Thursday, January 21, 2016

A COMPREHENSIVE EXPLANATION OF WHAT IS A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN

 

 

I am tired of arguing with those who would usurp the US Constitution to further their cause. These people will argue that so and so said that he is a Natural Born Citizen or this Group or Lawyer Said he is a Natural Born Citizen. They never read the LAW. Well Read it and then decide for yourself!

The Constitution requires that the President of the United States must be a natural born citizen: Article II, section 1, pa. 5: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
If “natural born citizen” is a synonym for “citizen,” then there is no reason for adding the exception “or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution.” None at all. Being a citizen is not sufficient, unless you happened to be alive when the Constitution was adopted.
So what, then, is a “natural born citizen”? To answer that question definitively will require a full examination of the concepts and history of citizenship.
Types Of Citizenship: Jus Soli, Jus Sanguinis, Natural Born, Native Born, Naturalized
Jus soli citizenship: “Jus soli” is a Latin phrase meaning “law of the soil.” Jus soli citizenship is any citizenship that inheres in a person based on the location of his or her birth.
Jus sanguinis citizenship: “Jus sanguinis” is a Latin phrase meaning “law of the blood.” Jus sanguinis citizenship is any citizenship that inheres in a person based on his or her ancestry.
Native born citizenship: A native born citizen is one whose citizenship derives from the facts of his birth, and who becomes a citizen at the moment of birth. In both US and British law, those born within the sovereign territory of the country or born to parents who are citizens (subjects) of the country when the person is born are native citizens (subjects.) Native born persons are said to have “birthright citizenship.” Note that one can be “native born” either by the “jus soli” principle or by the “jus sanguinis” principle.
Naturalized citizenship: A naturalized citizen is one whose citizenship is granted by statute or by the decision or act of a sovereign.
Natural born citizenship: A natural born citizen is one whose citizenship is beyond dispute, not synthetic, not subject to conflicting claims, not granted by statute or by any act of a sovereign, but inheres naturally in the person according to principles that don’t depend on laws or decisions of a sovereign. [The rest of this essay will fully justify this definition]
The 14th Amendment created an implicit distinction among 14th Amendment native-born citizens, and statutory native-born citizens. A 14th Amendment native-born citizen is any person who (a) was born in the United States, and (b) was subject to U.S. jurisdiction at the time of his or her birth. In contrast, a statutory native-born citizen is a person who does not qualify for birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, but receives U.S. citizenship, at birth, by laws enacted by Congress. For example, foreign-born children of American parents do not receive citizenship from the 14th Amendment; such children acquire U.S. citizenship, at birth, by statute.
So those born outside the United States to parents who are US citizens at the time of the person’s birth are both native citizens and also naturalized citizens, since their citizenship is a) granted to them by an Act of Congress (based on Congress’ Constitutional authority “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,”) and b) effective from the instant of their birth, based on the fact that the person’s parents were US citizens at that moment. <p>Similarly, it is necessary to distinguish between Constitutional and statutory natural born citizens:

