I would like to wish all my readers a happy Independence Day 2020. It’s only a little over 4 months until the election. I urge every one of you to register and vote. There are many good places on the web to find the registration deadlines and where to vote in your state and county. I know it is a cliche to say this is the most important election in US history but this year that may well be the case.
This doesn’t need much explanation.
Remember this video by Mark Gillar? He posted it on his Tea Party Power Hour YouTube channel in 2013. Folks were going to prison. Yes, people were going to prison over Barack Obama’s birth certificate. I know. It sounds absurd now. It was absurd then.
Yet, even today there are still crazy Birthers like Robert Laity, OPOVV (for One Pissed Off Vietnam Vet) and others at the Post & Email who firmly believe that Obama was never legitimate and worse. Laity believes President Obama committed treason and should be tried under the UCMJ. Here is a typical comment from Laity:
Robert Laity Tuesday, March 10, 2020 at 2:07 AM
Obama usurped the Presidency by fraud, during a time when the U.S. was at war. He swore a false oath of office to defend the constitution knowing that he is a fraud.
That makes Obama both a Traitor under 18 USC and a spy under 10 USC (UCMJ 906.106)
First, as Laity has been told several times on Twitter and elsewhere, the president is not under the UCMJ. The president is a civilian. Second, President Obama was elected twice, twice the electoral college vote was certified at a joint session of Congress, and he was sworn in twice. He served his two full terms. End of story. The nonsense about his birth certificate and not being eligible is complete bullshit.
Laity also likes to fantasize that he performed a “formal citizens arrest” of Barack Obama in 2012. He has notified every attorney general since then of his “formal citizen’s arrest”. This citizens arrest is probably what earned him a visit from the Secret Service. Laity is probably a harmless nut case but he certainly doesn’t live in the real world so it is good the men in suits from the US Secret Service checked him out.
Meanwhile, we find ourselves in a real crisis. The Birther President gutted our ability to respond to an epidemic by dismantling the pandemic response team at the National Security Council. Why? Ostensibly it was a cost cutting measure but a more likely explanation is that it had been created by President Obama. Trump also failed to listen to what experts where telling him about COVID-19 months ago. Almost at every turn Trump has failed to do the right thing or has done exactly the wrong thing and that is going to make the ultimate outcome much worse.
I have observed, debated, and laughed at Birthers since late 2008. If I have learned one thing it is that their stupidity, hatred and racism has no bounds. No amount of evidence was ever going to convince them that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, none of his documents were forged, and he was rightfully elected and served two terms admirably.
It is no surprise that they worship the Birther in the Oval Office now despite ample evidence that he lies, cheats, and is completely unequipped to handle possibly the greatest crisis to hit the country since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Instead these mental midgets would rather waste their time talking about how Carl Gallups did Mike Zullo wrong or there is something wrong with Barack Obama’s Selective Service registration card.
Well here is some Universe Shattering news for you. It appears that the “dream team” couple of Mike Zullo and Carl Gallups is headed towards a nasty divorce. Carl and Mike have been inseparable for the last 7 years since Gallups began having Mike Zullo as a regular guest on his radio show on a peanut whistle station in the Florida panhandle (WEBY in Milton, FL). At some point Carl anointed himself as the semi-official spokesperson for Zullo and the Cold Case Posse investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate.
The origin of the split is apparently a chapter in a book titled Shadowland written by Carl Gallup’s nut job, conspiracy kook friend Tom Horn. Gallups supplied a chapter on the CCP birth certificate investigation without Zullo’s blessing. At least that is Zullo’s side of the story. We know that because of several wonderful and lengthy articles written on the split by the Post & Email’s very own Sharon Rondeau. Rondeau is it seems now the temporary mouthpiece for Zullo. The Post & Email articles can be found here, here, and here.*
According to Rondeau Zullo said he began suspecting problems with Gallups as far back as 2016 when Gallups began making too much of Sheriff Arpaio making him an honorary deputy. Zullo (along with Rondeau and the usual gang of Birthers at the P&E) seemed shocked that Gallups turned out to be such and ego-maniac. Anyone with a brain who had listened to Gallups’ show for more than a few minutes would not have been surprised.
Gallups is into self glorification and blowing up his own importance. He often speaks of his own law enforcement experience yet has never bothered to tell his audience just what that might happen to entail. This is from Carl’s biography that he provided Coast to Coast AM host George Nory before a recent appearance on the show:
Carl Gallups has been a senior pastor since 1987. He spent 10 years in Florida law enforcement prior to his ministry calling. Carl is a well-known author, and an Amazon top-60 bestseller. For many years Carl has appeared on numerous television and radio programs and has hosted two of his own radio programs: Ask the Preacher with Carl Gallups and Freedom Friday with Carl Gallups. Those shows air all over the world on two of the ADX Communications Group radio stations on the Gulf Coast.
I know several folks have searched databases of Florida former law enforcement officials for a listing for Gallups and have been unable to find him. One would think Gallups would be forthcoming about what he did in law enforcement if he was going to use it to pump his resume.
As mentioned earlier the final straw in the Gallups/Zullo relationship seems to be the chapter that Gallups wrote for Horn’s book. Gallups had submitted a draft for Zullo to review sometime last year. However, when Zullo failed to approve the chapter Gallups removed every mention of Zullo’s name from the final publication of the book.
As for Zullo and the CCP investigation he is quoted at the P&E by Sharon Rondeau in a comment:
Zullo made it very clear to me that There are only two kinds of people who want this information right now: those who want to satisfy their own curiosity and know more because they’ve been following this, and he can respect that, but there’s also the opposition that wants all the information out so they can pull the same con game and try to discredit it before it ever makes its way to where it needs to go. “Neither is going to be satisfied because I will not release it,” he said. “It is going to be turned over at an appropriate time to someone who matters.”
