Natural
Born Citizen Debates – Redux
Mario
Apuzzo, David Ramsay, Emer de Vattel
vs.
Mark
Levin, Larry Solum, Robert Natelson & Akhil Amar
I
also posted this on Mario Appuzo’s Natural Born Citizen blog
Mario,
I
have another suggestion for a heavy hitter “natural born citizen”
debate opponent for you, Yale Law Professor Akhil Reed Amar, However,
if his page 38 footnote inserted into his 2008 Slate.com essay in his
last book is an indicator, you don’t stand a chance... cough,
cough, of staying awake.
After
the quote from my previous comment here on June 2, 2017 at 8:18 PM
about Prof. Robert Natelson being added to the opposition’s natural
born citizen debate roster to “clarify what he, Natelson, meant
about Vattel’s clarification about “parents”, there are some
comments by Yale Law Prof. Akhil Reed Amar from his 2016 book
incorporating his essays, The Constitution Today –
Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era.
My
suggestion is that Prof. Amar should be included in the
debate roster of those who propose that dual U.S./foreign citizenship
is the original genesis original intent of Article II Section 1
clause 5and the Fourteenth Amendment, and that dual U.S./foreign
citizenship is sufficient for a person to be “...eligible to the
Office of President”.
To
put it another way, Yale Law Prof. Amar should be included in the
list of debaters against you on the side of the opposition who
promote the shallow proposition that dual U.S./foreign citizenship
parents, married or unmarried to each other, can produce a singular
U.S. citizenship child, aka a natural born citizen, “by birth
alone”. Also,
to add to my debate suggestion against the proposition that dual
U.S./foreign citizenship is sufficient to be eligible to be
president, and contrary to Prof. Amar’s comments below (see
“relevant congressional statute
conferred
birth-based American citizenship”
in footnote 38 below), citizenship
by positive law is NOT citizenship by “birth” alone and
positive law should NOT be adduced in opposition to the proposition
that a “natural born Citizen” is by “birth” alone and
so is the ONLY U.S. citizen eligible to be president. If Levin,
Solum, Natelson, and Amar will stipulate that positive law
(“conferring”) is not the solution to clarifying natural
law (“birth”), then the concomitant proposition follows
that a “citizen” by positive law should NOT be adduced into the
debate to define the meaning of “natural born Citizen” if
eligibility to be president can be ONLY by “birth” alone.
My
point is that all that Levin, Solum, Natelson, Amar and pinch
hitters/debaters et al. need to do is persuade us today, and, in
absentia of course, John Jay, George Washington, 100% of the
delegates who adopted the language of the Constitution on September
17, 1787 and eventually 100% of the ratifiers of the several states,
which includes ratifier John Jay from New York, that when John Jay
suggested on July 25, 1787 in his note to George Washington that
military “command” should not “devolve” on anyone but a
“natural born Citizen”, the dual U.S./foreign citizenship is
sufficient to be “...eligible to the Office of President”
proponents need to clarify why Jay did NOT mean that eligibility to
be president was derived exclusively by
–
ONLY
singular U.S. citizenship; and
–
ONLY
“by birth alone”; and
–
ONLY
by birth to two U.S. citizen married parents; and
–
ONLY
married to each (NOT multiple wives as with Muslims); and
–
ONLY
before the birth of the child.
Also,
in addition to what Jay did NOT mean exclusively in 1787 America,
those who oppose ONLY singular U.S. citizenship need to persuade us
today in 2017 America that Jay ALSO meant (and George Washington
tacitly agreed when he passed Jay’s suggestion to the convention
delegates) that “natural born Citizen” also meant, or, at least,
“could” have meant, as the 1790 Naturalization Act
“natural born citizen” language implied until corrected by the
1795 Naturalization Act “citizen” language, that eligibility to
be president could be derived by those
1
– born on U.S. soil to only one U.S. citizen parent, married or not
to the reproductive partner,
OR
2
– born on foreign soil to either two OR one U.S. citizen parent,
married or not to the reproductive partner,
OR
3
– born on U.S. soil to ZERO U.S. citizen parents, married or not to
the reproductive partner.
Number
3 is the absurd conclusion of the U.S. citizen parents are not
necessary fiat decision of the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark court that
Levin, Solum, Natelson, and Amar, who, as proponents of dual
U.S./foreign citizenship, are really proposing a shallow legal
assumption about the legal meaning of “natural born Citizen” in
Article II Section 1 clause 5 that leads to the equally shallow
conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment is constitutional authority
for plop-and-drop “anchor babies” born on U.S. soil to alien
parents and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Sen.
Marco Rubio, also born on U.S. soil to alien parents, are
“...eligible to the Office of President”.