  • “Constitutional natural born citizen” refers to the term “natural born citizen” when it appears in the Constitution or in a Constitution-related document such as a Supreme Court decision. It refers to the meaning of “natural born citizen” in the Constitution.
  • “Statutory natural born citizen” refers to someone who is deemed a “natural born citizen” by Federal or State law.
These distinctions are not my invention. The U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual—7 FAM 1130 (page 9) says:
…the fact that someone is a natural born citizen pursuant to a statute does not necessarily imply that he or she is such a citizen for Constitutional purposes
If we were to define “natural born citizen” to mean anyone who is a “citizen at birth”, our definition of “natural born citizen” would be statutory because it would depend on the statute or law which defines “citizen at birth”. Under existing law, all children born in the United States (except the children of foreign diplomats) are “citizens at birth”. Therefore, under existing law, almost all children born in the U.S.—including children of illegal immigrants—could be regarded as statutory natural born citizens.
H.R.1940, also known as the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2007, would change the existing law so that it would no longer grant “citizenship at birth” to children of illegal immigrants. If Congress were to pass H.R.1940, it would alter the meaning of “citizen at birth”, and therefore would alter our statutory definition of natural born citizen. If H.R.1940 were enacted, the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants could no longer be regarded as statutory natural born citizens.
Original Intent
On 25 July 1787, John Jay wrote a letter to George Washington, recommending that the new Constitution should require that the President be a “natural born citizen”. The stated purpose of this requirement for eligibility was to exclude “foreigners” from exercising Presidential powers:
“Permit me to hint whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of foreigners into the administration of our national government; and to declare expressly that the command in chief of the American army shall not be given to, nor devolve on any but a natural born citizen.”
Also on 25 July 1987 (the very same day,) James Madison made the following comment to the delegates of the Constitutional Convention then in progress in Philadelphia (the topic of the debate was whether or not it would be a good idea to have Congress , State legislatures, the Governors of the States or courts—Federal or State—choose the President):
Mr. MADISON. …Besides the general influence of that mode on the independence of the Executive, 1. [4] the election of the Chief Magistrate would agitate & divide the legislature so much that the public interest would materially suffer by it. Public bodies are always apt to be thrown into contentions, but into more violent ones by such occasions than by any others. 2. [5] the candidate would intrigue with the Legislature, would derive his appointment from the predominant faction, and be apt to render his administration subservient to its views. 3. [6] The Ministers of foreign powers would have and [7] make use of, the opportunity to mix their intrigues & influence with the Election. Limited as the powers of the Executive are, it will be an object of great moment with the great rival powers of Europe who have American possessions, to have at the head of our Governmt. a man attached to their respective politics & interests. No pains, nor perhaps expense, will be spared, to gain from the Legislature an appointmt. favorable to their wishes. Germany & Poland are witnesses of this danger. In the former, the election of the Head of the Empire, till it became in a manner hereditary, interested all Europe, and was much influenced by foreign interference. In the latter, altho’ the elective Magistrate has very little real power, his election has at all times produced the most eager interference of forign princes, and has in fact at length slid entirely into foreign hands. The existing authorities in the States are the Legislative, Executive & Judiciary. The appointment of the Natl. Executive by the first, was objectionable in many points of view, some of which had been already mentioned. He would mention one which of itself would decide his opinion. The Legislatures of the States had betrayed a strong propensity to a variety of pernicious measures. One object of the Natl. Legislre. was to controul this propensity. One object of the Natl. Executive, so far as it would have a negative on the laws, was to controul the Natl. Legislature, so far as it might be infected with a similar propensity. Refer the appointmt. of the Natl. Executive to the State Legislatures, and this controuling purpose may be defeated. The Legislatures can & will act with some kind of regular plan, and will promote the appointmt. of a man who will not oppose himself to a favorite object. Should a majority of the Legislatures at the time of election have the same object, or different objects of the same kind, The Natl. Executive would be rendered subservient to them. — An appointment by the State Executives, was liable among other objections to this insuperable one, that being standing bodies, they could & would be courted, and intrigued with by the Candidates, by their partizans, and by the Ministers of foreign powers. The State Judiciarys had not [8] & he presumed wd. not be proposed as a proper source of appointment. The option before us then lay between an appointment by Electors chosen by the people — and an immediate appointment by the people. He thought the former mode free from many of the objections which had been urged agst. it, and greatly preferable to an appointment by the Natl. Legislature. As the electors would be chosen for the occasion, would meet at once, & proceed immediately to an appointment, there would be very little opportunity for cabal, or corruption. As a farther precaution, it might be required that they should meet at some place, distinct from the seat of Govt. and even that no person within a certain distance of the place at the time shd. be eligible. …
With one exception to be noted shortly, it was only after Jay’s letter to General Washington, and Madison’s comment at the convention, that the Convention began to mention citizenship requirements for any Constitutional officers, even though they had begun to consider eligibility issues about a week previously. It should be noted, however, that during the early days of the Convention several very different initial drafts of proposed Constitutions were presented, all but one of which were rejected. The last one to be presented, by Alexander Hamilton, is known as the British Plan (because it was modeled closely after the British governmental architecture.) Although that proposal was totally rejected, it also happens to have been the only one whose text included any eligibility requirements for the Chief Executive. That plan required that that person be “born a citizen.”
The Convention’s “committee of the whole” went into recess from 27 July through 5 August. When it resumed on August 6, the “committee of detail” presented the first draft of the Constitution that included eligibility requirements for any Constitutional officers: the members of the House and Senate had to be citizens for specified periods prior to serving (thus implicitly allowing naturalized citizens to serve, a point that was actually discussed in detail in the “committee of the whole.”) But the only constraint on who could be President was that he “shall not be elected a second time.”
Finally, on 4 September, the Convention considered proposed changes from one of the sub-committees where the “natural born citizen” eligibility requirement for the President was introduced to the “committee of the whole.” The differences between the initial language and what later became the text of the ratified Constitution are minor and of no bearing on the meaning of “natural born citizen”:
(5) ‘Sect. 2. No person except a natural born citizen or a Citizen of the U. S. at the time of the adoption of this Constitution shall be eligible to the office of President; nor shall any person be elected to that office, who shall be under the age of thirty five years, and who has not been in the whole, at least fourteen years a resident within the U. S.’
Based on the above evidence, we can conclude that John Jay’s letter to Washington, and the comments of Madison and later others at the Convention, establish the fact that the Framers were worried about the undivided loyalty of the President, and thought that the requirement that he be a “natural born citizen” would be sufficient to prevent anyone with foreign allegiance (anyone who could be claimed as a subject or citizen of a foreign sovereign) from serving as President. But how could that be, if “natural born citizen” means what many claim it does, namely “a person born in the United States, with parents who aren’t employed in any official capacity by a foreign sovereign”?
Some nations claim you as their citizen or subject based on where your were born, some based on who your parents were (father and/or mother,) and some based on both together. By requiring that the President be born at a location where the US is sovereign, any foreign “natural law” or “law of nations” claim on the President to allegiance based on his place of birth is precluded. By requiring that the President be born to parents who are solely US citizens, any foreign “natural law” or “law of nations” claim on the President to allegiance based on his parentage is precluded.
There is no denying the fact that a person born in the United States could have multiple nationalities, and owe allegiance to multiple sovereigns, since either parent could have multiple citizenships, any of which could by the law of that nation transfer to the child by the principle of jus sanguinis. Many nations claim anyone with at least one parent (sometimes it must be the father, sometimes it must be the mother, sometimes both) who is a citizen or subject of that nation as a citizen/subject also. However, if both your parents are citizens (or subjects) of the same sovereign, and if you were born in that same sovereign’s territory, then and only then is it impossible for any other sovereign to have a birthright claim to your allegiance under the law of nations as commonly understood. Of course, a person can become a citizen or subject by naturalization, and not just by birth.
Therefore, it should be evident that if the purpose of the requirement to be a “natural born citizen” is to prevent anyone with foreign citizenship from serving as President, it cannot achieve that end unless, by definition, the phrase “natural born citizen” excludes anyone who might have acquired foreign citizenship by means of any one of the three modalities recognized by the law of nations: 1) jus soil (born on foreign soil), 2) jus sanguinis (born to a parent with foreign citizenship), or 3) naturalization by a foreign country. John Jay’s request to Washington makes no sense otherwise, since in that case his suggested eligibility requirement would not preclude what he was seeking to prevent.
Consider again Article II, section 1, pa. 5: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” That limits who may be President to persons who meet the following requirements:

