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To: Kansas58

“NO COURT HAS EVER RULED THAT THERE IS A CONSTITUONAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NATURAL BORN CITIZEN AND CITIZEN AT BIRTH!”

Woah, are YOU late to the party!

Minor V. Happersett, 1874 DID make precisely that ruling. It defined a Natural Born Citizen, and differentiated it from someone who is a 14th Amendment Citizen. GO READ IT. It isn’t even that long for a SCOTUS case!


223 posted on 02/01/2012 10:40:12 PM PST by Danae (Anailnathrach ortha bhais beatha do cheal deanaimha)
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To: Danae
"Minor V. Happersett, 1874 DID make precisely that ruling. It defined a Natural Born Citizen, and differentiated it from someone who is a 14th Amendment Citizen. GO READ IT. It isn’t even that long for a SCOTUS case! "

I'm sorry, but Minor did not settle this question. It is the longstanding practice of the court to decide only those constitutional issues which MUST be decided to address the case at hand. Minor addressed the voting rights of a woman; the final sentence of the decision reads:

"Being unanimously of the opinion that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, and that the constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void, we affirm the judgment.

Earlier in the decision the court made clear it was NOT defining natural-born citizen, as it was not necessary to do so to decide the case at hand: [emphasis added]

"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."

333 posted on 02/02/2012 9:47:08 AM PST by In Maryland ("Truth? We don't need no stinkin' truth!" - Official Motto of the Main Stream Media)
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