Posted on 02/04/2010 10:20:40 AM PST by jazminerose
Hey, he brought it up, not us. Using the National Prayer Breakfast to whine about how everyone is picking on him, Obama raised the issue of his citizenship. Using talking points presumably prepared by Chris Matthews, Obama also bleated straight-faced about the lack of “civility” in DC. This from the guy whose chief of staff just referred to his fellow democrats as a bunch of effing “retards.” Former ballerina, Rahm Emanuel quickly recognized the offensiveness of his comments and apologized to the retards for comparing them to democrats.
In what would have been one of the best lines of his career, had he any capacity for self deprecating humor (no narcissist does), Obama denounced DC as a “Tower of Babel”, which he pronounced as “babble.”
(Excerpt) Read more at joytiz.com ...
BO/BS is feeling the heat.
Yep...pretty stupid on his part, given the fact that probably 85% of the populace hasn't (until now) got a clue as to the birfplace proof business.
His comment might cause some headscratching and searches here and there.
Praying that attorney Phillip J. Berg is granted success from above....
This is like a coach issuing orders to the opposing team: “you can run the ball all you want, but you are not allowed to pass”.
” As always, the allegedly Harvard-trained lawyer misunderstands the legal issues.”
” Obama has been stung by a string of narcissistic injuries; expect him to be throwing all kinds of wild punches like this
as he straddles the fence between reality and his own inner paranoia.”
Real good civility expressed by Zer0, the “Do what I say, not what I do” POTUS.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/23/obama-to-gop-i-won_n_160401.html
All we are saying♩♪♫
is give release a chance♩♪♫
Obama at a prayer breakfast...hmmm...
I wonder what kind of prayer Obama said? Did he touch his face to the floor?
Because he just mentioned it, “Obama citizenship” now brings up news on google instead of just links. He does not understand how buzz works on the web.
Re: given the fact that probably 85% of the populace hasn’t (until now) got a clue as to the birfplace proof business
One of the favorite tactics of the political Left is to smear their political opponents. They follow Alinsky’s guideline — “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” They ridicule, personalize and attack those they disagree with, because they can not, and will not, debate the issues.
The Left is unable to defend Obama’s decision to hide his bona fides from the American People, so they attack anybody that dares to ask Obama to release his documentation. One of their favorite tactics is to tar the questioner as a “Birther,” or relegate the skeptic to the “fringe.”
An AOL Poll that asks the question: “Do you think it’s fair to question President Obama’s citizenship?”
At 6 AM, on 12/6/09, the results were: 67% “Yes” — 33% “No” — and this is AOL, hardly a conservative website.
That’s some fringe — AOL visitors, by a factor of two-to-one, believe Obama should release his bona fides and end the controversy.
YouPolls.com has taken down their December 4th poll that asks the question, “Is Obama’s birth certificate a valid question.” Obviously, they didn’t like the respondents’ answers — 83% “Yes” — 17% “No.”
YouPolls.com is still running the one asking, “Is Obama a one term President?” — 94? “Yes — 5.7% “No” — expect that one to disappear soon.
And, as previously reported, an October 23rd item reported that three-in-ten Americans think their current head of state was not born in the United States, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. That’s almost a third of all Americans.
Now, Goddard’s Political Wire points to a new Public Policy Polling survey in Arkansas shows that only 45% of voters in the state say they believe Obama was born in this country, while 31% say they think he was not and 24% are unsure.
“Arkansas is the first of four states where we’ve polled the birther issue (Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado were the others) and found less than half of respondents confident that Obama is a natural born citizen. The numbers are particularly dramatic among Republicans with 49% saying Obama was not born here to just 23% who grant that he was.”
That’s some fringe — just 51% Of Americans Believe Obama Eligible:
http://www.theobamafile.com/_opinion/ThatsSomeFringe.htm
Joy summarized the elegibilty issue perfectly... for all you freepers who continually missunderstand the legal questions. The founders would have never wanted someone who was born as a British subject to become POTUS in the late 1700’s anymore than we would want a dual Iranian/American citizen today. Obama’s father was a British subject. Obama has admited he was a dual citizen until his college years. Not qualified per article II. Easy. Doesn’t matter where the usurper was born.
“As always, the allegedly Harvard-trained lawyer misunderstands the legal issues. The crux of the birther’s inquiry is not whether or not Obama is legally in the United States. The question is whether or not he meets the Constitutional requirement that he be a “natural born citizen.”
