re: #4 calochortus

Legal analysis from FR:

This is presumably based on Minor v. Happersett, which if I understand it correctly, had to do with whether women were citizens, and if so, shouldn’t they have the right to vote? The decision said yes they were citizens if their father was a citizen, but not all citizens could vote.
I believe we have moved on from there and women are citizens in their own right, so yeah, that doesn’t apply any longer. Good call.

Reading that entire case, I find that their argument is even more pathetic than I thought it was. Listening to the birthers talk about, you’d think the Supreme Court said “Only people whose parents are BOTH citizens can be considered ‘natural-born.’

Here, on the other hand, is what the Court had to say about “natural-born citizens”:

Additions might always be made to the citizenship of the United States in two ways: first, by birth, and second, by naturalization. This is apparent from the Constitution itself, for it provides [n6] that “no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President,” [n7] and that Congress shall have power “to establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” Thus new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.

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 [p168] 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.

So what the Court actually says, is that there have never been any doubts that a person born in the country, to parents who are citizens, are “natural-born”. Then, the Court says that authorities have also considered anyone born in the US to be “natural-born,” and that, while there have been doubts raised to that, they’re not even going to bother going into it. And it doesn’t go into what happens if the father is a citizen but the mother isn’t, or the mother is a citizen but the father isn’t.

THIS…..is their “smoking gun”???? This is what is causing them to go into a rage when the judge “ignores” the case?

Good grief. I should have expected this level of stupidity from Birthers, but still…..sometimes it surprises you.