of LOGICALLY demonstrating that your theory is hogwash.
You asked for logic, remember?
If your theory is true, then it is utterly intolerable to our Founding Fathers and their generation for anyone to have any kind of dual citizenship or dual allegiance, and serve as President.
And yet 3 of our first 4 Presidents were dual citizens of France, made so by the French legislature - AND WERE DUAL CITIZENS WITH FRANCE WHILE SERVING AS PRESIDENT.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.
Three out of our first four.
AND ALL THREE WERE AMONG OUR MOST PROMINENT FOUNDING FATHERS.
By your theory, this isn't possible. Because the same logic that bars someone from serving as President if he was named a citizen of Italy as a baby, because his parents were Italian citizens, even though he himself had not the slightest relationship with the country of Italy, absolutely applies if someone, THROUGH HIS ACTUAL, REAL RELATIONSHIP WITH A FOREIGN COUNTRY IN ADULTHOOD WAS AWARDED CITIZENSHIP OF THAT COUNTRY AS AN ADULT.
So the Founding Fathers themselves absolutely contradict the rationale of your theory.
The fact is, it's a nice theory.
But it's not true. It is simply not in line with history.
So once again, you have a choice.
Do you go with the Founding Fathers and the truth of our history, or do you go with your own opinion of how you personally would write history?
I know who I pick. I pick the Founding Fathers and the truth.