Indiana Court Of Appeals Trips Over Natural Born Citizen Issue. - Thanks Pieter Nosworthy
Leo Donofrio published in relation to Indiana Appellate Court reinvents NBC definition
[Ed. UPDATE 6:48 PM. Advanced Indiana broke this story first yesterday.
Also, the Chester Arthur analysis in Footnote 16 reeks. This Indiana decision is pure evil. They have rewritten history to make it appear as if the whole world knew Chester Arthur was a British citizen at birth while history records this blog discovered that fact and first published it to the world in December 2008. Before that time, it was not known. Law review articles that appeared around the time Arthur was President thoroughly discussed whether persons born of foreign parents were citizens. This was before Wong Kim Ark was decided. The propaganda has spread from the press to the courts.]
The Indiana Court of Appeals in the Arkeny and Kruse case has just issued a lame judicial attempt at defining the “natural born citizen” clause. The errors of fact and law incorporated into the decision serve as a beacon outlining the desperation certain government factions now face. Obviously, the British birth issue is getting on their nerves and this was clearly an attempt to derail further national discussion on this issue.
The Indiana Court of Appeals held that the plaintiffs did not state a claim upon which relief might be granted, but then they went ahead and visited some of the underlying merits of the case in a rather cavalier manner. Since any appeal of this decision will be dismissed on other procedural grounds, no appellate court will ever review them on this issue. The upper courts will simply deny the appeal without reaching this aspect. So they took a crack at stopping this in its tracks.
And they failed miserably. And it’s very encouraging. The arguments presented by the Indiana Court of Appeals are weak. The facts used by them are also a fantastic attempt at propaganda. For example:
With regard to President Barack Obama, the Plaintiffs posit that because his father was a citizen of the United Kingdom, President Obama is constitutionally ineligible to assume the Office of the President. The bases of the Plaintiffs‟ arguments come from such sources as FactCheck.org, The Rocky Mountain News…
That’s interesting. Later in the decision they reject this fact. Amazing. It appears that the Indiana Appellate Court was not willing to accept that Barack Obama Sr. was the President’s father. That alone tells you something was rotten in Denmark. But the legal arguments they proceed upon, particularly their selective quotations from the Minor and Wong Kim Ark cases illustrate a wonderful example of a court acting as one of the advocates.
Their main argument is to state that citizens are only born or naturalized. That fails to take into account the framers (and other original citizens) who themselves were neither born citizens nor were they naturalized. So the Court proves itself a bit wonky on that point. Still, I certainly do not dispute that today all US citizens are either born or naturalized. But that’s not the point. The necessary evaluation requires consideration of the various types of born citizenship. And on this important issue, the Indiana Court of Appeals has failed.
Born citizens can be broken up into three groups:
1. natural born
2. citizens by statute
3. 14th amendment citizens
- All three classes were born as US citizens, but not all three are the same. Persons born abroad are citizens by federal statute.
- A person born on US soil to alien parents who were domiciled here, according to Wong Kim Ark, is a 14th Amendment citizen.
- Natural born citizens are born on US soil to parents who are citizens.
All of the above are citizens, but each reaches their citizenship through different circumstances.
To be “natural born” is a circumstance of citizenship. It is not a separate level of citizenship. All citizens have equal rights. But naturalized citizens aren’t eligible for the office of President. This is because the natural born citizen clause is a national security measure, not a right of citizenship. The Indiana Court conveniently ignores this point.
Born citizens are not necessarily bestowed with citizenship in the same way. Some require a statute. Some require the 14th Amendment. Some were natural born and their citizenship was self-evident.
The Indiana court also pointed to dicta in a 7th Circuit Court of Appealscase which labeled two children of an illegal alien as natural born. That case stated:
The petitioner has a wife and two children under the age of three in Chicago; the children are natural-born citizens of the United States.
But nothing about the issue was discussed. The children were mentioned in passing dicta. Whether the children were natural born was not an issue in that case. And it was a mistake for the court to say they were natural born.
The Indiana Court of Appeals acknowledges that the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark did not hold that the man was a natural born citizen. Essentially, the Indiana court acknowledges that the US Supreme Court exercised judicial restraint, but the Indiana Court of Appeals here doesn’t feel that they are restrained in that regard. How brave of them.
Furthermore, the Indiana Court chose to ignore the most relevant aspect of Wong Kim Ark where the SCOTUS clearly indicated that Wong Kim Ark was not natural born:
Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States. His allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate…and his child, as said by Mr. Binney in his essay before quoted, ‘If born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen…’
That tells you right there that the child of the citizen and the child of the alien are not both natural born.
“…and his child… ‘If born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen…”
Justice Gray does a very revealing compare and contrast here:
- he compares two children
- on the one hand, he mentions the US born child of a resident alien
- on the other hand, he mentions the “natural-born” child of a citizen
He clearly states that only one is natural-born: the child of the citizen.
He says that both are citizens. But only the child of the citizen is natural born – for this is what he is comparing the other one to. So the holding indicates Wong Kim Ark was as much a citizen as any other citizen despite not being natural-born.
The Court does not say that the child of the alien is a natural-born citizen.
The Indiana Court conveniently ignored this analysis. And that comes as no surprise to me. They had to ignore it because there was no possible way for them to distinguish it.
Leo C. Donofrio
An election for President and Commander in Chief of the Military must strive to be above reproach. Our public institutions must give the public confidence that a presidential candidate has complied with the election process that is prescribed by our Constitution and laws. It is only after a presidential candidate satisfies the rules of such a process that he/she can expect members of the public, regardless of their party affiliations, to give him/her the respect that the Office of President so much deserves.
The privilege of being classified as a Natural-born citizen is a matter of circumstance. And circumstances change over time.
For example, Barack, a native-born American citizen, moved from the States with his mother and step-father to Indonesia. With his mother’s encouragement, Barack convinced a US State Department official in Indonesia he wanted to renounce his US citizenship to enjoy all the rights and privileges of an Indonesia national.
We know this circumstance took place by looking at Barack’s school registration. It states Barack was born in Hawaii and an Indonesian national. See photo at http://chenzhen.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/obamamuslim.jpg
Barack lost the privilege to be classified as a Natural-born citizen when he filed Form DS-4080, Oath of Renunciation of the Nationality of the United States.