Mario,
all Levin, Solum, Natelson, and Amar and et al. need to do is
persuade themselves first and then us that Jay was totally inclusive
and not exclusive when he underlined the word “born” in his
“natural born Citizen” note to Washington.
Simple,
huh? That’s all they need to do.
For
context about Prof. Amar, here is my previous comment about including
Prof. Natelson into your debate roster.
“After
posting the previous comment today (June 2, 2017 at 12:38 PM) about
debates with Mark Levin and Professor Larry Solum I remembered
Professor Robert Natelson, author of The
Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant,
3rd
Edition, published in 2014. He did not add
anything to the text of the 2nd Edition published in 2011, but he did
add footnote #25 about Emer de Vattel and how Vattel "clarified"
what he meant by
“parents”.
After the quote from Natelson’s book
about Emer de Vattel
is your quote about David Ramsay that
Natelson should be asked about to clarify what he, Natelson, meant
about Vattel’s
clarification.”
Now,
here are some of
Prof. Amar’s comments related to
why a “citizen”
with only one U.S. citizen parent (see
page 38 footnote below)
is eligible to be president. He
states on pages 4
and 5 that his
book is composed of his essays: “The
essays are organized by subject matter so that the reader may see the
larger patterns of argument that run through them. … To preserve
the integrity of the historical record, I’ve used this book’s
footnotes and endnotes to identify all important substantive
changes.”
Mario,
to me this statement
about “substantive
changes”, specifically
his long footnote
on page 38 about
a “citizen” who is “...eligible to the Office of President”
(my words), means
that his footnote is all he thought was needed to deal with the
“hullabaloo”
about the “presidential eligibility”
of then Senator Obama in 2008
and Senator Cruz in 2016.
Although
“natural born citizen” is on page 36 in the text, the
Index does not list “natural born citizen”, “natural”,
“born”, or “citizen”, but it does list “citizenship
rights,
406; birthright citizenship,
38(fn); detention of an “enemy
combatant,”
207-208; Obama and Cruz’s
presidential eligibility,
38(fn); presidential
qualifications,
36, 263”. All
empheses are in the original.
Page
36[-37]
–
Slate
essay: The
Constitution and the Candidates
(2008)
–
presidential
eligibility”
“Consider
next the Constitution’s rule that the president be
“a natural born citizen”—a rule
that focuses not on where
a person becomes a citizen, but when.
To be eligible,
one must be born
a citizen rather
than naturalized at some later date. At the Founding, a special
constitutional clause provided that
even those who had not been citizens at birth could nevertheless
become president, if they were citizens circa 1787. Thus, Alexander
Hamilton, born in the West Indies, was clearly eligible. All those
already in America in 1787 could be trusted; but the framers fretted
that an Old World earl or duke might someday sail across the Atlantic
with a boatload of gold and bribe his way into the presidency. (Rumor
had it that George III’s second son, the Bishop of Osnaburgh, would
soon head this way.) Thus, the “natural-born” clause’s main
target of concern was not immigrants generally, but wealthy European
aristocrats who might wreak havoc in an America lacking strong
campaign finance laws.
“The
Constitution’s final requirement—fourteen years of U.S.
residence—also focused on transoceanic travel and made clear that
loyal Americans who had spent years or even decades abroad were
nonetheless welcome to pursue the American presidency. (The document
pointedly did not require decades of continuous and uninterrupted
residence in the U.S.) ….”
[...snip…
to
page 37]
“Later
amendments have further opened the door of eligibility. Nothing at
the Founding required that state election laws give equal treatment
to black or female voters or office seekers. The
Constitution’s Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments corrected these
Founding lapses, promising blacks and women the rights to vote and to
be voted for as full political equals.”
Page
38 footnote
–
Slate
essay: The Constitution and the
Candidates (2008)
–
“birthright
citizenship” & “Obama and Cruz’s
presidential eligibility”
[After
a short comment in the text about Sen. John McCain, the
footnote that references the “hullabaloo”
about natural born citizen – “hullabaloo”
??? – starts
with “extra information for
readers interested...”.
A
question for Prof. Amar: Is
this long
footnote
the best that Prof. Amar, being a constitutional scholar and all that
implies, like constitutional scholars Levin, Solum, and Natelson, is
this footnote the best Prof. Amar can do… after eight years dealing
with the “nbC” “hullabaloo”?]
