Eligibility rulings vanish from Net (Minor v Happersett, FReeper Danae quoted)

A New Jersey attorney who brought the first legal challenge to Barack Obama's occupancy in the Oval Office to the U.S. Supreme Court has published a report revealing that references to a U.S. Supreme Court decision addressing the definition of "natural-born citizen" were scrubbed at one of the key online resources for legal documents.

The Minor v. Happersett case is significant because it is one of very few references in the nation's archives that addresses the definition of "natural-born citizen," a requirement imposed by the U.S. Constitution on only the U.S. president.

Dianna Cotter wrote in the Portland Civil Rights Examiner: "This was done in these specific cases in order to prevent their being found by Internet researchers long before anyone had even begun to look for them, even before Obama would win the Democratic nomination at the DNC Convention in Denver, Colo., in August '08. This is premeditation and intent to deceive."

She noted that attorneys working on arguments always would return to the originals from the Supreme Court, "but 99.99 percent of the population has no access to dusty law texts or expensive legal research services such as Lexis and Westlaw.

The issue is not whether Minor could be found but whether non-lawyer members of the “court of public opinion” such as journalists and ordinary citizen researchers would be triggered by subsequent citations to look for the Minor case as precedent.

It is now obvious that Minor was cited in numerous cases as SCOTUS precedent on the definition of natural born citizen rendering claims moot that Minor just discussed NBC as “obiter dictum.” It is these citations included in SCOTUS cases subsequent to Minor that the Justia conspirator removed.

As Danae said:

“The manipulation at Justia.com diluted the importance of Minor by killing the citations in Supreme Court cases spanning over 100 years. Since Google most often returns Justia.com’s version of the case being searched for as the first or second hit, Justia’s version of Supreme Court opinions are most influential in the blogosphere's forums and comments. Erasing those citations and text on the Internet literally erases the importance of Minor and its precedents to millions of Americans otherwise unlikely to ever step into physical Law Library.”

“I find Google to be superior to Lexis and Westlaw for about 50% of my legal research. Google Scholar and many other free search engines make it possible for anyone to research the law, not that there are that many people who really want to.”

Your comment affirms the insidious nature of the Justia scrubing of Minor from citations. Legal researchers using free internet links get lulled into confidence in the reliability of the links.

Note that Wiki moderators have viciously scrubbed any attempts to include reference to Minor v Happersett from their “natural born citizen” page.

The Wiki page on Natural Born Citizen has been recently updated for comments by Lawrence Solum relating to Rubio and even makes reference to his own law review article from Sept. 2008 based on the Minor v Happersett formulation and mentions that Solum has modified his position away from Minor in a way that just happens to make Obama and Rubio eligible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_of_the_U.S._Constitution

quote

Academic opinions

In a 2008 article published by the Michigan Law Review Lawrence Solum, Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, stated that “there is general agreement on the core of [the] meaning [of the Presidential Eligibility Clause]. Anyone born on American soil whose parents are citizens of the United States is a ‘natural born citizen’”.[24] In April 2010, Solum republished the same article as an online draft, in which he changed his opinion on the meaning of natural born citizen to include persons born in the United States of one American citizen parent. In a footnote he explained that “based on my reading of the historical sources, there is no credible case that a person born on American soil with one American parent was clearly not a ‘natural born citizen’.” He further extended natural born citizenship to all cases of jus soli as the “conventional view”.[25] Although Professor Solum stated elsewhere that the two-citizen-parents arguments “weren't crazy”, he believes “the much stronger argument suggests that if you were born on American soil that you would be considered a natural born citizen.”[26]

Ronald Rotunda, Professor of Law at Chapman University, stated, “There's some people who say that both parents need to be citizens. That's never been the law.”[27] Polly Price, Professor of Law at Emory University, added, “It's a little confusing, but most scholars think it's a pretty unusual position for anyone to think the natural born citizen clause would exclude someone born in the [United States].”[26] Professor Chin concurred with that assessment, stating, “there is agreement that ‘natural born citizens’ include those made citizens by birth under the 14th Amendment.”[28] Similarly, Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, found “quite persuasive” the reasoning employed by the Indiana Court of Appeals, which had ruled “that persons born within the borders of the United States are ‘natural born Citizens’ for Article II, Section 1 purposes, regardless of the citizenship of their parents.”[29][30]