That’s an interesting comment if Rondeau is quoting him correctly. Zullo speaks only through Rondeau and never comments directly at the P&E. From the context of the articles and other comments we assume that Zullo is speaking of some “super secret evidence” that he has not yet made public. It is not clear who the “someone who matters” might be.
Recall that in the past the MCSO CCP has had three separate press conferences (although the final one in December 2016 could hardly be called a press conference since no questions we allowed and mostly consisted of playing a fuzzy video produced by Mark Gillar). Zullo and Jerome Corsi published a book, and Birther Mike Volin sent out thousands of DVD’s he called “Sheriffs Kits” to almost every official in government and every sheriff in the United States. The “Sheriffs Kits” contained videos of the press conferences and other reports produced by the CCP. Finally evidence gathered by the CCP was sent to the Maricopa County Attorney by former CCP member Brian Reilly. Montgomery explained why he could do nothing with what he had been presented:
Dear Mr. Reilly,
Thank you for taking the time to write and for the concerns you have expressed. There are a couple of points of analysis, though, in determining whether a criminal charge can be filed, regardless of the charge or who the suspect might be. The first is whether I have jurisdiction over the case. That requires that some conduct had to have occurred in Maricopa County for me to have jurisdiction. From the Sheriff’s Office investigation into suspect documents produced by the White House to date, that investigation has not revealed any evidence that conduct occurred in Maricopa County. I have discussed this with the Sheriff. As for any issues regarding qualifications or information provided regarding the Presidential Election itself, that is a statewide election. Under Arizona law, the Secretary of State and the Attorney General have jurisdiction over statewide elections. I do not.
I will share with you, as well, that the criminal statute you cited in your message requires additional evidence that the MCSO investigation to date has not uncovered. Specifically, we would need evidence to affirmatively prove that Mr. Obama is not a US citizen. To date, there has been evidence presented leading to speculation that documents have been forged and other documents do not exist. That alone, though, is not sufficient evidence to present to a grand jury and actually have a reasonable likelihood of conviction. I cannot speak for other prosecutors at the state level around the rest of the country or for prosecutors at the federal level but Arizona’s ethics rules do not permit prosecutors to file a charge they can only hope to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt at a later stage.
I stand ready and willing, however, to review any case submitted for charges and, fi (sic) the evidence is there, I will prosecute regardless of who the suspect/defendant may be.
Sincerely,
Bill Montgomery
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2013/05/arpaios-clock-is-ticking/
Maricopa County Attorney
Zullo has also spoken to multiple members of Congress either in person or by telephone. Most of these meetings were arranged by supporters like Mike Volin.
It’s hard to imagine for what Zullo is waiting. The CCP “investigation” ended in late 2016 after Sheriff Arpaio was voted out of office. As soon as the new Sheriff Paul Penzone was sworn in he fired Zullo, banned him from future posse service and dissolved the Cold Case Posse. Since January 2017 a Birther friendly Obama hating President has been in office. Really, what the hell are you waiting on Mike?
The other part of Zullo’s comment isn’t hard to figure out. Zullo is afraid his “super secret evidence” would be debunked by the press and “Obot” bloggers like me and others, well, just like all his other evidence has been debunked.
Recall how Zullo’s findings have completely evolved and old theories forgotten since his first press conference was held on March 1, 2012. In the first press conference Zullo used anomalies that he and other Birthers had found in the PDF file of the Obama LFBC posted at the whitehouse.gov web site on April 27, 2011 as proof of forgery. By the time of the first press conference most of these anomalies had been explained and there was the irrefutable fact that Hawaii had verified that the copy of the LFBC the White House had released was in fact provided by the Hawaii Department of Health made by copying original records.
Zullo had to admit later that what had been seen as anomalies were probably the result of a compressed PDF being produced from a Xerox multi function office machine similar to one that was known to be used in the Executive Office of the President in the White House. See my article entitled Mike Zullo Admits the Obots Were Correct All Along.
At the same press conference Zullo trotted out an older claim that Barack Obama’s Selective Service registration form had been forged. Copies of Obama’s registration card had been obtained via a FOIA request in 2008. Some questioned the postmark on the SSS Form 1. It contained only “80” for the year and not “1980”. The obvious explanation is that it was an old Bates stamp and the “19”, which never changes, had worn out.
Neither Zullo nor any other Birther can explain how a forged copy of Obama’s SSS Form 1 happened to be in the archives to be found during the George W. Bush administration by a Director of Selective Service appointed by George W. Bush. One could conclude it is another example of Barack Obama using a time machine.
Of course Birthers, who can find a conspiracy about the scary black man under every stone, didn’t buy the obvious explanation. I wrote about this conspiracy after Zullo’s press conference: Helping Kommandante Zullo Once More
At the second press conference on July 17, 2012 Zullo trotted out completely new “evidence”. This time he played a video claiming that there was something wrong with the pencil marked codes on the Obama LFBC. These codes were used on birth certificates to enter information on births into standardized databases for the federal and state governments. Specifically, the video claimed that the number 9 code for Obama’s father’s race did not match the standard codes for race shown in a table in a CDC coding manual.
Within hours bloggers like Dr. Conspiracy and John Woodman had determined that the table of race codes shown in the video were from a 1968 manual and were not from 1961. Here is an article from Dr. Conspiracy’s blog that debunks the race code claims:
Code “9”: the Cold Case Posse’s big lie
Here is John Woodman’s article on the race codes:
Finally after four years of essentially nothing from Zullo Arpaio scheduled a “press conference” during his last month in office in December 2016. At this one Zullo unveiled brand new theory. He showed a fuzzy video produced by Mark Gillar that made the claim that the Obama LFBC was created by copying portions over from another Hawaiian birth certificate belonging to a lady born the some month as Barack Obama (August 1961).