  • Those who are 35 years old or older, AND
  • Those who have been a resident of the US for 14 years or longer, AND
    • Those who are natural born citizens, OR
    • Those who were US citizens at the time the Constitution was adoptedWhy did the Constitutional Convention include that last exception, allowing those who were citizens at the time the Constitution was adopted to be President?Before answering that question, consider the case of Congressman Smith. He was born in South Carolina before the American Revolution. At the time of the Revolution, he was not yet an adult. His parents were British loyalists, and fought against the Revolution. But after the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, he was elected to Congress. But his right to be seated was challenged on the basis that he was not a citizen, due to the actions of his parents.James Madison himself spoke in defense of the fact that Mr. Smith was a citizen. The reasoning he used is decisive with respect to understanding the reason for the exception in the Constitution to the “natural born citizen” requirement. Madison essentially argued that Mr. Smith was a citizen because of where he was born, and because he was a minor when his parents sided with the British loyalists against the American Revolutionaries. He focused on that point, because he obviously felt that any adults who sided with the British loyalists would not qualify as citizens, regardless of where they were born (he explains the reason for that.) Bear in mind that the Constitution allows naturalized citizens to serve in Congress, there is no requirement that one have “birthright citizenship” (whose normative definition means either “jus soli” OR “jus sanguinis” citzenship (OR, not AND.)) But Madison nevertheless argued that Mr. Smith was a citizen from birth, by reason of his place of birth alone, and explicitly not due to his parentage, because (as Madison argues) his parents never were US citizens at all. Madison’s argument prevailed, and Mr. Smith was seated as a Congressman. The Congress accepted Madison’s argument that Mr. Smith had birthright citizenship solely due to the location of his birth in South Carolina—when South Carolina was a British Colony, and not yet a State of the United States. By that same logic, most residents of the US at the time the Constitution was adopted were native citizens of the US by their place of birth alone. Note that, according to Madison’s argument, those who were citizens of any State became citizens of the US instantly, automatically and by operation of natural law and the law of nations the moment two events occurred: 1) The society in which they were citizens came under the sovereignty of the United States, and 2) they were adults who accepted, and did not reject, allegiance to the United States. However, their status as US citizens began only at that moment, and not before. By Madison’s rule, anyone born on soil where the United States is currently sovereign, and who has not denounced or rejected US citizenship, is a citizen of the United States (although he didn’t say what kind.). However, most people who were alive when the Constitution was adopted would have had parents who were not US citizens when they were born, because the United States did not exist until 1776 at the earliest. Whether the United States that came into existence in 1776 is the same nation as the one whose government was constituted in 1787 by the current US Constitution is an interesting question, but there is no need to answer it here. The only persons who were indisputably born on soil in which the United States was sovereign when the current US Constitution was adopted and whose parents were US citizens at the very moment when those persons were born would, under the most lenient possible interpretation, have been no older than 13 years of age in 1789 when the US Constitution was ratified. Under the strictest interpretation, they would have been mere infants. In contrast, most of those who were citizens when the Constitution was ratified would have satisfied the requirement to have been born on US soil— because the soil on which they were born would have become US soil no later than the moment the Constitution was ratified, if not before (per Madison’s rule.) So, based on Madison’s argument (which Congress accepted,) if “natural born citizen” means simply “native born” or “born a citizen” or “born on soil where the United States is currently sovereign” then any citizen of the US at the time the Constitution was adopted would satisfy the “natural born citizen” requirement, so there would have been no need for the exception, and its inclusion in the Constitution makes no sense, especially in historical context, where no small number of residents of the US were at least potentially British subjects per British law, and the undivided loyalty of many of them to the United States was under serious suspicion (as demonstrated by the case of Congressman Smith.) But if “natural born citizen” means “born on US soil, with parents who were US citizens when their child was born,” then it would in fact be true that no one older than 13 years of age (at most) could have satisfied the “natural born citizen” requirement in 1789 (when the Constitution was ratified,) in which case there is a good reason for the exception. Without that exception, and assuming a semantic for “natural born citizen” as stated, George Washington would not have been eligible, nor would most of the Presidents after him until well into the 19th century. In addition to the debates at the Constitutional Convention, John Jay’s letter to General Washington, and the text of the Constitution itself, there is also the testimony of Founder and historian David Ramsay (April 2, 1749 to May 8, 1815,) who was an American physician, patriot, and historian from South Carolina and a delegate from that state to the Continental Congress in 1782-1783 and 1785-1786. He was the Acting President of the United States in Congress Assembled. He was one of the American Revolution’s first major historians. A contemporary of Washington, Ramsay writes with the knowledge and insights one acquires only by being personally involved in the events of the Founding period. In 1789 (the same year the Constitution was ratified,) Dr. Ramsay published an essay entitled “A Dissertation on the Manners of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen,” a very important and influential essay on defining a “natural born Citizen.” In his 1789 article, Ramsay first explained who the “original citizens” were and then defined the “natural born citizens” as the children born in the country to citizen parents. He said concerning the children born after the declaration of independence, “[c]itizenship is the inheritance of the children of those who have taken part in the late revolution; but this is confined exclusively to the children of those who were themselves citizens….” Id. at 6. He added that “citizenship by inheritance belongs to none but the children of those Americans, who, having survived the declaration of independence, acquired that adventitious character in their own right, and transmitted it to their offspring….” Id. at 7. He continued that citizenship “as a natural right, belongs to none but those who have been born of citizens since the 4th of July, 1776….” Id. at 6. Based on Dr. Ramsay’s definition of “natural born citizen,” there can be no doubt why it was necessary to include the time-limited Constitutional exception that permitted those who were citizens when the Constitution was adopted to be President. Without that exception, those who would have qualified as natural born citizens, and so been Constitutionally eligible to be President, would have been no older than 13 years of age in 1789. Given Dr. Ramsay’s position of influence and especially given that he was a highly respected historian, Ramsay would have had the contacts with other influential Founders and Framers and would have known how they too defined “natural born Citizen.” Ramsay, being of the Founding generation and being intimately involved in the events of the time would have known how the Founders and Framers defined a “natural born Citizen” and he told us that definition was one where the child was born in the country of citizen parents. Note Dr. Ramsay’s phrase “as a natural right.” Modernly, it seems strange to us to associate questions of citizenship with “natural rights.” We consider questions of citizenship to be purely political matters, not questions of “laws of nature” such as those investigated by physicists. But that was not at all true in 18th century European culture, nor had it been the case in English common law for many hundreds of years prior. At the time, science was still in its infancy, and its stunning and then-very-recent success inspired those who lived through the initial scientific revolution to seek “natural laws” to explain and justify their hypotheses, theories, concepts and policies. And the tradition of English common law was grounded quite firmly in rendering decisions based on what was “true by nature,” as opposed to what was true by political decree. That attitude was especially strong among those who founded the United States and wrote its Constitution. They were determined to throw off the chains of tradition and arbitrary authority, and to establish their society and government based on invariant, self-evident principles arrived at by reason and conformance with objective reality. They used the term “natural” in a way similar to the way we modernly use the term “scientific,” in the sense of “justified by reason and the way the world works, not by tradition or arbitrary human policy” (which isn’t quite the formally correct definition, but is nevertheless what most people mean when they use the term.) That’s why the political writings of the time constantly and incessantly refer to “natural law.” The point was to claim that the concepts, principles, rules or laws under discussion were derived by reason and logic from objective facts, and not merely the remnants of irrational cultural traditions or political edicts. It was the Age Of Reason, and naturalness was its standard of validity and truth. When the US Constitution was written, the “natural law” that dealt with issues such as nationality and allegiance to a sovereign was called “the law of nations.” Modernly, we call this “international law.” In 1789, the preeminent codification, description and explanation of “the law of nations” was a work written by Emerich de Vattel, entitled THE LAW OF NATIONS, or principles of the law of nature applied to the conduct and affairs of nations and sovereigns. The Founders were not only familiar with de Vattel’s treatise, they relied on it extensively when they wrote laws and Constitutions (of their respective States, not just the Federal one.) In Section 212 of de Vattel’s treatise, he states the following: § 212. Of the 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.” Note that de Vattel defines “natural born citizen” as the purest form of citizenship, requiring both jus soli (“law of the soil”) citizenship and jus sanguinis (“law of the blood”) citizenship—with BOTH parents being citizens. But de Vattel wrote in French, not in English. In French, the words he used instead of the English “natural born citizens” were “les naturels, ou indigenes.” Literally, “les naturels, ou indigenes” translates as “the naturals, or citizens.” Note that “les naturels” does not translate as “natives.” For “naturel” to mean native the word would need to be used as an adjective. In the quoted section, it is used as a noun. In fact, when de Vattel defines “natural born citizens” in the second sentence of section 212 after defining general or ordinary citizens in the first sentence, you see that he uses the word “indigenes” for natives along with “Les naturels” in that sentence. He used the word “naturels” to emphasize clearly who he was defining as those who were born in the country of two