Daniel Takaji, Professor of Law at Ohio State University, stated Marco Rubio (whose parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of his birth in the United States) was a natural-born citizen because he was born in the United States; the citizenship status of his parents was irrelevant.[31]

end quote

Yes, Wiki has a page on Minor, but the unnamed reviewer goes to great pains to state on that page that Minor is “obiter dictum” and not precedent and omits the subsequent citations as precedent that were scrubbed by Justia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_v._Happersett

quote

In obiter dictum, the Court referenced the natural-born-citizen clause of the U.S. Constitution, stating, “The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words ‘all children’ are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as ‘all persons,’ and if females are included in the last they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.”

Subsequent history

Minor has not been explicitly overruled by another Supreme Court decision. In fact, Minor is still cited for the proposition that the Constitution does not confer the right to vote. However, as the decision relates to women's suffrage in particular, it is no longer applicable because of the Nineteenth Amendment.

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Let us now examine what Obama’s enablers are peddling on this blog. They must and do attack the Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875) decision on two fronts. First, they argue that the definition of a “natural-born citizen” given by the Court is dicta and therefore not binding precedent. But they are wrong. In Minor, the U.S. Supreme Court had to decide whether Virginia Minor, a woman, was a “citizen” in order to determine whether as a “citizen” she enjoyed a constitutional right to vote under the privileges and immunities clause of Article IV. So the Court reasoned that once she was shown to be a “citizen,” it did not matter that she was a woman, unless Missouri could still disqualify a woman from voting because being a “citizen” did not guarantee any person the right to vote. It does not matter whether the Court chose to say that Minor was a “natural born Citizen” or just a “citizen.” Either way, Virginia Minor would advance to the next step in the analysis which was whether as a “citizen” she had the right to vote which Missouri could not abrogate. The Court chose the “natural-born citizen” path. It thoroughly analyzed and considered what a “natural-born citizen” was and after saying that it is a child born in the country to citizen parents, found that Virginia Minor was a “natural-born citizen” and therefore also a “citizen.” After the Court told us what a “natural-born citizen” was, it then made the comment about there being doubts as to whether a child born in the country to alien parents was even a “citizen.” The Court said that it was not necessary for it to decide that question and it did not because Virginia Minor was a “natural-born citizen” which necessarily also made her a “citizen.” So the focus of the Court’s decision regarding citizenship was in defining who the “original citizens” and the “natural-born citizens” were. The Court did not and did not have to answer the question about who was a “citizen” under the Fourteenth Amendment which in the question that it raised involved deciding whether a child born in the jurisdiction of the United States but to alien parents was born “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” We know that this latter question concerning who was a “citizen” under these circumstances was answered by U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 which also confirmed Minor’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” and analyzed whether such a child was born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment.

So as we can see, Minor’s analysis and discussion about citizenship was central to the Court’s answering the question of whether Virginia Minor was a “citizen” which it answered by telling us that she was a “natural-born citizen” which automatically made her a “citizen” also. Hence, Minor’s discussion and decision on what a “natural-born citizen” is was central to the Court’s holding regarding citizenship (as I explained the other holding concerned whether voting was a privilege and immunity originally guaranteed by the constitution’s privileges and immunities clause) and not dicta.

“Totally false. It simply did not happen. That is why the issue was debated before the Supreme Court with WKA years later. They would not have accepted arguments about it if it had been previously settled.”

First, let me say that reasonable people can differ on the meaning of Minor as compared to WKA without resort to ad hominem attacks, which I hope we can keep off of this thread.

My take on Minor is that the court defined NBC _only_ as a means of establishing whether Mrs. Minor was in a class citizen which they needed to do before they could decide whether she, as a citizen, would have a right to vote.

The court _did_ reach the question of whether Mrs. Minor was a citizen and their holding was that she was a specific type of citizen, a natural born citizen.

In obiter dictum in Minor the court said that regarding the children of aliens born on US soil that was “doubt” as to whether they were citizens. The court said it could _not_ reach the question of whether these children of aliens were citizens, but the court clearly defined NBC in a way that _excluded_ them as being NBC, i.e. born on US soil of two citizen parents. A child born in the US with one or more alien parents cannot be NBC under the Minor holding, period.