A redacted version of Mrs. Johanna Ah’Nee Randolph’s birth certificate had originally been produced by WND September 2011 following the release of the Obama LFBC in April. Although the name and several other fields were redacted by WND John Woodman and some others were able to use photo editing tools to glean what was under the redactions by looking at the WND unredacted photo of the back of the birth certificate.
Unsurprisingly, WND had redacted fields that either supported the authenticity of the Obama LFBC or blew up Birther theories that there were errors on the Obama certificate. One example were the names of the hospital and the Registrar. The Ah’Nee certificate fields were the same for the names of the hospital and registrar. The birth certificate number also supported the theory that the certificates were sorted alphabetically for the month and then numbered (at least in a given region). So the registration number on the Ah’Nee certificate was lower than the one on Obama’s even though she was born at Kapi’olani Hospital over two weeks later in August.
Again the claim made by Zullo that parts of the Obama LFBC had been copied from the Ah’Nee certificate quickly fell apart under scrutiny. See my article: Overlay of Obama and Ah’Nee Birth Certificates Shows the Latest Cold Case Posse Forgery Theory Is Nonsense
I wrote this rather lengthy dissertation on the history of the Cold Case Posse’s “evidence” to show that Zullo might have a very good motivation for hiding evidence. Every time Zullo has held a press conference and presented new “evidence” it has been quickly debunked, sometimes within hours. Why should he believe it would not happen again?
I suppose the “divorce” means we will never hear another one of those exciting segments of Gallups’ Freedom Friday program with “Detective” Mike Zullo. Maybe Zullo might be finally interested in appearing on RC Radio? I might even bring back the show for that. 😆
Update: If either Carl Gallups or Mike Zullo wishes to present their version of this disagreement I would be perfectly willing to print whatever they would like to send. Unlike Sharon Rondeau who is clearly taking Zullo’s side I have no dog in this fight whatsoever. All they have to do is add something on the contact page on this blog and I will get back to them.
*Rondeau keeps writing more articles on Zullo and Gallups so I suspect by the time I publish this article there will be more.
Is Mayor Pete a natural born citizen?
The latest target is Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg. In this bit of tripe, Is Mayor Pete a Natural Born Citizen, submitted by Joseph DeMaio he writes:
(Feb. 9, 2020) — Well, faithful P&E readers, the “eligibility” issue surfaces again, this time with regard to one of the Democrat presidential candidates vying for the opportunity to be bludgeoned in the November general election by President Trump. That lucky fellow is Pete Buttigieg. Memo to all you other non-P&E readers who have accidentally stumbled onto this offering: you can go back to whatever else you were doing, as you will be unable to follow the rest of this post.
OK, here is the preface: in connection with the intrepid editor’s recent P&E post found here, one of the regular commenters (CDR Kerchner, Ret.) has noted (2/5/20 at 8:07 PM) that he had searched the Wikipedia website entry for Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg.
…
There is little doubt that candidate Buttigieg’s mother, Jennifer Anne Buttigieg (née Montgomery), was also, at minimum, a “native-born” U.S. citizen, so the “two citizen parents” requirement of § 212 would seem to be satisfied, provided that Joseph Buttigieg can be proved to have been naturalized before Jan. 19, 1982. Nor is there any doubt that Joseph Buttigieg was an educated, upstanding member of society. That acknowledgment, however, does not eliminate the question of whether he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen before Pete Buttigieg was born.
First I have to wonder where this eligibility issue “surfaced” other than in some dark corner of DeMaio’s warped mind. Second this nonsense speculation about Buttigieg’s father is based on more nonsense that Pete’s father’s citizenship status matters. It doesn’t. Pete is a natural born citizen because he was born on US soil, period, end of story. There is no requirement based on de Vattel’s writings or otherwise that a natural born citizen must have parents who are citizens.
This article in itself points out the absurdity of such a theory. It would require that not only documentation of the candidates birth be produced but that every candidate’s parents’ birth certificates or naturalization records be produced to establish if they were citizens at the time of the candidates birth. What about adopted children? What about children born from in vitro fertilization? I doubt de Vattel covered those situations. I could go on…
That got me thinking. What about the current resident of the White House? Well, it turns out that things aren’t completely settled under this nonsense two citizen parent theory. Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MaCleod immigrated from Scotland to the USA in 1929. In 1936 she married a wealthy builder named Fred Trump. (Fred Trump’s father, Donald’s grandfather, had been born in Bavaria as Friedrich Drumpf 1 2; he anglicized his name to Frederic Trump after coming to America).
Now back to Mary Anne. She supposedly became a citizen in 1942 and some documentation of her naturalization card from the Eastern District of NY has been published by Snopes:
However, on the 1940 census Mary Trump reported that she was a naturalized US citizen already:
Notice the “Na” in column 16 of the form. that would denote she was a naturalized US citizen. We know that could not have been the case however. The “(X)” denotes that Mary Trump is the person reporting for the family.
Donald Trump was born in 1946 so in all likelihood Mary was a citizen by that time. This exercise was done merely to illustrate that digging back a generation into every candidates background is not a straightforward exercise and could lead to doubts from those who wish to doubt.
However, this discussion is all ridiculous. The idea that to be a natural born citizen requires more than birth on US soil under the jurisdiction of the Untied States and that both of you parents have to be citizens at the time is just plain wrong. It has lost in every court case that incorporated the argument and no worthy Constitutional scholar agrees with it.