citizens of the country. Also, when we read Vattel, we must understand that Vattel’s use of the word “natives” in 1758 is not to be read with modern day various alternative usages of that word. You must read it in the full context of sentence 2 of section 212 to fully understand what Vattel was defining from natural law, i.e., natural born citizenship of a country. Please see the photograph of the original French for Chapter 19, Section 212, here in the original French if you have any doubts. The text of de Vattel’s treatise was translated into English more than once, some of those translations being published well before the American Revolution. None of those pre-Revolutionary translations rendered “les naturels, ou indigenes” into English as “natural born citizens” The first that did so was published in 1797, 10 years following the Constitutional Convention, 8 years following the adoption of the Constitution, and 8 years following the publication of Dr. Ramsay’s essay on US citizenship—where “natural born citizen” is defined by the Founder/historian to have precisely the same meaning as the one de Vattel establishes for “les naturels, ou indigenes.” We can reasonably assume that the other Founders and Framers would have defined a “natural born Citizen” the same way that Ramsay did, for being a meticulous historian he would have gotten his definition from the general consensus that existed at the time. And we can also reasonably conclude that the professional translator who rendered “les naturels, ou indigenes” into American English in 1798 for an edition of the book to be published and distributed in the United Sates as “natural born citizens” would have been fully aware of the occurrence of that phrase in the brand-new US Constitution, and that he had the same reasons as Dr. Ramsay to use the same definition of “natural born citizens” as was generally accepted among speakers of American English at the time. Based on the facts and reasoning presented above, there can be no other sound conclusion but that “natural born citizen” must have been intended to have the same meaning as de Vattel defined for his term-of-art phrases “les naturels, ou indigenes.” It cannot be coincidence that Dr. Ramsay’s 1789 definition of “natural born citizen” is the same as the one de Vattel gives for his French phrase “les naturels, ou indigenes,” and which a professional translator translated into English as “natural born citizen” just a few short years after the “natural born citizen” requirement was written and ratified in the new US Constitution. The fact that that semantics for the term is very consistent with the stated purpose of the “natural born citizen” requirement to prevent a person from having allegiance to a foreign sovereign provides the confirming motive and original intent. The evidence from the historical record and from the text of the Constitution itself is clear and compelling, as regards to both semantics and intent:
      1. The reason the Constitutional Convention required that the President (and later, by Amendment, the Vice President) be a “natural born citizen” is that they wanted to minimize the possibility that the person who would be head of State, chief executive and Commander-In-Chief of the US armed forces might be subject to conflicts of interest, legal obligations or loyalties with respect to any foreign sovereigns or foreign powers;
      2. Whatever the Founders meant by “natural born citizen,” it was more restrictive than “citizen,” and so restrictive that it was necessary to add an exception to the Constitution allowing those who were citizens when the Constitution was adopted to be eligible to be President, provided they satisfied all the other constraints;
      3. The only explicit definition of “natural born citizen” in the historical record that was provided by one of the Founders defines it as meaning a person born in the country to citizen parents. No testimony from any other Founder or delegate of the Constitutional Convention exists that claims any other definition.
      4. However, in spite of all the foregoing evidence, there remain those unconvinced. Why is that? The Core Of The Controversy In 1891, Prentiss Webster (1851-1898) published A Treatise On the Law Of Citizenship In The United States. The author makes the argument that there are two schools of thought regarding the philosophical and conceptual basis for the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. The controversy over the meaning of “natural born citizen” is but one aspect of this larger disagreement. It should be noted that the 1891 publication of A Treatise On the Law Of Citizenship In The United States happened 23 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, and seven years before the Supreme Court decided the Wong Kim Ark case (which used the English common law definition of “natural born subject” to justify its interpretation of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” that occurs in the first sentence of the 14th Amendment.) The difference of opinion between the two factions is starkly evident in the majority and minority opinions in that case. We will examine the Wong Kim Ark case in greater detail later. According to one school of thought identified by Webster, the principal philosophical and conceptual foundation of the United States founding documents was English common law. According to the other school, the US founding documents were based on pan-European “natural law” theory, as exemplified by what the US Constitution refers to as the “law of nations” (which refers to a theory of international law based on natural law concepts, not to any particular publication.) Modernly at least, the proponents of neither school are absolutists. Those who favor English common law as the principal foundational seed don’t deny at least some influence of pan-European political theory based on natural law principles. And those who believe that pan-European “natural law” theory was the principal framework the Founders used to establish the governmental architecture of the United States generally agree that there were some principles, concepts and terms also borrowed from English common law. The crux of the disagreement is focused primarily on whether the terms and concepts involving citizenship are based on English common law or on the “law of nations” developed in Europe based on natural law principles. Those who reject the idea that “natural born citizen” means “born in the country, to parents both of whom are citizens of that country” argue that the term “natural born citizen” is simply the Americanized form of the term “natural born subject” as defined in English common law. They argue that the term was Americanized by substituting the word “citizen” for “subject”—because the US has citizens, not subjects—and that no other semantic or legal change was intended. Both those who believe that US citizenship concepts and terms derive from English common law and those who believe they are based on the pan-European “law of nations” have written many articles, books, legal briefs and court decisions based on their point of view. So it’s easy to find citations in support of either thesis. Nevertheless, it is possible to determine which faction has de jure won the argument. Was English Common Law The Foundation Or Basis For The US Constitution? English common law was the basis for the common law of the original British colonies, and then of the original States of the Union, but was not the basis for the common law of the United States Federal government. The framers rejected the notion that the United States was under English Common Law, “The common law of England is not the common law of these States.” —George Mason, one of Virginia’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention. James Madison wrote a letter to George Washington, shortly after the end of the Constitutional Convention (Oct 18, 1787). The letter was in defense of the work of the Constitutional Convention against criticisms by George Mason. One such criticism was that the “the common law was not secured” by the proposed Constitution. Madison’s response to that charge (text [enclosed within square brackets] has been added as clarification): The common law is nothing more than the unwritten law, and is left by all the constitutions [of the several States] equally liable to legislative alterations. I am not sure that any notice is particularly taken of it in the Constitutions of the States. If there is, nothing more is provided than a general declaration that it shall continue along with other branches of law to be in force till legally changed. The Constitution of Virga. [Virginia] drawn up by Col Mason himself, is absolutely silent on the subject. An ordinance passed during the same Session, declared the Common law as heretofore & all Statutes of prior date to the 4 of James I. to be still the law of the land, merely to obviate pretexts that the separation from G. Britain threw us into a State of nature, and abolished all civil rights and Obligations. Since the Revolution every State has made great inroads & with great propriety in many instances on this monarchical code. The “revisal of the laws” by a Committee of wch. Col. Mason was a member, though not an acting one, abounds with such innovations. The abolition of the right of primogeniture, which I am sure Col. Mason does not disapprove, falls under this head. What could the Convention have done? If they had in general terms declared the Common law to be in force, they would have broken in upon the legal Code of every State in the most material points: they wd. have done more, they would have brought over from G.B. a thousand heterogeneous & antirepublican doctrines, and even the ecclesiastical Hierarchy itself, for that is a part of the Common law. If they had undertaken a discrimination, they must have formed a digest of laws, instead of a Constitution. That should make it abundantly clear why in Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. (Pet. 8) 591 (1834), the Supreme Court held: “It is clear there can be no common law of the United States. The Federal government is composed of twenty-four sovereign and independent states, each of which may have its local usages, customs and common law. There is no principle which pervades the Union and has the authority of law, that is not embodied in the constitution or laws of the Union. The common law could be made a part of our Federal system only by legislative adoption.” In a recent speech to the Federalist Society, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia confirmed that English common law did not “control” at the national or Federal level after the United States gained its independence from Great Britain: The common law is gone. The federal courts never applied the common law and even in the state courts it’s codified now. (Audio/Video: Justice Scalia speech, Nov 22, 2008) Is “Natural Born Citizen” Equivalent To “Natural Born Subject” As Defined By English Common Law? If so, it would have to be an exception to the clear words of the Founders and the controlling Supreme Court precedents that deny that Federal law is based on the English common law. Could that be? One reason that English common law was rejected as the basis for US Federal common law is because the US was founded as a Constitutional Republic, not as a monarchy. The founding principles were different, and in fact were an explicit rejection of key foundational principles of English law and English government. Another reason was simply that each colony was founded at a different time, adopted English common law as its own at the moment of its founding, but then evolved its own common law going forward, independently of Great Britain and the other colonies. There was no common “common law” among the founding States—not even concerning matters of citizenship. Words and terms of art have the meanings they do because of their utility in the culture and society that uses them. New words