Note that Minor was decided in 1875 _after_ the 14A was authorized, so as of 1875 there was still doubt that children born in the US with one or more alien parents were even citizens.

It took until 1898 in the Wong Kim Ark case (WKA) before the court reached the issue of the “doubt” about the citizenship of children born to aliens on US soil raised by the court in Minor.

If you look at the Wiki page (heavily moderated by Obama supporters) even Wiki does not claim that WKA has anything to do with defining natural born citizen. If you search the page you won't find the term, nor will you find reference on the WIKI WKA page to the discussion and definition of natural born citizen in Minor v Happersett that are contained within WKA in obiter dictum.

The whole issue in WKA _only_ involved whether Wong was a 14th Amendment citizen due to being born “under the jurisdiction” of the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark

quote

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), was a United States Supreme Court decision that set an important legal precedent about the role of jus soli (birth in the United States) as a factor in determining a person's claim to United States citizenship. The citizenship status of Wong—a man born around 1871 to Chinese parents who were domiciled in the United States—was challenged, based on an 1882 law restricting Chinese immigration and prohibiting immigrants from China from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. Eventually, this issue reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in Wong's favor, deciding that the citizenship language in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution could not be impaired in its effect by an act of Congress.

end quote

“I’m still trying to figure out why anyone would go through the trouble of concocting such an ineffective conspiracy...much less actually trying to pull it off.”

What, you’re saying this sequence of events doesn’t make sense to you?

- Sometime prior to July 6, 2008, someone at Justia.com (possibly Obama-supporter Tim Stanley) decides that Minor v Happersett is detrimental to Obama.

- Justia decides to respond, but not by deleting the text of Minor v Happersett from its website.

- Instead, Justia removes references to the case name “Minor v Happersett” and its citation in the pre-1875 Supreme Court reporters (21 Wall 162).

- Then, in the place of the information it removed, Justia puts hyperlinks to the Minor v Happersett page on Justia.com, utilizing the more common U.S. Reports locations for that case (88 US 165).

- Then for some reason, Justia also does the same thing for other pre-1875 cases. So, in Luria, it also substitutes hyperlinks for case names for Osborn v. Bank of United States and for U.S. v. Babbitt.

- Then sometime prior to April 2010, Justia added back in the case names and original reporter numbers, but also retained the hyperlinks to the US Reporters.

- And Justia did all of this to hide the significance of Minor from the general public, even though it knew that this would have no effect on lawyers or actual legal experts, who use Lexis or Westlaw.

- And Justia also did all this to hide the significance of Minor, even though by replacing the case name with a direct hyperlink, it was actually making it EASIER and FASTER for readers to locate the Minor decision if they were reading Luria.

Per Seizethecarp:

“It is now obvious that Minor was cited in numerous cases as SCOTUS precedent on the definition of natural born citizen “

Per Mr. Rodgers:

“Totally false. It simply did not happen.”

Just one example refuting of Mr. Rodgers by Leo Donofrio:

http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/

quote

The Mystery of In Re Lockwood 154 U.S. 116 (1894).

A crucial US Supreme Court decision which has miraculously been absent from the national dialogue on Presidential eligibility is Ex Parte Lockwood, 154 U.S. 116 (1894), an essential case which confirms Minor v. Happersett as precedent on the definition of federal citizenship:

“In Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, this court held that the word ‘citizen’ is often used to convey the idea of membership in a nation, and, in that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution as since;” (Emphasis added.)

Lockwood directly cites Minor as precedent on the definition of federal citizenship, yet I can find no hits in Google searches which discuss this case in relation to Obama’s eligibility. Furthermore, If you visit Cornell’s page for Lockwood, the opinion is cut off right after “Minor v”. It never gets to Happersett and what comes after. The Cornell page is filled with gibberish from some other case.

The Lockwood opinion is also mangled at the Wiki Source page which doesn’t mention Minor at all. And as of Oct. 18, 2011, the version on Lexis has “Minor” mis-spelled as “Miner” in the body of the Lockwood opinion hosted there.

end quote

Minor is irrelevant to the meaning of NBC, since it specifically decided NOT to explore the debate over the term.

That statement demonstrates your inability to read and comprehend the Minor decision. In this regard, we can say the folks at Justia.com did better at it than you.

As I explained elsewhere to a troll a few months ago, the court declared the NBC debate was unnecessary since the definition of NBC was not in doubt.