1 Friedrich Drumpf’s biography is quite interesting in case you have not read it. Trump (Drumpf) emigrated from Bavaria to the USA at age 16 in 1885. After working for a barber in New York City for five years he moved to Seattle, WA. He purchased a restaurant that was also a brothel. Trump moved north to the town of Monte Cristo. Trump wanted to build a hotel (restaurant and brothel) there but could not afford the land. He obtained the mineral rights on a piece of land for nothing and then quickly moved in lumber and began building his hotel before the real owner of the land one Nicholas Rudebeck could do anything about it. Rudebeck tried unsuccessfully to collect rent from Trump. Trump eventually paid Rudebeck for the land.
Trump moved on and operated hotel/brothels in the Yukon and amassed a tidy sum. When the gold rush played out Trump returned to Bavaria in 1901. He married Elizabeth Christ whiled there and returned to New York City in 1902. He worked as a barber and hotel operator. In 1904 after the birth of a daughter the Trump’s returned to Bavaria because of Elizabeth’s homesickness. The Trump’s were deported however because Bavarian authorities had determined Trump’s earlier emigration had been done to avoid the draft. (Sounds like cowardice runs in the family).
2Like several things in Trump’s backgrounds there is confusion as to when the family name was changed from “Drumpf” to “Trump”. Some sources say the name was changed in the 1600’s while some say it was changed later. Immigration records list Donald Trump’s grandfather’s name as Friedr. Trumpf.
Trump claimed in the 1987 book Art of the Deal that his grandfather had come from Sweden. One article I read said that the Swedish ancestry lie was invented by Fred Trump after World War II because when was trying to market apartments to Jewish couples in New York. Fred also got into trouble with the Federal government for discriminating against blacks. Among other things Fred and Donald were accused of telling blacks there buildings had no vacancies to avoid renting to them.
The Department of Justice filed a discrimination lawsuit against the Trumps and their property management company in 1974 but later dropped the lawsuit when they determined the Trumps had stopped the practices that had led to the lawsuit.
RC Radio will be returning next week. The show will be concentrating on the impeachment of Donald John Trump. Stay tuned for more details.
Update: The show will air on Monday, January 21th at 9 PM ET.
Reality Check Radio returns for a few episodes this month. We will discuss the Senate Trial of Donald Trump, which starts Tuesday January 22nd and what’s gone on with the Birthers the last 3 years.
Note: the call in number for the show has changed. It is (516) 453-9197. Dr. Ken will return as guest host and will screen calls.
The link for the show remains unchanged: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/rcr
The usual Birther suspects have surfaced recently to push their nonsense theories about who is and is not a natural born citizen. The latest flurry of articles and comments seems to be related to the beginning of the 2020 presidential election campaign and especially candidate Kamala Harris. (Tulsi Gabbard is targeted by some of the same Birthers as being ineligible to serve but for different reasons.1 ).
Ms. Harris, who was elected in 2016 to represent California as junior Senator, was born in Oakland, California, on 20 October 1964. Her father was a Jamaican and her mother was from India. I have not seen a definitive date for naturalization for either of her parents it is probable they were not yet citizens at the time of Ms. Harris’s birth.
Since Harris was born on American soil and under the jurisdiction of the United States she is a natural born citizen. She meets the other presidential eligibility requirements too since she is over 35 years of age and has been a resident of the US since moving back to the country in 1992 after attending high school in Montreal, Quebec Canada.
Now some of the Birthers would disagree on the first item. Sometime late in 2008 an attorney from New Jersey named Leo Donofrio filed a lawsuit in New Jersey State court against then Secretary of State Nina Wells asking the court to stay the election. He claimed that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain were eligible, Obama because even though he was born in Hawaii his father was a British subject and McCain because he was born on a military base in Panama and not US soil. Previous lawsuits filed by Birthers like Phil Berg were based on claims that Obama was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.
Donofrio’s emergency application was denied and his appeal to the New Jersey Supreme Court was denied on October 31. He filed an application for stay pending writ for certiorari on November 3 to Justice Souter of the US Supreme Court. It was denied on November 6th and eventually denied by the full court on December 8, 2008.
As far as I can tell Donofrio is the first person to dredge up this definition of natural born citizen. He cited a Supreme Court case on women’s suffrage, Minor v Happesett from 1875 where the court in dicta said:
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 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, 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 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. [Emphasis added] It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words “all children” are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as “all persons,” and if females are included in the last, they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact, the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.
The holding in this case was that the rights and privileges guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to all citizens did not include the right to vote. The Court left in place a Missouri law that prevented women from voting. The opinion did not in obiter dicta define the term natural born citizen and as a matter of fact Justice Waite writing for the Court specifically said the Court was avoiding doing that. (See the emphasized portion.)
Other Birthers began adopting this misinterpretation of Minor v Happersett and the two citizen parent theory as it came to be known. Later a majority of the Birthers took up the theory and began citing Minor as defining precedent.
Attorney Mario Apuzzo from New Jersey, who had no experience in this area of the law, started a blog on the subject of natural born citizenship and filed a lawsuit in federal court around the time of President Obama’s first Inaugural on January 20, 2009 on behalf of Charles Kerchner. He was attempting to stay the Inauguration. Even though Apuzzo now mentions Minor v Happersett in almost every comment on his blog and many other places he didn’t even cite Minor in his first big case, Kerchner v Obama.
When I challenged Apuzzo on this fact in an earlier article on this blog he left a comment in which he lied and gave the excuse that attorneys don’t cite precedent cases in complaints. Of course he had cited more than 17 other cases in his complaint in Kerchner. Apuzzo is ubiquitous on comment streams on articles on natural born citizen. He has probably written a million words on the subject. The problem with Apuzzo is that when he gets cornered him on the Kerchner case he lies and claims victory. John Woodman came to the same conclusion: that Apuzzo is not just a fervent supportor of a position but an outright liar.