and phrases are created with particular meanings, and existing words and phrases are given new meanings, because those new meanings serve the purposes of those who use them, and old meanings no longer do. The Founders of the United States undeniably wanted and needed to start a brand new legal tradition, based on the principles of government in which they believed, and not based on those of the nation whose government and political traditions they had fought and died to repudiate and discard. Breaking their allegiance to the King, severing the ties of community and nationality, establishing a new anti-monarchist Republic based on a new political philosophy cannot fail to require new principles, new words and new meanings for old words. So, even if English common law served as the foundational seed for the US Constitution, there would still be every reason to assume that the Founders would have made any necessary and proper changes to the legal principles and to the semantics of any terms of art they they may have incorporated from English common law (which, of course, they may have done even if they used the pan-European “law of nations” as the foundational framework for the new nation they created.) Questions of citizenship are inextricably linked to the relationship between a state and its people, which depends fundamentally on the political theory according to which the people of a nation constitute and operate their government. English common law evolved to fit a political theory according to which it was a natural law that a nation would be ruled by a sovereign who was a single human being (a king or queen,) and a natural law that, in exchange for the protection of the sovereign and his permission to reside in the territory the sovereign rules by divine right a person must from the moment of birth onward be “in allegiance to the king,” which means to demonstrate loyalty and obedience to him (or to her, if the sovereign is the Queen.) Under English common law, any child born on English soil (except the child of a foreign ambassador or alien enemy) was a natural-born subject, and English natural-born subjects owed perpetual allegiance to the king. Therefore, if you believe that English common law guided the formation of the U.S. national government, you are likely to also believe that U.S. citizenship was based on the jus soli principle, and that U.S. citizens did not have the right of expatriation. On the other hand, European political and natural law theorists, such as de Vattel, taught that children, at birth, acquire citizenship by descent from their fathers, and that expatriation is a basic human right. Thus, if you believe that European theorists influenced the Founding Fathers as they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, you are likely to also believe that the Founding Fathers’ understanding of citizenship included the jus sanguinis principle and the right of expatriation. After gaining independence, the original thirteen States retained aspects of English common law, including the “rule” which granted citizenship to children of alien parents who, though not yet citizens, had sworn an oath of allegiance to the State and had established permanent legal residence, or domicile, within the State: While all States could be said to have recognized birth within the State as a means of conferring State citizenship to all persons, it is important to realize these States also required of aliens who desired to become domiciled within their limits to first renounce any allegiances to other governments and pledge their allegiance solely to the State. Therefore, a child born to domiciled parents was “born within the allegiance” of the State even if the parents had not yet been naturalized. (What ‘Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof’ Really Means ~ Madison(2007)) However, the early framers of the Federal government seemed disinclined to follow the English understanding of sovereignty and allegiance. For example, Thomas Jefferson rejected the English common law notion of perpetual allegiance, and affirmed each individual’s right of expatriation: That our citizens are certainly free to divest themselves of that character, by emigration and other acts manifesting their intention and may then become the subjects of another power and be free to do whatever the subjects of that power do. (Thomas Jefferson, as quoted by Webster, p.76) If the Framers of the Constitution were guided by English common law, it’s likely that the original meaning of “natural born citizen” was also based on English common law which included the jus soli principle. This would mean that anyone born in the United States (except the child of an ambassador or alien enemy) is at least a U.S. citizen at birth, if not a natural born citizen. On the other hand, if the Founding Fathers were guided by European political and natural law theorists, such as de Vattel, the original meaning of “natural born citizen” probably included the jus sanguinis principle; in which case, you cannot be a U.S. natural born citizen unless your father was a U.S citizen at the time of your birth. In 1884, an article was published in The American Law Review written by George D. Collins, Esq. Attorney Collins was the Secretary of the California Bar Association. His name was recognized nationally for cases in the federal courts, and also due to his regular publishing of articles via The American Law review. The article was entitled “ARE PERSONS BORN IN THE UNITED STATES IPSO FACTO CITIZENS THEREOF?“, and was an in depth discussion and review of the legalities of US citizenship. Attorney Collins states: There is nothing in the constitution to indicate that the term “citizen” was used in reference to the common-law definition of “subject,” nor is there any act of Congress declaratory of the common-law doctrine, and the subject of citizenship being national, questions relating to it are to be determined by the general principles of the law of nations. The Founders not only rejected the idea that English common law in general was the basis of the US Constitution, they also specifically objected to the use of the British definition of “natural born subject.” They actually fought yet a second war against the British over precisely the issue of whether or not the British definition of “natural born subject” applied to US citizens: The War of 1812! One of they key disagreements between the US and Britain that led to the War of 1812 was the practice of the British Navy of impressing into British naval service sailors (and even passengers) they found on ships at sea. “Drafting” people into military service (to use the modern term) was predicated on the British definition of “natural born subject.” Under British law then and now, anyone either born on British soil or born to parents who were British subjects was also a British “natural born subject,” and hence owed allegiance to the British Crown, and so could be “impressed” (drafted) into British military service. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many US citizens had either been born on British soil according to British law (the American colonies were British soil according to British law until the Crown signed the peace treaty with its former colonies,) or else had parents who were British subjects at the time of their birth. The US government strenuously objected to having its citizens kidnapped from ships at sea in order to be impressed into the British Navy, rejected the argument that Britain had any right to do this based on the British definition of “natural born subject,” and insisted that on US ships at sea, only US law applied, and on non-British ships, only the “law of nations” applied. And this objection by the US would only have been logically consistent if the US had categorically rejected the British definition of “natural born subject,” and if that rejection involved issues in addition to the difference between a subject and a citizen. In addition to going to war, the US took other measures to deal with the problem of having its sailors impressed into the British Navy: On February 9, 1813, the US House of Representatives passed a law that required that all the officers and three fourths of the seamen on a ship of the United States be natural born citizens. Whatever “natural born citizen” meant to the founding generation (many of whom were still alive and serving in Congress at the time,) the US Congress of 1813 thought that requiring a person to be such would prevent the British definition of “natural born subject” from applying to such a person—which means that a “natural born citizen” of the US could not have been born on British soil, nor could a “natural born citizen” of the US have even one British parent. US Supreme Court Decisions Concerning Citizenship and “Natural Born Citizens” The Constitution vests the judicial power of the United States with the US Supreme Court. By definition, “judicial power” is the power to judge questions of law, both with respect to what the law means in general and with respect to how the law should apply to a particular set of facts and circumstances. The US Constitution names itself as a law, and therefore the Supreme Court has the power to judge its meaning and application pursuant to the Constitutional grant of judicial power to the courts of the United States. The Supreme Court ruled in 1803 that the judicial power that the US Federal courts were granted in the Constitution necessarily included the power to use the Constitution as a “meta-law” governing the meaning and validity of the actions of the President, the Congress and lower courts. That ruling is referred to as “Marbury vs. Madison,” and the ruling in that case set the precedent of what has come to be called “judicial review,” which is the principle that Federal courts have the power to retroactively invalidate Congressional statues by finding them in violation of the superior law known as the US Constitution. One of the precedent-setting holdings of Marbury vs. Madison was the following: It cannot be presumed that any clause in the Constitution is intended to be without effect, and therefore such construction is inadmissible unless the words require it. ~ Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 That each clause of the Constitution must be consequential, and not superfluous, is one of the foundational principles of exegesis that the Supreme Court uses in interpreting the Constitution. One consequence of this principle is that the Supreme Court will not interpret a later Amendment in such a way so as to render any clauses present before that Amendment was added impotent or irrelevant, unless it is abundantly clear that such was the intent of the later Amendment—perhaps because the later Amendment explicitly states that an earlier clause is repealed, or perhaps because the later Amendment contradicts an earlier clause, and the conflict can only be resolved by assuming the implied intent was to repeal or nullify the other clause. With that interpretive principle in mind, consider what the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment has to say regarding US citizenship: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. Firstly, note that the sentence says nothing about “natural born citizens”—that term does not appear. Nor does it say anything about who is or is not eligible to serve as President of the United States. It does not take away from or add to the power of Congress with respect to making naturalization rules (it does prevent Congress from denying citizenship to anyone “born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but that leaves unchanged the power of Congress to naturalize whomever it pleases.). Nor does the Amendment state that it is repealing any clause in the original Constitution or in any of the subsequent Amendments. Instead, it specifies the following rules regarding Federal and State citizenship:
