Justice Scalia: Fourteenth Amendment "General Words with General Meanings"

Justice Scalia:

Fourteenth Amendment"General Words with General Meanings"

This post is modified with corrections from a similar post on Mario Apuzzo's blog on March 9, 2015 at 12:20 AM.

>> http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2015/02/what-do-president-obama-and-senator.html

<<>>

Mario,

I read Kevin's/Ph.D. Mathematician and recalcitrant "proper subset" expert (aka Slartibartfast) comment about his friend who is a friend of Jack Maskell who thinks "absolutely nothing of you," as if that gives intellectual weight to Maskell's incoherent explication about "natural born Citizen," dual U.S./foreign citizenship and Obama's eligibility.

Mario, don't hold your breath for Jack Maskell to respond to your public challenge 'cause his reputation, job and income are not threatened by not responding. Also, if Maskell has read your blog expositions, he can not refute your expositions of the Slaughter-House cases.

This next quote, which includes references to Amendments 13, 14, 15 and Slaughter-House, is from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner's 2012 book "Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts", pages 101-103, in the section titled "9. General-Terms Canon, General terms are to be given their general meaning."

(I did not include open or closed quotes, all quote marks are in the original)

Scalia/Garner:

Examples of general words with general meanings can be found in the post-Civil War amendments to the United States Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, guarantees equal protection of the law to "all persons." Some commentators have argued that because it was enacted for the benefit of blacks, it should not apply to anybody else.1 But in the first case to expound the meaning of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—the Slaughter-House Cases2—the Supreme Court acknowledged the breadth of the language used, as contrasted with the immediate purpose for their passage:

We do not say that no one else but the negro can share in this protection [of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments]. Both the language and spirit of these articles are to have their fair and just weight in any question of construction. Undoubtedly while negro slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which proposed the thirteenth article, it forbids any other kind of slavery, now or hereafter. If Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie labor system shall develop slavery of the Mexican or Chinese race within our territory, this amendment may safely be trusted to make it void. And so if other rights are assailed by the States which properly and necessarily fall within the protection of these articles, that protection will apply, though the party interested may not be of African descent.3

Both text and tradition support this much of the opinion. The language of the Fourteenth Amendment—that no state may deny to any person the equal protection of the law--is very general.

[...snip...]

Nor could the general wording of the Fourteenth Amendment be confined to men. ... the argument that despite the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection to all persons, women were not given the vote until adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment. That has nothing to do with the meaning of person in the Fourteenth Amendment; it has to do with the meaning of equal protection. ... there is no doubt that the society that adopted the Fourteenth Amendment did not believe that the equal-protection guarantee gave women the vote, as the laws of the era demonstrate.

[...snip...]

The argument most frequently made against giving general terms their general meaning is the one made (and rejected) in the Slaughter-House cases--that those who adopted the provision had in mind a particular narrow objective (equal protection for blacks) though they expressed a more general one (equal protection for "any person"). The conclusive response to this argument is that "statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed."8

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

What I would like for "natural born Citizen" new meaning neo-birther Jack Maskell and other new meaning neo-birthers to coherently define and defend is the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark holding that 1898 ONLY dual U.S./foreign citizenship anchor baby Wong Kim Ark, born to alien residents (aka zero U.S. citizen parents) fulfilled, for POTUS eligibility, the original intent of ONLY singular U.S. citizenship as a citizen of ONLY one nation.

It is obvious that Article II POTUS eligibility was NOT what the framers intended for the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment word "born" because the intent was to define "citizens" born to two U.S. citizen married parents OR one U.S. citizen parent, and POTUS eligibility was already defined by Article II as ONLY singular U.S. citizenship by birth on U.S. soil to two U.S. citizen married parents.

The "natural born Citizen" new meaning neo-birthers like Jack Maskell can not defend the 1898 Court's rejection of the 1868 original intent of the original framers of the Fourteenth Amendment: ONLY singular U.S. citizenship of ONLY one nation that was obviously intended in 1868 for the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment free Negroes, as Justice Scalia affirmed in the previous quote.

Art
U.S. Constitution: The Original Birther Document of the Union
( http://originalbirtherdocument.blogspot.com/2015/01/time-to-change-natural-born-citizen.html )