After Donofrio’s failed case was filed other Birther’s filed hundreds of challenges against President Obama in 2009 and during the 2012 election cycle trying to either remove him from office or keep him off ballots based on the flawed theory that he was not a natural born citizen.
All of these cases were dismissed on lack of standing, lack of jurisdiction, or failure to state a claim. In decisions where judges bothered to opine on whether Obama was a natural born citizen they said he was, that Minor did not define the meaning of the term, and that the USA v Wong Kim Ark (1898) case was the deciding case on who was a natural born citizen. (In that case the court by a majority decided that a California resident born on US soil to two Chinese parents was a citizen at birth and could not be deported. The court reasoned that the 14th Amendment had merely affirmed what had been in place under common law before its adoption, that the definition of natural born citizen had been inherited from the English term “natural born subject” and that anyone born on US soil and under its jurisdiction was a citizen at birth.)
Rather than repeat the points made in many, many articles that have been written on this subject I will briefly state the false claims made on Birther blogs, specifically Mario Apuzzo’s blog and the Post & Email blog and provide links to several good resources on the subject of who is a natural born citizen.
Here are some of the false claims that Birthers make on the subject of definition of the term natural born citizen:
Leo Donofrio may have been the first Birther to discover the writings of Emer de Vattel. He wrote about de Vattel on his blog as early as late 2008. As I mentioned earlier Vattel published Le droit des gens (The Law of Nations) in French in 1758. de Vattel’s treatise was about natural law. The first English translation appeared in 1760. This is the English edition that would have been available to the authors of the US Constitution. On citizenship de Vattel wrote:
[§212] 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 indigenes, are those born in the country of parents who are citizens. Society not being able to subsist,and perpetuate itself, but by the children of citizens; those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights….The country of the fathers is then that of the children; and these become true citizens,merely by their tacit consent….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 stranger, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.
Another English translation was published in London in 1797. That edition replaced indigenes with “natural born citizen: “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens”. This is the translation that Birthers always quote even though it was published 10 years after the Constitution was written. When challenged on this fact Birthers claim that the 1797 London translation was influenced by the American use of natural born citizen in the Constitution. While this makes for a fine story there is exactly no evidence that it is true and there are tons of evidence that the term natural born citizen was the equivalent of the English natural born subject.
There are at least a couple of other issues with the Birther interpretation of Vattel. First Vattel himself admitted that other countries like England had different laws on citizenship. Vattel added that in England “being born in the country naturalizes the children of a foreigner.”
Then there is the question of whether Vattel meant that parents had to be citizens for their child to be a natural born citizen. Vattel wrote ” of parents who are citizens”. Unfortunately this phrase is imprecise in English. It is pretty clear Vattel was referring to the father(s) here. He wrote that “It is asked, whether the children born of citizens in a foreign country, are citizens? The laws have decided this question in several countries, and it is necessary to follow their regulations. By the law of nature alone, children follow the condition of their fathers, and enter into all their rights (§ 212); the place of birth produces no change in this particular, and cannot of itself furnish any reason for taking from a child what nature has given him . . . .” (again from the 1760 translation).
A French attorney posting under the name Lupin at a number of blogs wrote this about de Vattels Law of Nations”
I have frequently posted under the name of “Lupin” on Dr. Conspiracy’s blog. I am a French attorney with 30+ years’ experience, currently semi-retired and living in the South of France; amongst other things, I have edited translations of Vattel into English.
First, when tackling this issue, one has to decide (a) whether the term “natural-born citizen” is a correct translation of Vattel’s term “indigene” and “naturel”; and (b) whether Vattel has any relevance at all to the issue at hand.
Both of these propositions seem highly debatable to me, but not being an expert on U.S. law, this is not my place to comment.
When reading Vattel’s article on citizenship, often quoted by Mr Apuzzo, one must keep in mind the following:
(a) the terms “parents” actually means blood relatives, not just parents; this is easily verifiable: ask any Frenchman if the sentence “j’ai des parents en Amerique” means “my parents are in America” or “I have family in America” — he will answer the latter.
(b) the term “parents” is used by Vattel as a group plural, ie: either parent, not both; as in “only children whose parents are club members may use the pool”; there is no ambiguity here.
(c) further on, Vattel mentions the father, but only as an illustration of his “jus sanguinis” approach to citizenship as stated above; he does not exclude the mother or indeed any relatives on either side; as a matter of fact, the mother is specifically included/added in a footnote the second edition;
(d) finally, Vattel mentions that other countries like England favor a “jus soli” method, and claims no universality.
So, if one were were to apply Vattel’s theory to the hypothetical case of a young Obama born in Switzerland at the time of Vattel’s writings from a visiting English student and a Swiss woman, it would be unambiguously clear that the child would be considered by the Swiss authorities to be a Swiss “indigene” from his mother’s side of the family.
Had his father hypothetically taken the child back to England to be raised there, he might ALSO be eligible to become a British citizen because of his father, but that would in no way impact his “quality” as a Swiss “indigene” in Switzerland.Lupin’s comment on John Woodman’s blog.
As I have often pointed out, there is nothing in Vattel (even if he were deemed relevant) that bolsters the birthers’ agenda — quite the contrary.
Michael Ramsey analyzed the influence of de Vattel on the meaning of natural born citizen as used in the US Constitution in his paper that I cite in the Resources section below:
“The weight of the evidence, however, points strongly in the other direction. First, any connection between Vattel and the Eligibility Clause is pure speculation. Apparently no one at the time made the connection, or at least there is no surviving record if they did. To be sure, some individuals might have done so. But it seems clear—as clear as we can be about these matters—that no widespread public connection was drawn.