      5. Any person born in the United States who is also “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is Constitutionally defined as a US citizen
      6. Any person naturalized in the United States who is also “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is Constitutionally defined as a US citizen.
      7. A citizen of the United States is Constitutionally defined as also a citizen of the State in which he or she resides.
      8. We know from history that this sentence of the 14th Amendment was intended to accomplish the following purposes:
      9. To retroactively define as US citizens those who had recently been slaves, but whose citizenship was not recognized by the States in which they resided
      10. To prevent States from claiming that such persons were not citizens of the State in which they lived, even if they were US citizens
      11. There is no evidence that the 14th Amendment was intended in any way to change the Constitutional qualifications for serving as US President. Many at the time argued that the freed slaves were already citizens by natural law. Nevertheless, the Amendment was proposed and ultimately ratified because the natural law argument was not accepted by some of the States with respect to former slaves. Nevertheless, those who accepted the natural law argument did not view the 14th Amendment as granting citizenship to those who had not had it, but rather as affirming the citizenship of the former slaves in a way that could not be contested by those opposed. The point is that the Amendment was not proposed and ratified because the nation had concluded that the previous citizenship rules needed to be changed (obviously, those opposed to the idea that the former slaves should be recognized as citizens wanted no such “change”), but rather because there was such strong disagreement with respect to what the rules actually were, and how they should be applied. Note, for example, that the 14th Amendment defines anyone naturalized as a citizen pursuant to Congress’ authority to make naturalization rules as a Constitutional citizen. But such persons were already “Constitutional citizens,” because the Constitution grants Congress the power to grant citizenship. So in the case of naturalized citizens, the only possible effect of the 14th Amendment was to prevent States from claiming that US citizens residing in that State were not citizens of the State. Although the Fourteenth Amendment ended the argument regarding the citizenship of the former slaves, it did not end it for other cases. Why not? Because in addition to the clear jus soli requirement established by the 14th Amendment that a person must be born in the United States in order to be a citizen, the Amendment additionally required that the person be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. What does “subject to the jurisdiction” mean? That became the next disputed issue, and its resolution required a Supreme Court decision. In 1898, the Supreme Court had to decide whether a petitioner was or was not a US citizen. It was the first such case the Court considered following the ratification of the 14th Amendment where the question of citizenship could not be decided by any means other than interpreting the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. Interestingly, the text of the decision itself falsely claims that there was a prior case that had already done the same, but that claim is provably false. That’s actually a crucial point, as will be shown later. The 1898 case involved the citizenship status of Mr. Wong Kim Ark, who was born in the United States to Chinese parents who never acquired US citizenship. His citizenship was challenged both because neither of his parents were US citizens, and also because of a law restricting Chinese immigration and prohibiting immigrants from China from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. The court decided that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen based on the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, and that “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” means a) physically present on United States soil, AND b) the person was born to parents who were private individuals not employed in any official capacity by a foreign sovereign. The court’s interpretation of “subject to the jurisdiction” has been strongly criticized on a number of grounds by those who argue that the intended meaning was “not subject to any foreign power.” In the majority’s Opinion of the Court, English common law was “in force” when the United States was founded, “continued to prevail” under the Constitution, and controlled the Constitutional meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction.” According to the jus soli principle of English common law, U.S.-born children of “domiciled” (permanent legal resident) alien parents are citizens by birth. In the minority’s Dissenting Opinion, the law of nations controlled the Constitutional meaning of citizenship. According to the jus sanguinis principle promoted by European natural law theorists, a child is naturally a citizen at birth only if its parents were citizens at the time of its birth, regardless of the child’s place of birth. In the Wong Kim Ark case, the difference of opinion among the justices was rooted in their differing understandings of America’s history and founding principles. The split decision in Wong Kim Ark illustrated Prentiss Webster’s main point: that one’s understanding of Constitutional citizenship reflects one’s belief as to which philosophical system — English common law, or European political and natural law theory — guided the framers of the U.S. Constitution—at least in so far as questions of citizenship zre concerned. Original Intent of the 14th Amendment: In delivering the majority opinion in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, Justice Gray admitted that he had “presumed” that, in the 14th Amendment, the word “jurisdiction” means territorial and legal jurisdiction only. Evidence regarding the Framers’ original intent, as expressed during the Congressional debates over the 14th Amendment, was deemed “not admissible”: The words ‘in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ in the first sentence of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution, must be presumed to have been understood and intended by the congress which proposed the amendment … as the equivalent of the words ‘within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States’… Doubtless, the intention of the Congress which framed and of the States which adopted this Amendment of the Constitution must be sought in the words of the Amendment, and the debates in Congress are not admissible as evidence to control the meaning of those words. (Wong Kim Ark, 1898). The Supreme Court did not consider evidence showing that the originally intended meaning of “jurisdiction” was sole and complete jurisdiction. The Court’s refusal to consider such evidence was “inexcusable“: A refusal to consider reliable evidence of original intent in the Constitution is no more excusable than a judge’s refusal to consider legislative intent. (Justice John Paul Stevens, as quoted by Madison(2006)) The Supreme Court Defines “Natural Born Citizen The earlier Supreme Court decision, which was wrongly referenced in the Wong Kim Ark decision as having used the 14th Amendment to decide a person’s citizenship, is known as Minor vs. Hapersett, 88 U.S. 162. That decision did in fact use the 14th Amendment as the basis for its second principal holding concerning the right to vote, but not for its first principal holding concerning whether or not the petitioner was a US citizen (court decisions can involve multiple holdings, which are the precedent-setting decisions the court makes in order to decide the legal and/or factual issues before the court in a particular case.) In Minor, the court held that the 14th Amendment granted no one at all any right to vote, regardless of sex, age or citizenship. Previous cases had already held that there was no Federal right to vote. The second principal holding in Minor, as well as the holdings in previous cases, are the reason that the 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments were later proposed and adopted, the language of which forbids the denial of the privilege of voting based on race, previous condition of servitude, sex or age (for those 18-years of age or older.) The 19th Amendment, for example, requires that if one sex is granted the privilege to vote, the other sex must be granted that same privilege equally. But the court in Minor determined that before it could decide the issue of whether the petitioner (who was an adult White woman) had any Federal right to vote based on the 14th Amendment, it first had to decide whether or not she was a citizen, and if so on what basis? Understanding why the court approached the issue that way is crucial: Firstly, if women as a class be not US citizens, then the second sentence of the 14th Amendment that forbids States from denying citizens any privileges of US citizens would not apply to them, since it only applies to those who are US citizens. Secondly, the court was concerned with whether or not the citizenship of women as a class depended on the 14th Amendment. In other words, the question was whether or not, in the absence of the 14th Amendment, would any women at all be citizens? That second issue mattered for two reasons:
      12. The legal principle known as judicial restraint: If women as a class were not citizens before the adoption of the 14th Amendment, then the Court would have to decide whether the first sentence of the 14th Amendment granted women “born in the US and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” US citizenship. But if the woman who was the petitioner in the case at hand could be held to be a US citizen even without applying the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, then the principle of judicial restraintwould behoove the Court to avoid deciding whether or not the 14th Amendment grants any women US citizenship. Judicial restraint requires that courts not make precedent-setting holdings when the issues in a case do not require it.The court has always interpreted the principle of judicial restraint as sufficient reason to use the original (unamended) text of the Constitution before relying on the text of any subsequent Amendments, if such is possible. That’s especially true in the absence of any prior precedents based on a particular clause of the Constitution. They seek to avoid making a “first instance” interpretation of any clause when there are other precedents that can be used instead (where it can be shown that no reasonable meaning of the unused clause could possibly change the outcome.) In this case, since the 14th Amendment definitely did not deprive anyone of citizenship, there was no reason to rely on its first sentence to determine citizenship, if it could be determined that the petitioner was a citizen based on the original text of the Constitution.
      13. The court reasoned that, if women can be citizens without applying the 14th Amendment, then the 14th Amendment cannot fairly be interpreted as granting them any rights or privileges of citizenship that they have not always possessed, even before the ratification of that Amendment. In fact, this is the crucial point the court relied on in order to reach its second principal holding (that the 14th Amendment did not grant anyone the right to vote)! In the words of the court in Minor: It is clear, therefore, we think, that the Constitution has not added the right of suffrage to the privileges and immunities of citizenship as they existed at the time it was adopted. This makes it proper to inquire whether suffrage was coextensive with the citizenship of the States at the time of its adoption. If it was, then it may with force be argued that suffrage was one of the rights which belonged to citizenship, and in the enjoyment of which every citizen must be protected. But if it was not, the contrary may with propriety be assumed. [pp. 171, 172]
