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To: sourcery

I didn’t read the whole thing, but I skipped to the end and read this, which is obviously untrue:

“The settled law of the land is that the US President must be a natural born citizen, and that to be a natural born citizen, you must have been born in the United States to parents both of whom were US citizens when you were born.”

In other words, you are claiming that it is “settled law” that both John McCain and Barack Obama are constitutionally ineligible to run for President.

I’m glad you wrote that. It means that I needn’t waste my time reading the rest, per Luke 16:10.

In fact, it has always been understood that anyone who is a U.S. citizen at birth is a natural born citizen. That’s what the term means, and what it has always meant. That’s been settled since 1790, when the first Congress enacted a statute declaring that children born overseas of U.S.parents are natural born U.S. citizens.

That statute was signed into law by President Washington.

As a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett affirmed there are exactly two classes of citizens: “new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.” The former are natural-born, the latter are naturalized. There’s no halfway-between class of citizens, who are citizens from birth but not natural-born.

There’s no evidence at all, in the language or history of the U.S. Constitution, to suggest that the Framers envisioned a third class of citizens, who were citizens from birth but not to be considered “natural born.” Only crackpots like Mario Apuzzo claim such a thing, and they have no evidence to support it.

If the First Congress had meant to define some other sort of citizen, they certainly would not have used the exact term used in the Constitution: natural born. They would not have said, “shall be considered as natural born citizens” if what they’d really meant was “shall be considered as citizens, but not natural born.” There’s no suggestion in any known historical or legal document that any of the Framers thought there could be a third sort of citizen, who was neither a natural born citizen nor a naturalized citizen.

At no time has any Congress ever written any statute suggesting that someone who is born a U.S. citizen might not be a natural born citizen of the United States.

Here are four references:

1. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-66/pdf/STATUTE-66-Pg163.pdf (if interested in Ted Cruz, see Sec. 301(a)(7) on p.236, which is p.74 as Acrobat Reader numbers the pages in that file).

2. http://tinyurl.com/NatBornHarv

3. http://tinyurl.com/natz-chart-a

4. http://tinyurl.com/natz-chart-b

Reference #1 is the statute which specifically applies to Ted Cruz’s circumstance, though it’s the current version, rather than the 1970 version.

Reference #3 is a chart which takes into account how the law has changed over the years. (What matters is what the law was when a person was born.)

Reference #2 is a Harvard Law review article about the meaning of the term “natural born.” It was written by two former Solicitors General of the United States, one Republican and one Democrat.

Reference #4 doesn’t apply to any of the current candidates, but might have applied to President Obama if he’d been born overseas, and if his parents’ brief, illegal, bigamous marriage had been declared invalid.


102 posted on 02/11/2016 3:13:41 PM PST by ncdave4life
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To: ncdave4life

Your rebuttal is comprehensively and unarguably refuted by what you refused to read.


103 posted on 02/11/2016 4:27:13 PM PST by sourcery (Without the right to self defense, there can be no rights at all.)
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