[...the
brackets [] below in the next paragraph are in the page 38 footnote]
“[Extra
information for readers interested in the more recent hullabaloo
about Obama’s birth certificate and the questions raised about Ted
Cruz’s presidential eligibility: Cruz is eligible even though he
was undeniably born in Canada. At the time of his birth, the relevant
congressional statute conferred birth-based American citizenship on
any foreign-born baby who had at least one parent who was a U.S.
citizen, so long as that parent had met certain conditions of
extensive prior physical presence in the United States. On the day of
his birth, Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen, even though his father
was not; and his mother also met the relevant rules of extensive
prior physical presence. Why then, would Obama have been any
different even if he had
been born in Kenya, as has been
(preposterously but repeatedly) claimed by various critics, led by
Donald Trump? Like Cruz, Obama’s mother
was a U.S. citizen on the day of his birth, even though, like Cruz,
his father was not. And nothing in the relevant congressional statute
treats a Kenyan birth as any different from a Canadian birth. The
answer to this puzzle is that the
congressional law on the books when Obama was born required a
foreign-born child to have at least one citizen parent who had been
physically present in the United States at least five years after age
fourteen. Obama’s mother did not clear this bar because she was
only eighteen when she gave birth. So this birth had to happen in the
United States to make her son a citizen at birth. Of course this
birth did in actual fact happen in the United States—in the state
of Hawaii—and except for the children of foreign diplomats, anyone
born these days in the United States is a birthright citizen under
the Constitution itself, whether or not the baby’s parents are
themselves citizens. (This birthright citizenship is the clear
command of the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, see pp.
240-245.) For this law on the books on Obama’s birthday, see Act of
June 27, 1952, 66 Stat. 235-36; Title III, ch. 1, section 301(a)(7).
For on the meaning of “natural born” see p. 42 n. 14.]”
Page
207-208
–
New
Republic essay:
Go Directly To Jail
–
“enemy
combatant”
“Question
5: What difference does it make that Padilla[*] is an American?
[*
Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Muhajir is a U.S. citizen, and is
simply being “detained” as a “soldier”. The Arabic
“abdullah” means “slave of Allah”]
“….
But the government is not (yet) charging Padilla with a crime. For
now, they are simply treating him as a soldier. Why should he get
more rights than a typical prisoner of war simply because he may also
be a criminal? Why should he get more
rights than all the detainees in Guantanamo simply because, unlike
the rest, if he is indeed a soldier then he has also betrayed his
country (whereas the others owed America no loyalty in the first
place)?”
Page
264
–
Slate
essay: Two and a Quarter
–
“presidential
qualifications”
“Consider
also the way that the states elect governors—directly by the
voters, one person, one vote. If the federal electoral college is so
good, why does no state closely follow it? Let’s scrap it. And if
naturalized Americans like California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm can be trusted to serve as governors,
why not amend the federal Constitution to allow them to run for
president? In fact, in 2004, the Senate held hearings on just such a
proposed amendment, sponsored by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and
strongly endorsed by several congressional Democrats.”
[Soft-socialist
Schwarzenegger
lost California to hard-socialists
and Granholm did nothing to stop the socialists from “transforming”
Michigan, so they are definitely not liberty
vs. tyranny role
models
for amendment propositions for
the same commonsense reason that the BREXIT initiator of
26 years ago and 2016 BREXIT hero
Nigel Farage is not a role model to “transform” America, with or without
absurd amendment propositions—they are not U.S. natural born
citizens by
“birth”
alone.]
Page
406
–
Conclusion
(not an essay)
–
“citizenship
rights”
“Simply
put, the written Constitution is often wise—typically, wiser than
judges acting on their own steam—because the document distills the
democratic input of many minds over many generations. … Later
generations of ordinary Americans mobilized to enshrine in this terse
text an end to slavery, a sweeping guarantee of equal birthright
citizenship, an emphatic commitment to protecting civil rights
against all levels of government, and radical expansions of the
rights of political participation—to blacks, to women, to the poor,
to the young, and more. These were epic democratic achievements, and
they are all worthy of profound respect by today’s Americans. We,
the people of the twenty-first century, thus do well to ponder the
collected and collective wisdom of this old and intergenerational
text.”
[This
is not a previous essay, but it is definitely
an excellent point about the Fourteenth Amendment and
“citizenship rights” - except for Prof. Amar's implication that the Fourteenth Amendment is the constitutional authority that allows plop-and-drop anchor babies, who are born on U.S. soil to parents who are not U.S. citizens, to be eligible to be president. The implication is shallow, thoughtless, irrational, and contrary to self-preservation.]
Art
Original-Genesis-Original-Intent.blogspot.com
2017-06-02
Natural
Born Citizen Debates
Mario
Apuzzo, David Ramsay, Emer de Vattel
vs.
Mark
Levin, Larry Solum, Robert Natelson
Mario,
After
posting the previous comment today (June 2, 2017 at 12:38 PM) about
debates with Mark Levin and Professor Larry Solum I remembered
Professor Robert Natelson, author of The
Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant,
3rd
Edition, published in 2014. He did not add
anything to the text of the 2nd Edition published in 2011, but he did
add footnote #25 about Emer de Vattel and how Vattel "clarified"
what he meant by
“parents”.