      14. The Court in Minor held that the petitioner was in fact a US citizen, and had been such from birth, before the ratification of the 14th Amendment. The reasoning the Court used to reach that holding is actually central to the question of the Supreme Court’s definition of “natural born citizen,” and so we will soon examine that reasoning (and the Court’s definition of “natural born citizen”) in more detail. But before we do, let us first consider another issue: Is what this essay asserts to be a holding in Minor that the petitioner was a US citizen based on the original (unamended) text of the Constitution (and in fact had been such since birth, before the ratification of the 14th Amendment) actually a precedent-setting holding? Or was it, as has been claimed elsewhere, merely dictum, and therefore not binding US Supreme Court precedent? To answer that question, we first refer to the most recent Supreme Court precedent regarding the principles to be used to distinguish between dicta and holdings that establish binding precedents, which can be found in a case decided in 1996 known as Ogilvie Et Al., Minors v. United States, 519 U.S. 79 (1996). Justice Breyer’s majority opinion in that case stated that when the Court discusses a certain “…reason as an ‘independent’ ground in support of our decision”, then that reasoning is not simply dictum: “Although we gave other reasons for our holding in Schleier as well, we explicitly labeled this reason an ‘independent’ ground in support of our decision, id., at 334. We cannot accept petitioners’ claim that it was simply a dictum.” The syllabus of the Minor case lists the following as one of the holdings: 2. In that sense, women, of born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution as since. The fact that that decision is listed in the syllabus of the case is evidence that the Court considered its decision on the citizenship question to be a precedent-setting holding, and not a dictum. The fact that the Minor court used the fact that the petitioner was a US citizen without recourse to the first sentence of the 14th Amendment as one of the independent grounds for their other principal holding regarding the right to vote makes that decision a precedent-setting holding, according the principles established in Ogilvie. Therefore, the citizenship holding in Minor is binding US Supreme Court precedent. Although the second principal holding regarding the right to vote was later mooted by the 19th Amendment, the first principal holding regarding the basis for establishing US citizenship without any reliance on the 14th Amendment still stands as binding Supreme Court precedent which has never been overturned nor obviated by subsequent Amendments to the Constitution. The reason this is so important is because in the Minor decision, the Supreme Court didn’t just decide that a woman was a citizen, it made that decision by providing its official interpretation of the phrase “natural born citizen,” specifically referencing the qualifications to be US President from Article II section 1, and then applying the definition of “natural born citizen” to the petitioner and coming to the conclusion that she satisfies all the conditions to be a “natural born citizen.” Here’s the text: 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. … So there it is. In plain, unambiguous language. The Supreme Court defined “natural born citizens” as “all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens.” It should be noted that, at the time, wives were deemed to automatically acquire the citizenship of their husbands, and out-of-wedlock births were relatively rare. So the issue of children born to parents who didn’t share the same citizenship would have been uncommon. But the Court did not need to worry about that issue in Minor, because the petitioner was born in the US to parents both of whom were citizens. The Court, by finding that the petitioner was a “natural born citizen,” necessarily also established that the petitioner was a citizen, without any need to consider the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. For that reason, the fact that, even before the ratification of the 14th Amendment, there might have been many who would have been citizens but not “natural born citizens,” was not an issue before the Court, and so was not an issue that the Court needed to consider or resolve. Note that the Court states that “natural born citizens” are distinct from “aliens or foreigners.” That’s actually a very important semantic distinction. To see why, it is necessary to understand the 18th-century common law meanings of the words alien and foreigner: According to Black’s Law Dictionary, the word “foreigner” can be used in a municipal context and in an international context. In a municipal context, anyone who is not a member of a community is a “foreigner” in that community. In an international context, anyone owing allegiance to a foreign state or sovereign is a “foreigner”: FOREIGNER. In old English law, this term, when used with reference to a particular city, designated any person who was not an inhabitant of that city. According to later usage, it denotes a person who is not a citizen or subject of the state or country of which mention is made, or any one owing allegiance to a foreign state or sovereign. (Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law, First Edition, 1891, p.506) In 2009, the Berkeley Journal of International Law published a comprehensive historical analysis of the words “foreigner” and “alien”, as used in English and American legal writings during the late eighteenth century. Research by Anderson Berry found that the word “foreigner”, when used in an international context, has a general meaning and a specific meaning. In the general sense, anyone who was born in a foreign country or is a citizen or subject of a foreign country is a “foreigner”. But in the specific sense, “foreigner” is used in contradistinction to “alien”. …the overwhelming majority of sources available to the drafters of the judicial bill [of 1789] define an “alien” as an individual who: 1) is foreign-born, and 2) resides in a sovereign’s territory other than the one where he was born. A “foreigner” is defined as an individual who: 1) is foreign-born, or more specifically, is a foreign citizen or subject, or 2) is a foreign-born individual residing extraterritorially [outside the sovereign’s territory]. (Berry, pp.337-8) “Aliens” are persons who relocate permanently to one country, while they are still citizens or subjects of some other country. Presumably, aliens intend to renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and become naturalized citizens of the country of their new permanent residence. In contrast, “foreigners” are temporary visitors who retain citizenship and permanent residence in their home country and intend to someday return to their home country [32]. In the general sense, the eighteenth-century meaning of “foreigner” was not limited to persons born in a foreign country. If you are a citizen or subject of a foreign country, you are a “foreigner,” regardless of your residence or place of birth. So someone who is a citizen of the United States could be also an alien, if he or she retains or acquires foreign citizenship, and could also be a foreigner if he or she was born outside the United States—even if the person no longer had any foreign citizenship. Note also that a US citizen born in the US could become an alien simply by acquiring foreign citizenship. So the fact that the Supreme Court has defined “natural born citizens” as distinct from “aliens or foreigners” excludes anyone who either has foreign citizenship or was not born in the United States from qualifying as a “natural born citizen.” The Court, in the interest of completeness, does continue to discuss the fact that yet other persons could be citizens who didn’t qualify as “natural born citizens,” but that discussion is dicta, because it was not used as grounds for any of their holdings in the case. But they also explicitly state that such questions have no relevance to the case before them. The issue on which the court was focusing was whether or nor the petitioner was a citizen regardless of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. The definition of “natural born citizen” was relevant solely because a) Article II, section 1 establishes “natural born citizen” as the strictest class of citizenship, and b) anyone who qualifies as a “natural born citizen” necessarily qualifies as a citizen. So the Court immediately continued (starting with the next sentence following the immediately preceding quote from the Minor decision): … Some authorities go further and include as citizens [Note, not as “natural born citizens”] children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts [regarding citizenship, but not regarding “natural born citizenship”], but never as to the first [because anyone who qualifies as a “natural born citizen” is a citizen beyond dispute]. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. 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. So the Supreme Court notes in passing (dicta) that those who satisfy some, but not all, of the qualifications of a “natural born citizen” may nevertheless qualify as citizens. But since the petitioner satisfied the definition of a “natural born citizen,” there was no need to consider whether any lesser standards of citizenship could be used to assign citizenship, with or without recourse to the 14th Amendment. Therefore, they exercised proper judicial restraint and left those questions undecided. Note also that, since the citizenship issue in Minor was decided by defining “natural born citizen” based on the text of Article II, section 1, but the citizenship issue in Wong Kim Ark was decided based on the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, the two decisions do not conflict with each other. Therefore, Wong Kim Ark does not supersede Minor. It is worth noting that, had the petitioner in Wong Kim Ark been a “natural born citizen,” failure to simply use the precedent established in Minor to rule that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen would have been a failure to abide by judicial restraint. The fact that the Wong Kim Ark Court, unlike the Minor</i> Court, decided that it was necessary to decide the citizenship issue using the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, instead of using the “natural born citizen” clause, demonstrates that a person who satisfies the 14th Amendment’s qualifications for citizenship does not necessarily qualify as a “natural born citizen.” The only reason to make a “first instance” interpretation of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment would be because the question could not be settled using any existing precedent, such as the one in Minor. The settled law of the land is that the US President must be a natural born citizen, and that to be a natural born citizen, you must have been born in the United States to parents both of whom were US citizens when you were born. You may disagree with the goal of the Constitutional Convention, and/or with the means they chose to achieve it. But it’s not a technicality, not an anachronism no longer relevant in modern times, nor is it racist. Especially in modern times, it enables persons of any race or ethnic heritage to become President. And it’s what the Constitution requires.
      15. You may also disagree with binding precedent regarding the meaning of “natural born citizen” as established in Minor. But in our system, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it, are the “supreme law of the land.” And if one faction gets to disregard the Constitution and/or the Supreme Court because they disagree, then that sets a precedent where all other factions can do the same.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Obama works to Castrate the Military