Second, there is evidence that the founding generation, at least in some instances, used “natural born citizen” and “natural born subject” inter-changeably. For example, Massachusetts continued the English practice of legislative acts naturalizing particular named individuals. These acts recited that the naturalized individuals would have all the rights of (in some cases) “natural born subjects” of the state97and (in others) “natural born citizens.”98As far as the historical record reflects, no difference was intended; the phrases appear to be used interchangeably to convey the same meaning. In particular, the state Acts referred to “natural born subjects” during the Confederation period immediately before and during the drafting and ratifying process, suggesting that revolutionary Americans did not change their terminology from citizen to subject in the wake of the Revolution
Similarly, Zephaniah Swift’s treatise on Connecticut law, published in 1795, repeatedly used the phrase “natural born subject” in connection with post-independence inhabitants of Connecticut. Swift began his discussion by saying that “[t]he people are considered as aliens, born in some foreign country, as inhabitants of some neighboring state of the union, or natural born subjects, born within the state.”99Later he added that the children of aliens, “born in this state, are considered as natural born subjects, and have the same rights with the rest of the citizens.”100As a result, there is little reason, on this ground, to think Vattel is a better source of the clause’s meaning than English law: Americans did not broadly reject the word “subject” and instead used it interchangeably with “citizen.”Third, post-ratification evidence indicates that the Framers were using an English-law influenced definition of citizenship, not a Vattel-influenced definition. As described above, an early post-ratification discussion of citizenship was Madison’s comment in the Smith controversy (in which there was some question whether Representative Smith was a citizen and thus eligible to Congress). Madison wrote, “It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth, however, derives its force sometimes from place, and sometimes from parentage; but, in general, place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States….”
Birthers have elevated de Vattel to the status of sainthood but the reality is that there is just no evidence that authors of the Constitution used anything other than the English term “natural born subject” as a synonym for “natural born citizen”. There is certainly no evidence that they ditched the meaning they had known for the term natural born for all their lives and embraced a meaning that Birthers wrongly ascribe to de Vattel.
The following is a list of resources I have found useful on the definition of “natural born citizen” as used in the US Constitution:
Jack Maskell, an attorney for the Congressional Research Service, wrote three reports on presidential eligibility. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is a non=partisan division of the Library of Congress that provides legal and policy research on various subjects for members of the House and Senate of both parties. These reports are normally confidential but can be made public by the Congressional members who requested the research.
The first of these reports was dated April 3, 2009:
In his first report Maskell explains why Barack Obama was not obligated under federal law to produce his “long form” birth certificate or any birth certificate for that matter and that the presidential election is conducted by the states who have no such requirement either. He also covers the history of the inclusion of the natural born citizen requirement for the office of president in the Constitution and what the likely understanding of the meaning was by the authors of that section.
In November 2011 Maskell updated his report to provide a more rigorous and documented explanation of the meaning of the term “natural born citizen”.
Maskell meticulously lays out the case that the Supreme Court had ruled that terms not defined in the Constitution were to be interpreted in light of English common law and that under English common a person born to alien parents on US soil was a natural born citizen.
A third report was written in January 2016:
In this third and final update on presidential eligibility Maskell reviews all the court cases that had been filed against Barack Obama and John McCain and the outcomes. He also discusses the eligibility of persons born abroad to one or two United States citizens and whether they are eligible. This had become an issue in the 2016 election cycle with the candidacy of Texas Senator Ted Cruz. By this time some lawsuits had already been filed.
Unlike the status of person born to one or two alien parents on US soil the status of persons born US soil abroad has generated disagreement among legitimate Constitutional scholars at least as far back as 1968 when George Romney, who was born to Mormon US citizen parents in Mexico, was running for the Republican nomination for president.
Other resources:
A blogger posted the results of a Google Book search of books that define the term “natural born citizen. BOOKS ON GOOGLE BOOKS THAT DEFINE “NATURAL BORN CITIZEN Notably, not a single one of these hundreds of books defines a natural born citizen as only one who was born of two citizen parents. Birthers have claimed in blog posts that they recall reading such a statement in their Civics books but to date not a single book has been produced.
An attorney named “Tes” on her “What’s Your Evidence” blog posted a compendium of Supreme Court cases that mentioned the term “natural born”. The results can be found here. She also compiled a list of all cases at both the state and federal level that addressed the meaning of the term “natural born citizen”. Finally, she assembled a list of cases filed against Barack Obama and others concerning presidential eligibility and release of documents in a “Birther Scorecard” that documents the outcomes of the so called Birther cases beginning with the Phil Berg cases in 2008 through August 2015. Over 200 cases are listed and none succeeded.
A number of these cases claimed that Obama was not eligible based on the fact his father was a British subject and therefore not a natural born citizen. While none of the cases ruled directly on this claim several judges who commented on this claim noted that precedents like the Wong Kim Ark case made the Supreme Courts position clear that anyone born on US soil and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States was a natural born citizen.
From December 2008 and continuing for 8 years the go to blog for following all the Birther claims and activities was the Obama Conspiracy blog. A good place to start reading is Dr. Conspiracies article The Debunker’s Guide to Obama Conspiracy Theories, which contains a section debunking claims that President Obama was not a natural born citizen.
Another blog that I recommend is John Woodman’s Investigating the Obama Birth Mysteries. Mr. Woodman is a conservative and the author of the book Is Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate a Fraud? in which he debunked the conspiracy theories that erupted that the Obama Hawaiian long form birther certificate that was published in April 2011 was a forgery. Mr. Woodman later did some excellent research into the meaning of the term natural born citizen and the Birth claims that Obama was ineligible. A good place to start reading is this series of articles.