There are no prior cases which specifically take up the issue of how to define “natural born” citizen for the purposes of determining eligibility for the highest office in the land. Courts often look to legislative intent when treading new legal ground. In this instance, our Founders clearly wanted to prevent a situation in which the Commander in Chief’s loyalties could be divided.
Reasonable minds could certainly differ as to whether one parent’s status as a foreign national could lead to an inference of divided loyalties or not. It’s a legitimate Constitutional and legal issue that should have been addressed during the 2008 campaign. An excess of political correctness got in the way and left this serious question unanswered.”
True, “There are no prior cases...” specifically defining natural born citizenship. That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of evidence proving our founder’s intent on this issue.
The term natural born citizen was first codified in writing in colonial reference books in 1758, specifically in the legal reference book “Law of Nations.”
That legal reference book was used by John Jay, who later became the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Jay requested the clause be inserted into the Constitution via a letter he wrote to George Washington, the leader of the Constitutional Convention. Jay, considered the outstanding legal scholar of his time, was responsible for inserting that term into the U. S. Constitution, a term derived from the Law of Nations.
The Law of Nations was written by Emmerich de Vattel. He was a Swiss jurist who attained world preeminence in international law. This fame was primarily the result of his great foundational work — The Law of Nations — which he published in 1758. This monumental work applied a theory of natural law to international relations.
De Vattel’s Law of Nations was THE primary reference and defining book used by the framers of the U. S. Constitution. It is really not possible to overstate the influence of de Vattel’s Law of Nations as the primary reference book in the drafting of the U. S. Constitution. The Law of Nations is almost beyond comparison in its value as a defining document regarding U. S. Constitution intent and interpretation. The Law of Nations, or the Principles of Natural Law, published in 1758, is the first, and ONLY, definitive work the Framers of the U. S. Constitution used for the inclusion of the “Natural Born Citizen” phrase. It nails what is meant by the “natural born citizen” phrase of Section 1, Article 2, of the U. S. Constitution.
To be a “natural born citizen” one’s parents must both be citizens (native born or naturalized, it doesn’t matter which) AND one must be born within the nation of one’s parents.
“…natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society can not 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 a 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.”
The definition of the term, “natural born citizen”, was entered into the Congressional record of the House on March 9, 1866, in comments made by Rep. John Bingham on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was the precursor to the Fourteenth Amendment. He repeated Vattel’s definition when he said:
” ... I find no fault with the introductory clause [S 61 Bill], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents (plural, meaning two) not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen...”
Bingham is also quoted saying in the Spring of 1868 some serious warnings:
“May God forbid that the future historian shall record of this day’s proceedings, that by reason of the failure of the legislative power of the people to triumph over the usurpations of an apostate President, the fabric of American empire fell and perished from the earth!...I ask you to consider that we stand this day pleading for the violated majesty of the law, by the graves of half a million of martyred hero-patriots who made death beautiful by the sacrifice of themselves for their country, the Constitution and the laws, and who, by their sublime example, have taught us all to obey the law; that none are above the law...”
In other words, anyone born in the U.S.A. to citizen parents is a natural born citizen.
Here is the true precedent from a most liberal professor.
In a recent Illinois Public Law & Legal Theory written by Professor Lawrence B Solum of the U of IL, College of Law, Chicago, Solum further explains why the English common law definition of ‘natural born subject was not the definition adopted by the Framers for the Sovereign citizens of the United States of America.
[Blackstone Commentaries (1765): When I say, that an alien is one who is born out of the king’s dominions, or allegiance, this also must be understood with some restrictions. The common law indeed stood absolutely so; with only a very few exceptions: so that a particular act of parliament became necessary after the restoration, for the naturalization of children of his majesty’s English subjects, born in foreign countries during the late troubles. And this maxim of the law proceeded upon a general principle, that every man owes natural allegiance where he is born, and cannot owe two such allegiances, or serve two masters, at once. Yet the children of the king’s ambassadors born abroad were always held to be natural subjects: for as the father, though in a foreign country, owes not even a local allegiance to the prince to whom he is sent; so, with regard to the son also, he was held (by a kind of postliminium) to be born under the king of England’s allegiance, represented by his father, the ambassador. 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;...]
