You just keep driving along making these unsupportable pronouncements--I am going to stop responding to you. You may think Safire was in error, but most of the Constitutional Lawyers I talk to have an equally firm view to the contrary. Doesn't make anybody correct until either Supreme Court tells you the answer or Congress and the several states amend the Constitution.
To me, it never makes any difference. If somebody hired me to talk to the Supreme Court, I assume I can win either side. But as an abstract proposition, my bet is on Safire's side of the argument--it means more or less within the confines of the 57 states.
“You just keep driving along making these unsupportable pronouncements—I am going to stop responding to you. You may think Safire was in error, but most of the Constitutional Lawyers I talk to have an equally firm view to the contrary. “
LOL, my judgment of Con Lawyers goes down a peg. ... that was a quote from an immigration lawyer in the New York Times that you are responding to that you claim is beneath responding to.
This statement he made ...
“A far more logical and reasonable meaning, however, is one who became a citizen naturally, through the circumstances of birth, and not through being naturalized, the lengthy and onerous process by which aliens become United States citizens.”
... is hardly ‘unsupportable’, since the common law definitions, the 1790 law, and other basic definitions of citizenship allow one to acquire citizenship by blood or by birthright, and Mr Kresge expounds on the roots of this.
This article on Volokh Conspiracy also goes into depth and says the same thing:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_02_24-2008_03_01.shtml#1204265246
” If the drafters of the Constitution had wanted to require that presidents be born in the United States, they could have done so. Instead, they invoked the then-standard idea of natural citizenship as reflecting natural allegiance to the king or the state.
Standard 18th century dictionaries and commentaries couldn’t have been clearer on this point. ...”
They quote Blackstone
“To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. III. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband’s consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants. But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception; unless their said fathers were attainted, or banished beyond sea, for high treason; or were then in the service of a prince at enmity with Great Britain.”
This basic English legal understanding carried over into the US and was used in the 1790 law, helpfully quoted on this thread. You are a natural born US citizen if your parents were US citizens.
“And the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States”. —First Congress, Act of March 26th, 1790, 1 Stat. 103.
The logical error some fall into is one of assuming that since birthright citizenship is the *main* way to become a natural born citizen, that it is the only way. One can be a natural-born US citizen (that is a citizen upon birth without having to undergo any other process) either by blood (jus sanguinis) or by soil (jus soli).
McCain is a natural-born citizen because both his parents were citizens.
See also:
http://stubbornfacts.us/politics/2008_election/mccains_eligibility#comment-13147