Finally, several excellent papers have been written on the meaning of natural born citizenship over the years:
Readers are invited to leave comments as long as they abide by this blogs comment policy. If you have suggestions for additional resources I would be happy to add them to the article if they are from legitimate sources.
1Tulsi Gabbard was born in American Samoa to parents who were US citizens. American Samoa is considered an unincorporated US territory and children born there are not citizens at birth under the 14th amendment. They are citizens at birth only if at least one of their parents is a citizen at the time of birth (like Gabbard). Others are considered US nationals instead. US nationals from American Samoa may apply for US citizenship after 3 months residency in the United States. This means Gabbard is probably not a natural born citizen by jus soli but would fall into the category of a citizen born “abroad” to US citizen parents, e. g., Ted Cruz. Since Gabbard is a long shot for either position on the Democratic ticket I doubt that her status will become an issue.
2Some attorneys believe that a Supreme Court decision in Rogers v Bellei in 1971 created a third class of US citizens, namely those who are citizens by virtue of being born abroad to at least one US parent. From Wikipedia:
The appellee, Aldo Mario Bellei, was born in Italy to an Italian father and an American mother. He acquired U.S. citizenship by virtue of section 1993 of the Revised Statutes of 1874, which conferred citizenship upon any child born outside the United States of only one American parent (known as jus sanguinis). Bellei received several warnings from government officials that failure to fulfill the five-year residency requirement before age 28 could result in loss of his U.S. citizenship. In 1964, he received a letter informing him that his citizenship had been revoked under § 301(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.
Bellei challenged the constitutionality of this act. The three-judge District Court held the section unconstitutional, citing Afroyim v. Rusk, and Schneider v. Rusk.
The Supreme Court reversed the decision, ruling against Bellei.
This ruling seemed to separate that class of citizens from those born on US soil and those naturalized while living in the US. The law that was upheld in the case was repealed a few years later. Note that many scholars still consider those who are citizens at birth while born abroad to be natural born citizens. No court ruling has been issued to the contrary. Judges who dismissed cases filed against Ted Cruz in 2016 seemed to be leaning towards the conclusion that those of Cruz’s circumstances are eligible.
Last year Dropbox stopped allowing the posting of public links to files so most of the audio clips I had posted using Dropbox public folder are broke. I apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you Dropbox!
I still have all the files so I can find another place to host them and gradually fix all the links. This might take some time, however. I have discontinued using Dropbox altogether on my PC’s.
I started to write a short post to wish everyone a happy 2019 and take a shot at the few remaining Birthers but as I was writing and thinking about where we are at the end of the second decade of the 21st century it got me thinking. Just how did we get here?
How in 8 short years did we go from electing a wonderful, articulate, honest, intelligent young black man who was a wonderful father to electing an immoral, lying, clueless, racist scum bag? Almost no one saw this coming but in hindsight I think we should have seen the signs it could happen beginning with the way the election in 2008 played out.
I can remember the night of November 4, 2008 as if it were yesterday. I was out of town for some business meetings in northwest Ohio having dinner with a group of coworkers. I had heard some early returns as we were driving to dinner. Of course the traditional early red states went for McCain like Kentucky. Oh well, I tried but my vote was futile as I knew it would be. By 8:00 PM the big states started coming in for Obama and McCain’s path to victory started getting less and less likely.
When Ohio came in fairly early I knew it was over. The networks waited until the polls closed on the west coast at 11 PM ET to make it official. Barack Obama was going to be the 44th President.
I recall John McCain’s statesmanlike concession speech where Palin almost had to be physically restrained because she was determined to give her own spin on the defeat and immediately grab the mantle as the leader of the Republican party. I remember Obama’s wonderful acceptance speech and his calls to come together as a country. We should have known that the Republicans like Mitch McConnell had other ideas.
Those were euphoric times. Change was in the air. Gone were the incompetent puppet George W. Bush and the puppet-master Dick Cheney. The Democrats had solid majorities in both chambers in Congress. Yes, we had big problems. The economy was in terrible shape and was probably far worse than we knew. We still had troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite Obama’s solid victory we can now see that the seeds for 2016 were sown in 2008 and before. First was Obama’s choice of Joe Biden to be Vice President. By picking Biden Obama removed one of the Democratic champions in the Senate. He then caused another loss in the Senate when he picked Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State. While both seats were going to be replaced by appointees chosen by Democratic governors (not to mention that Obama’s seat was also being vacated) I think the choices weakened the Democratic majority in the Senate.
Obama’s choice of Biden and Hillary almost ensured that the vice president was not going to be the clear successor if Obama were to win a second term in 2012. Biden was going to be almost 74 years old by November 2016. By picking Clinton as Secretary of State he enhanced her resume as a future candidate too.
Well that was a good thing wasn’t it? Not necessarily. One clear lesson from the 2008 Democratic nomination battle was that Clinton was not a great candidate. It was her nomination in 2008 to lose and she lost to a relatively unknown junior Senator from Illinois. I supported Hillary Clinton early on in the 2008 cycle. However, after watching Barack Obama speak a few times I saw he had the “it” factor and Clinton did not. He connected to people in a way that Clinton did not.
Would Clinton still have been the nominee in 2016 had Obama made other choices? Possibly. However, had Obama chosen a young up and coming Democrat to be his running mate in either 2008 or 2012 they would have been the clear front runner in 2016.
I had hoped that Obama would choose a younger running mate in 2012. Someone who would be seen as the front runner in 2016. I think it was a mistake that he didn’t. It would have been a difficult decision to drop Biden though in part because he had done such a good job as VP. Obama had developed a close friendship with Biden and I think Obama leaned on him often in making difficult decisions.
