Natural Born Citizen.

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Forgery, Fraud and Ineligibility| The Post & Email

I mentioned this the other day and I believe it was Awpitt who said I was full of crap.

If I am wrong there are others who are also wrong, but right or wrong , I believe our Teflon boy will survive it.

If this article is 100% correct, it still will not matter.There is no one with the courage to do anything about it, certainly not in the Congress nor in the Judicial.

The reasoning in that piece contains at least one critical flaw - it assumes that the term 'Laws of Nations', as it is used in Section 8 or Article I of the Constitution, was meant to refer to Emmerich de Vattel's 'The Law of Nations ...' book (or treatise or whatever one chooses to call it).

Not only would that make no sense based on the context and construction of the Constitutional provision in question, but reading from notes from the Constitutional Convention makes it pretty clear that they were not meaning to refer to that book. The laws of nations was (and still is to a certain extent) a term of art - it referred generally to "the rules that regulate the mutual intercourse of nations or states." That provision of the Constitution not only gave Congress the right to punish offenses against such rules, but to define what they were.

 

[Tilted]

I thought that it was the courts job to interpret what the laws definitions and meanings were.

It is. But the Constitution also gives Congress the authority to prescribe rules related to various things. That authority only exists within the context of the meaning of Constitutional provisions though.

As I said - IF natural born citizen just means 'a citizen by birth', then to the extent that Congress can create laws that make certain people citizens by birth, it tangentially has some control over who is a natural born citizen. If that's not what the term means - for instance, if it means 'white people that were born to citizen parents, within the territorial limits of the U.S., and who have never pledged allegiance to another sovereign', then that's what it means and Congress can't change that. (It might still be able to affect who all is a natural born citizen to a small degree though, by actions that affect what the territorial limits of the U.S. happen to be.)