After the quote from Natelson’s book
about Emer de Vattel
is your quote about David Ramsay that
Natelson should be asked about to clarify what he, Natelson, meant
about Vattel’s
clarification.
Professor
Rob Natelson
"...Vattel
wrote of citizenship following "parents," at several later
points he clarified that, as in England, foreign-born
children followed the status of their fathers."
On
pages 147-48 Natelson explains what the language of the U.S.
Constitution in Article II Section 1 clause 5 "...actually
said and meant"; the
footnote is on page 148:
"The
Constitution imposed certain qualifications on the President. The
Constitution implied, although it did not state explicitly until
adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, that the same qualifications
applied to the Vice President. Both had to be at least 35 years old,
which was a significant requirement in an age in which even people
who survived childhood often did not live beyond their 50s. The idea
was to better assure a certain amount of maturity and wisdom. Also,
both had to have resided within the country for the previous fourteen
years.
"Most
importantly, the President and Vice President had to be natural-born
citizens or citizens at the time of ratification. We know exactly
what the founders meant by the phrase "natural-born citizen"
because they adapted it from the English legal term, "natural
born subject," which in Britain defined who could serve in
Parliament or the Privy Council(25). Essentially, a natural-born
citizen was one who met either one of two requirements. First, a
person qualified if born within the United States or within American
territory, even if the person's parents were aliens. Alternatively,
an individual qualified even if born outside the country if the
individual's father was an American citizen not then engaged in
traitorous or felonious activities.
"These
birth and residence requirements were designed better to assure that
these officers were truly sympathetic to those they were to govern,
and to guard against the risk that they might be sympathetic to a
foreign power(26).
"There
was no constitutional requirement that a President or Vice President
be male. The pronoun "he" used throughout the Constitution
was generic(27)."
__________
"(25)Since
the publication of the first edition, several readers have contacted
me to argue that "natural born" should be defined as Emer
Vattel defined it in his international law treatise. Invariably their
argument is driven by hope that Vattel's definition, if applied,
would disqualify from the presidency some politician they dislike.
"The
Constitution's meaning does not, however, depend on one's political
hopes. The document generally employed domestic legal terms according
to English usage.
As
Vattel acknowledged, the English standard for "natural born"
varied from the international standard with respect to children born
within the country; as to children born outside the
country, the rules were the same. (Although at one point in his book
Vattel wrote of citizenship following "parents," at several
later points he clarified that, as in England, foreign-born children
followed the status of their fathers.)”
David
Ramsay
Mario,
here is
a short snippet
of your
comment about David Ramsay, and the url on your blog for
those who want to read it all:
>>
http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2015/07/july-4-1776-birth-day-of-nation-and.html
”Here
we have direct and convincing evidence of how a very influential
Founder defined a natural born citizen. Noah Webster, 1828, in
explaining how an American dictionary of the English language was
necessary because American words took on different meanings than the
same word in England, placed David Ramsay among great Founders such
as “Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jay, Madison, Marshall, Ramsay,
Dwight, Smith, Trumbull...”
[...snip...]
“Ramsay,
being of the Founding
generation and being intimately involved in the events of the time
would have known how the Founders and Framers defined a natural
born citizen and he
told us that such a person was one born
in the country to citizen parents.
“In
giving us this definition, it is clear that Ramsay did not
follow the English common law but rather natural law, the law of
nations, and Emer de Vattel, who also defined the
“natives, or natural-born citizen” the same as did Ramsay in his
highly acclaimed and influential treatise, The Law of Nations, Or,
Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs
of Nations and Sovereigns, Section 212 (1758 French) (1759 English).
”We
can reasonably assume that the other Founders and Framers would have
defined a natural born citizen the same way that Ramsay did,
....
[...snip...]
”It
is valuable because it is evidence of the public meaning of these
terms at the time they were framed and ratified."
In
conclusion, Mario, for those who may wonder why the definition of
natural born Citizen is so important I have very simple questions.
Which words of the U.S. Constitution are NOT important? Were the
words of the First Amendment intended to be temporary or perpetual?
How about the Second Amendment? Was the “...the security of a
free state” intended to be temporary or perpetual? Was John
Jay’s statement in his note to George Washington that the “command
in chief” should “devolve” ONLY on a “natural
born Citizen” and “...eligibility to the
Office of President” intended to be temporary or perpetual,
generation to generation, election to election, POTUS to POTUS?
Well,
Mario, you have written that
you are
ready to debate, so, Mark Levin, Larry Solum, Robert Natelson
and et al., who will be the first to tap the plate? Batter up!
Art
U.S.
Constitution: The Original Birther Document of the Union
OriginalBirtherDocument.blogspot.com
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