It is possible that Biden intended to run in 2016 when Obama picked him again in 2012. However, fate stepped in when Biden’s eldest son, Beau Biden, who was the Attorney General in Delaware died from brain cancer in 2015. I think if Joe Biden had any thoughts of challenging Clinton for the nomination his son’s death probably pushed him to decide not to run.
Clinton again proved to be a weak candidate in 2016. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primaries and caucuses and made it impossible for Clinton to wrap up the nomination until the end of the primary season in June. Although Sanders supported Clinton in the general election many of Sanders supporters thought somehow Sanders had been cheated and that the Democratic leadership had unfairly supported Clinton.
It is still hard to imagine she lost. Of course it was not entirely her fault. She entered the campaign with high approval numbers and high likeability ratings. However, the Republicans, who regained Congress in 2012 had had four years to hold nonstop hearings on the Benghazi incident in Libya. This lead to the discovery that then Secretary of State Clinton had used an external email server to conduct some government business.
Of course we now know the Russians were working overtime to support Trump. They set up a company in Florida with over 300 people working full time to attack Clinton and support Trump on social media using thousands or millions of fake accounts. In a coordinated attack Wikileaks released stolen internal DNC emails on the eve of the Democratic convention. Democratic Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign the same week.
Another factor working against Clinton was the outrage of a large fraction of white voters. Obama failed to get close to majority of white voters in either 2008 or 2012. In 2008 he got 43% and that dropped to 39% in 2012. Obama won with overwhelming support of minorities (blacks for the first time turned out at rates higher than whites to vote for Obama). He also won a majority of younger white voters. Whites were scared that the demographics of the country were changing and disturbed that a black could be elected.
Hillary’s demise was due to her failing to improve upon upon Obama’s fraction of white voters. She only got 38% of whites in 2016 while also not doing as well as Obama among blacks and especially Hispanic voters. Would a young Democratic or more progressive candidate without the Clinton baggage have done better with young white voters? I think the answer is yes.
This breakdown might provide a clue as to how Democrats can win in 2020 and beyond. More on that next time.
To be continued …
The Rose Bowl
At some point I quit being amazed at how quickly the years go by after you reach some arbitrary age. It does hit home on New Years Day how quickly another year has passed. I remember when all there was to do on January 1st was watch the boring Tournament of Roses parade in the morning while waiting for the bowl games to start.
There used to be four played on New Years Day and they were the only ones we actually cared about. The Cotton Bowl, Orange Bowl, and Sugar Bowl were all played in the afternoon and then “the grand daddy of them all” the Rose Bowl followed the others. Now there are so many bowls, most of them named after products I don’t use or even knew existed, that I couldn’t name at all even if my life depended on it. I’ve watched a few of these dogs this year played in nearly empty stadiums that ESPN carefully tries to avoid showing.
Enough about football. We find ourselves nearing end of the second decade of the 21st century. Chew on that for a minute. The Millennium was almost two decades ago!
I have been listening to a podcast series called The Wilderness. It is about how the Democratic Party found itself completely out of power and how it can get back to where it once was. That story is a big part of the history of the last couple of decades in America. Their story starts in 2008 but I wanted to go back to the turn of the century.
What a couple of decades it has been. Unfortunately, it begin with the mess of an election in 2000 when the Supreme Court decided to insert itself into the election in an unprecedented way with a decision that many Constitutional scholars considered to be pure horse hockey. It was so bad that even the conservatives on the court said it should never be used as a precedent.
That decision gave us President George W. Bush and the truly evil Vice President Dick Cheney for 8 years. Bush is considered by most historians to be in the running to be remembered as one of the worst presidents in history. He will be remembered for starting a war in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction that never existed and leaving office with the economy in the throes of the worst recession since the Great Depression.
In 2008 on the heels of a successful midterm election in 2006 the Democrats seemed poised to retake the presidency. What was unclear was just who the standard bearer would be. The favorite was Senator Hillary Clinton from New York. She was upset in a hard fought primary campaign by the young black Senator Barack Obama from Illinois.
The Republicans nominated the elder Senator from Arizona John McCain. McCain, a war hero who had been held captive and tortured by the North Vietnamese after his fighter had been shot down, had run before. He lost to George W. Bush in 2000. The Bush campaign led by dirty trickster Karl Rove employed some nasty tactics against McCain by spreading rumors right before the key South Carolina primary that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock. Funny how benign that indiscretion seems in hindsight in 2019 when compared with the current President’s lack of morality.
McCain made a major blunder by choosing the unknown Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin to be his running mate. That move will go down in history to be filed under the chapter titled “WTF were you thinking?”. Palin became the darling of the far right wing of the Republican party but scared the crap out of many moderate and independent voters who could not imagine electing McCain, who at the time was 72 years old and had a history of skin cancer, with Palin “a heartbeat from the Oval Office”.
Barack Obama had chosen as his running mate Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. Biden made a good running mate for several reasons. He was a veteran campaigner and ling time Senator. The contrast between Biden’s acumen and intelligence provided quite a contrast with Palin’s downright ignorance about almost every facet of government.
Obama ran a tireless campaign. He was easily the best orator the Democratic Party had produced since John Kennedy. McCain continued to pay for his mistaken choice for running mate as Palin grabbed most of the headlines good and bad. Obama was able to pin the Iraq War and the terrible economy on McCain and the Republicans. He swept to an easy electoral victory by winning almost all the swing states and even some previously Republican states like North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana.
Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009 and also the first non-white resident. Almost 2 million people attended. America appeared to be headed towards a new age of enlightenment.
So what happened? How did the shit show of an election in 2016 occur and how did we end up with a racist clown in the White House?
I think some of the signs of the calamity can be traced back to the 2008 election. I will discuss that and more in the next installment.
To be continued …