The court looked at two features of parental citizenship. The first: “At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.”

The second dealt with parental non-citizenship. “As to this (second) class there have been doubts, but never as to the first.”

What possible rationale can be used to argue that the founders, who had just concluded a bloody struggle with England, would allow those of non-citizen parents to hold the highest office in the nation?

http://www.federalistblog.us/2006/12/us_v_wong_kim_ark_can_never_be_considered/

....In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, the court was specifically asked to address “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and held it meant:

The persons declared to be citizens are “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The evident meaning of these last words is not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction and owing them (U.S.) direct and immediate allegiance. And the words relate to the time of birth in the one case, as they do to the time of naturalization in the other. Persons not thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States at the time of birth cannot become so afterwards except by being naturalized, either individually, as by proceedings under the naturalization acts, or collectively, as by the force of a treaty by which foreign territory is acquired.....

...Here we have the framers, the Attorney General and the Elk court all agreeing that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means political attachment. The question begs, what happened to the adopted meaning?....

....Conclusion

The ruling in Wong Kim Ark is of little relevance to the question surrounding the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction” since that was not the question before the court as it was in Elk. Whatever one wants to make of the Wong Kim Ark ruling it will have little bearing over questions of whether aliens who have no political attachment to the country can be born born subject to its jurisdiction......

“Who appointed Justice Gray?”

Flashback to December 2008:

http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/wrotnowski-application-referred-to-full-court-by-justice-scalia-distributed-for-conference-on-dec-12-supplemental-brief-to-be-submitted-tomorrow/

quote

Tomorrow, Dec. 9 – Cort Wrotnowski will submit a supplemental brief concerning the newly discovered ineligibility of twenty-first President Chester Arthur due to his having been born as a British subject. This is relevant to the case at hand in that Justice Gray – who wrote the seminal opinion in United States v. Wong Kim Ark – was appointed by Chester Arthur.

The Wong Kim Ark case involves an important historical opinion that SCOTUS Justices will certainly consider as to the Obama natural born citizen issue.

The recent discovery calls into question the motivations of both Arthur and Gray since Arthur’s father was a British subject not naturalized at the time of Chester’s birth. In fact, William Arthur was not naturalized until 1843, fourteen years after Chester was born. In the light of historical retrospection, Justice Gray’s decision in Wong Kim Ark seems tailor made to the circumstances of Arthur’s birth.

Chester Arthur was born in 1829. The 14th Amendment wasn’t ratified until 1868, and Wong Kim Ark was decided in 1898. But under United States law in 1829 it’s not clear that Arthur would have even been considered a United States citizen at the time of his birth, let alone a “natural born citizen” eligible to be President. At best, he would have been a dual citizen of Great Britain and the United States.

It was proved earlier this week, by various articles in the Brooklyn Eagle printed circa 1880, and other authorities, that when Arthur was on the campaign trail as Garfield’s running mate he lied many times about his father’s emigration record, his parents’ life in Canada before coming to the United States, and his father’s age. Chester also burned his papers and falsified his birth year. It appears now that he was doing so to conceal the POTUS eligibility issue.

Every other President (who didn’t become eligible under the Article 2, Section 1 grandfather clause) was born to American citizen parents in the United States. The fact that he was a British subject at birth was first reported on Friday Dec. 5.

It must now be questioned whether the relationship between Chester Arthur and Justice Gray was influenced by Arthur’s eligibility problems and whether those issues effected Gray’s opinion and vote in Wong Kim Ark.

It must also be considered that the integrity of Justice Gray’s SCOTUS appointment might have been called into question if Chester Arthur’s POTUS ineligibility issues had become known.

All of the above is relevant to the issue of whether Barack Obama is a natural born citizen in that the core Supreme Court opinion in Wong Kim Ark must now be re-evaluated in lieu of the fact that the Justice who wrote the opinion was appointed by Chester Arthur.

end quote

“That statement demonstrates your inability to read and comprehend the Minor decision. “

Yes, well, MY interpretation is supported by every court in the country.

If you could read English, you would understand. You can’t, and thus you are a birther.

But for any lurkers, here is what Minor said:

“At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their [p168] parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.”

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0088_0162_ZO.html

Oh golly, There I go again - pulling Minor without using justica!

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