“But that is not what the term meant to the authors of the U.S. Constitution.”
Except what the term meant to the authors doesn’t actually carry legal weight. What the term means to the last Supreme Court justices that bothered to rule on it is what actually carries weight.
That does not matter to Macho MAGA Man.
He obviously likes to keep beating a dead horse.
Right you are. And in this case, the federal courts are going to do nothing. So they’re be no injunctions, no holds, no nothing.
It’s an interesting theoretical argument, something to debate. But realistically, it’s a dead and buried issue, a totally moot point.
And another issue which is seldom discussed, is how would the Supreme Court ever rule on this? Who is going to bring a lawsuit in court on this?
The Supreme Court doesn’t just issue opinions because someone talks about an issue. Someone somewhere, will have to file a lawsuit against a specific candidate for president, and claim that such person is not a natural born citizen.
Then at that point, some lower courts, not even the Supreme Court yet, would issue an opinion.
It is rare for the Supreme Court to take a case which has not yet been through the lower federal courts.
“What the term means to the last Supreme Court justices that bothered to rule on it is what actually carries weight.”
They already have. My history is hazy, been a long time since I read it, but there was a ruling about citizenship in the 60s. The Supreme Court ruled on a citizenship case, and mentioned natural born citizenship as in the context of having citizen parents.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 defined it as having citizen parents.
This is true, but there are still those of us who do not believe men can become "women" simply because a court says so.
The Natural Born Citizen eligibility clause has never been directly adjudicated by SCOTUS. But it has been obliquely addressed in other cases.
In 1814, the SCOTUS heard a case known as the Venus Merchantman case. Among other issues, it concerned itself with the impressment of US merchant sailors by the British Royal Navy into their service on the high seas. That SCOTUS, ALL of whom being members of the founding generation defined what a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN was by quoting the entire 212th paragraph of Emmerich De Vatel’s Law of Nations, which was considered to be THE treatise on international law and was referred to regularly by statesmen at the time. That definition, which was incorporated into the majority opinion authored by Justice Livingston follows:
Quote of section 212, Chapter 19, Book 1, Law of Nations, by Vattel, written in 1758:
Ҥ 212 - Citizens and Natives. The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to
this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its
advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents
who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the
children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and
succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what
it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen,
on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The
country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens
merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of
discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they
were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of
a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of
his birth, and not his country. “
Note that the above reference was made in 1814, 54 years before the adoption of the 14th amendment, which makes no reference to, nor does it modify Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the constitution, no matter what the original intent might have been. The framers of the constitution were patriarchs, who believed that the citizenship status of the children followed that of the father. It is clear that they were concerned with undue foreign influence upon the office of the presidency, PARTICULARLY from a father owing allegiance to a foreign sovereignty.
To believe that the framers would have accepted that a person born a British subject, (as Obama himself admitted to being owing to his FATHER) when they had to exempt themselves with the grandfather exemption in clause 5 of Section 2 in order to be POTUS eligible, beggars belief and logic. Subsequent rulings of the SCOTUS in Minor vs Happersett, and Wong Kim Ark vs US serve only bolster this conclusion.
I believe that the court is reluctant to examine this issue, given the ghastly implications for the actuality of an illegitimate POTUS having made executive decisions for 2 terms, and the reality of an ineligible VP casting votes as the President of the Senate. How would all of their actions be unraveled? It would be a God awful mess of the worst sort...