A Nation of Fools

WHAT IS THE TRUE MEANING OF “NATURAL BORN CITIZEN?”

by Jedi Pauly, ©2012

Editor's Note: Re-posted with permission of The Post & Email.

(Feb. 8, 2012) — For some time now, I have been trying to explain the facts of life to the world regarding the true meaning and interpretation of Article II “natural born Citizen” requirements for the Office of President, and that Mr. Obama cannot possibly meet these requirements, as he was born to a foreign father who was never a U.S. citizen. I believe I have been viciously and unjustly attacked by the public at large and by some of the attorneys who have filed cases against Mr. Obama.

I contend and maintain that not one case filing so far has properly identified and argued the true and correct meaning and interpretation of Article II “natural born Citizen.” They have all missed the obvious, which I will once again state in light of the recent finding by Judge Malihi in the Georgia cases.

I am finding that I am forced to agree with Judge Malihi on one point: that Minor v Happersett is not a controlling case with regard to defining Article II “natural born Citizen.” It is, however, very useful in determining what is defining. One could even say it is controlling, but not for the reasons stated by the plaintiffs.

The judge is quite correct in his reading of the Minor case that the justices in Minor simply applied a general rule to Mrs. Minor: that those born within the U.S. to citizen parents are themselves “natives” or “natural born citizens” with a lower case “c” which, according to the Minor v Happersett judges, are synonymous terms. Such offspring are therefore members of the general class of “citizens” of the U.S. However, this does not mean that Mrs. Minor had the recognized and protected natural political right to be President that is implied in Article II by the term ”natural born Citizen” with a capital “C”. The Minor case was not even about Mrs. Minor’s right to be President; thus for this reason and others, it is not a controlling case.

In fact, the court in Minor went on to find that even though Mrs. Minor was already a citizen, and even a “natural born citizen” as a general category or type of “citizen” prior to the 14th Amendment, she still did not have any natural political rights recognized or protected by the Constitution. Nor did she possess any rights protected by the definition used by the court of what constitutes a “natural born citizen,” because the court found that she could not even vote, nor that she had any political rights secured by the Constitution at all. It required an Amendment to the Constitution to secure her natural political rights, her right to vote, regardless of the fact that she was determined to be a “natural born citizen.”

Obviously if she could not even vote, she could hardly be expected to be a candidate for the Office of President and qualify as a “natural born Citizen” by Article II. In fact, the court, using the findings in Minor v Happersett, actually proves that the definition of “one born in the country to parents who are citizens” IS NOT what is meant by “natural born Citizen” in Article II. In this sense, Minor might actually be a controlling case.

The Minor court determined that there were no political rights at all provided for or protected by the Constitution for Mrs. Minor, despite the fact that they determined that Mrs. Minor was a natural born citizen due to being born in the U.S.to parents who were citizens. If they could not see or find any political rights in the Constitution for Mrs. Minor, obviously the term in Article II, “natural born Citizen,” does not mean one who is born in the U.S. to parents who are citizens.

Likewise, if Article II “natural born Citizen” applied to Mrs. Minor and was what was meant by the court when they said that she was a natural born citizen, then the court would have found that she had the political right to be President secured, and so would have found that natural political rights were provided for her and thus could not then find that she could not vote. How might the Constitution provide for her a political right to be President but not a political right to vote? Obviously, the general term “natural born citizen,” with a lower case “c,” is a class of citizen that is synonymous in U.S. case law with native-born or even naturalized for most purposes, but it has nothing at all to do with the term in Article II spelled with an upper case “C” as in “natural born Citizen,” and the Minor v Happersett case proves this. It proves that these two terms, “natural born citizen” from U.S. case law that is removed from the context of Article II, and “natural born Citizen” within the context of Article II, are legal homonyms (they sound the same and are spelled the same but mean something different) and legal antonyms (two words or phrases that are opposite in meaning).

I will state again the obvious which everyone is ignoring or overlooking, now proved to be correct by Minor v Happersett. The term in Article II, “natural born Citizen,” is not a legal term that is undefined in the Constitution. It is not even a legal term, and it is perfectly defined within the context of Article II by the subject of natural political rights, history, Natural Law, International Law, and by the Declaration of Independence. It is an adjective phrase, “natural born,” which simply means created by natural birth inheritance as opposed to being created by statutory authority, modifying a specifically-restricted noun, “Citizen,” that is not a general use of the noun “citizen” but pointedly means a specific member out of the general class of citizens.

Specifically, the use of “Citizen” in Article II is meant to preclude natural born citizens of the federal territories or possessions, as they are not State citizens and not a party to the Constitution, so they cannot run for the Office of President. It is meant to include those from a State of the Union of States only, and did not mean a female; otherwise, the Minor court would have found a political right provided for females in the Constitution (the right to be President). Nor did it even at that time mean a Negro or Indian.

Minor v Happersett shows us and proves that the term “natural born Citizen” in Article II is being used in the most restrictive sense and means something other than someone born in the country to parents who are citizens. One need only examine convention according to International Law and Natural Law to see what it means. From Vattel’s The Law of Nations, Book I, Chapter 19, Section 212:

§212. Citizens and natives. The citizens are the members of the civil society: bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see, whether, on their coming to the years of discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country. [Emphasis added]

In the Supreme Court Case Tuan Anh Nguyen v. INS, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the following statements affirming that the world recognizes “birthrights” of the father (not the mother), and bloodline rather than birthplace as the foundation for inherited citizenship by birthright, aka “natural-born citizenship.”