[F.E. Edwards, Natural Born British Subjects at Common Law, 14 Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation 314 (1914): The pro- position that British Protectorates, and consequently any less interest of the Crown, should be excluded from our definition of the King’s protection, is supported by Sir William Anson, who declares that birth within such a region is not sufficient to found a claim for British natural-born status. The real test of whether a given territory is part of the British Dominions is that it must have passed openly, completely, and unequivocally into the possession of the Crown.]
[Solum: If the American conception of “natural born citizen” were equivalent to the English notion of a “natural born subject,” then it could be argued that only persons born on American soil to American parents would have qualified. This might lead to the conclusion that McCain would not be a constitutional natural-born citizen, because the Panama Canal Zone was not the sovereign territory of the United States, but was instead merely subject to its administrative control.
The language of the Constitution recognizes a distinction between the terms “citizen” and “subject”. For example, in Article III Section 2, which confers “judicial power” on the federal courts, “citizens” of the several states are differentiated from “citizens” or “subjects” of foreign states—corresponding to the distinction between diversity and alienage jurisdiction. In the framing era, these two terms reflected two distinct theories of the relationship between individual members of a political community and the state.
In feudal or monarchical constitutional theory, individuals were the subjects of a monarch or sovereign, but the republican constitutional theory of the revolutionary and post revolutionary period conceived of the individual as a citizen and assigned sovereignty to the people.
The distinction between citizens and subjects is reflected in Chief Justice John Jay’s opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia, the first great constitutional case decided after the ratification of the Constitution of 1789:
[T]he sovereignty of the nation is in the people of the nation, and the residuary sovereignty of each State in the people of each State…
[A]t the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects…]
As you can see, in England there are two very distinct meanings of ’natural born’ subject. In one hand there is the broader view & in the other there is the view of the laws of nations. What the liberal progressive constitutionalists use is the broader view and thus disregard the fact that at some point, even England used the law of nations. The Framers also knew of Englands use of the law of nations and were very aware of its importance when establishing a new nation. It has also been proven that the Law of Nations was in the hands of the Framers at the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
From the very 1st SCOTUS Justice Washington appointed, a Justice who was only 2nd to Madison in the drafting of the Constitution that the definition for US citizens was not derived from English common law, but on the law of Nations which is the law of nature:
“The law of nature, when applied to states and political societies, receives a new name, that of the law of nations. This law, important in all states, is of peculiar importance in free ones. The States of America are certainly entitled to this dignified appellation…But if the knowledge of the law of nations is greatly useful to those who appoint, it surely must be highly necessary to those who are appointed…As Puffendorff thought that the law of nature and the law of nations were precisely the same, he has not, in his book on these subjects treated of the law of nations separately; but has every where joined it with the law of nature, properly called so…the law of nature is applied to individuals; the law of nations is applied to states.”
Wilson, in his 1st commentaries, blasts Blackstone’s theory by citing that the definition of ’subject’ per English common law according to Blackstone was not the definition of ‘citizen’ as adopted by the framers of the US Constitution. A ’subject’ is ruled by an all powerful central government/monarchy and the under the new Constitution of the United States, the central government’s power is derived from the people, the citizens.
Wilson also wrote the very 1st SCOTUS decision in Chisolm which is cited to this day as to the powers of the central government. He also was no right-wing conservative where the limits of the central government were concerned. Wilson felt that the Constitution did not go far enough in giving broader powers to those in Washington, but he KNEW the premise of the Constitution and stood behind it in every decision he made, regardless of his political philosophy.
There is a Constitutional standing definition of natural born citizen. It is in Article I Section 8 provision #9 which embeds the Law of Nations by words without ambiguity. The Law of Nations declares a nbc as one born in the country of parentS who are it’s citizenS. You are correct that the Founding Fathers wanted to protect their new Nation and it’s POTUSA from any foreign influence. I believe they covered their requirement for POTUSA by incorporating the Law of Nations. Note they felt so strongly about this that they also called for punishment of offenses against that part of the Constitution.
“Former ballerina, Rahm Emanuel quickly recognized the offensiveness of his comments and apologized to the retards for comparing them to democrats.”
LOL! I’m crying over here!
Could his upcoming trip to Indonesia be related to this matter?
Its true that Rahm apologized to special needs people not the left wing Dems that he was trying to accurately describe.
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