“Mr. Kneedler, I have a problem with it [Kneedler’s argument]. You would surely have a huge statelessness problem if you didn’t recognize that the child born abroad to U.S.citizens is a U.S.citizen because, as you point out, in most countries in the world, they go by blood, not by land of birth.”—“You call the child born abroad an alien, but in most places in the world that child would NOT be a citizen of the place in which that person is born; isn’t that so?”

“Well, I thought you said in your brief that in most places, and I think it’s right, they do not go on just soil, they go on parentage.”

“Mr. Kneedler, if Congress went back to the way it was when everything was determined by the father’s citizenship, go back to before 1934, suppose congress accepts your argument or we accept your argument and say plenary power, they can do whatever they damn please, so they say children born abroad of fathers who are U.S. citizens can become U.S. citizens, but not children who are born abroad of U.S. mothers where the father in an alien. That’s the way it used to be in the bad old days.”

“Suppose Congress wants to restore the way it was, the way it was for most of our nation’s history, that the father’s citizenship gets transferred to the child, not the mother’s?”

“You are talking to children not born to a marriage…”

One need only realize that the general rule is that if you are born in a country to citizen parents, then you are a natural born citizen of your parents’ country and of course you would qualify for the Office of the President –if you were a white male from a State prior to the 15th Amendment and 19th Amendment. This is the general rule used in Minor v Happersett but was shown in Minor to not specifically apply to Article II “natural born Citizen” in the case of females.

However, if you are not born in the country, or you do not have parents who are both citizens of that same country, then the rule and convention under both International Law and Natural Law and U.S. law prior to the 1930s to which Justice Ginsburg is referring is that the offspring “naturally follow the condition of their fathers.” In other words, you are born a natural citizen of your father’s country and that is also a natural born citizen, regardless of where you are born or who your mother is, and no one can deny you your natural inherited political birth rights to membership in your father’s clan and society and allegiance to your birth father and his country: not the soil territory of a foreign country; not even a foreign mother. So to be consistent with Minor v Happersett and all other controlling Supreme Court cases, we see that in Article II, the term “natural born Citizen” just means those who are born to citizen fathers. It did not originally mean females or Blacks, but in light of the 15th Amendment and the 19th Amendment, one must expand Article II nbC to include females and Black people so that these parts of the Constitution do not clash with Article II. Without including these Amendments to expand the scope of Article II, it would otherwise require a constitutional Amendment for females or Blacks to be President, especially since most Blacks were not even State citizens in many of the States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and Article II.

So there you have it. Article II is using the most restrictive case of one born to a citizen father, and that is all that is required or necessary. That is what is meant by “natural born Citizen” in Article II. This is actually proven by Minor v Happersett. So Minor is controlling, but not for the reasons espoused in the Georgia filings because nbC has nothing at all to do with the place of birth or the citizenship of the mother, and the Minor court case proves this.

Judge Malihi is wrong because Obama does not qualify via his mother or place of birth. In fact, Mr. Obama is disqualified by his birth to a foreign father who was never a U.S. citizen, which, by International Law and Natural Law, makes him at birth to be a natural born member of his father’s country of Kenya despite his mother’s citizenship or place of birth. You cannot be born owing a natural allegiance to two countries simultaneously at birth. Which master would you serve? The convention recognized worldwide for thousands of years, and even under U.S. law, is to follow the father when you don’t have a unity of soil and parents.

Finally, in light of Minor v Happersett, Judge Malihi’s finding that Mr. Obama is Article II qualified because he is a natural born citizen via soil birth regardless of his foreign father takes on a surreal and ridiculous condition that is beyond absurd and can be easily seen via the following line of reasoning. Just apply some common sense and consider this:

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were written and signed entirely by males from State and Federal legislatures populated entirely by males who were citizens of the States and from the Confederation of States or federal government. The Declaration of Independence even states that governments are created according to natural laws by males, not females.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,[75] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”

[Notice the use of upper case "Men" and lower case "men" in the same sentence indicating that in the upper case instance the writer specifically means males.]

The purpose, of course, was to secure the natural political rights of males of this country. The Minor court found that the natural political rights that exist in the Constitution, such as the right to be President or to vote, for example, are only for U.S. males, proving that the entire purpose of the Constitution is to secure male citizens’ political rights. So Judge Malihi’s ruling implies that the political rights of the males are not provided for or secured by Article II nbC because the father’s citizenship does not matter when it comes to the Office of President, and any foreign father can sire a child with the political right to be President of the United States. In one fell swoop, Judge Malihi has eviscerated the political rights of U.S. males meant to be secured and protected by Article II nbC and the Constitution as a whole, and he has found that Article II and the Constitution were not created by the males of this American society to secure and protect their American political rights in order to pass on their American birthright heritage to their offspring, but instead was created to provide political rights for foreign males for their offspring! Can anyone now accept with a straight face that nbC in Article II just means born on the soil regardless of your father’s citizenship and that Obama qualifies? Does judge Malihi really expect us to accept that those who wrote nbC qualifications into Article II intended to not secure their own political rights as males who were citizens of this country, but rather intended to secure political rights for foreign non-citizen males and the offspring of those foreign males?

The judges must think that we are a Nation of Fools.