When You have an ISLAMIC SYMPATHIZER as Commander in Chief..

this is what you get!!

 

 


The picture is of the five first line US nuclear carriers docked together in one place.
Just like Battleship Row, Pearl Harbor , December 7, 1941.
This picture was taken in February 2014 in Norfolk , Virginia. Obama ordered 5 nuclear carriers into harbor for "routine" (?) inspections. Heads of the Navy were flabbergasted by the directive but had to comply as it was a direct order from their Commander-in-Chief.
The carriers were all pulled out from the MIDDLE EAST and the Afghanistan support role leaving our land forces naked and exposed without the air support needed to carry out their missions.
NORFOLK, VA. (February 8, 2014). This is the first time since WWII that five aircraft carriers were docked together. (These are all nuclear carriers).USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69),
USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77),
USS Enterprise (CVN 65),
USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75),
and USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72)

These are all in port at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., the world's largest naval station.
Knowledgeable sources stated that this breached a long standing military
protocol in the Navy meant to avoid a massive enemy strike on major US forces.

(U..S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Ryan J. Courtade/Released).
This ordering of most of the Navy's capitol ships into one place is unprecedented since Pearl Harbor!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is a list of our military elite who have been dismissed or fired under Obama

Commanding Generals fired:
� General John R. Allen - U.S. Marines Commander International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] (Nov 2012)
� Major General Ralph Baker (2 Star) - U.S. Army Commander of the Combined Joint Task Force Horn in Africa (April 2013)
� Major General Michael Carey (2 Star) - U.S. Air Force Commander of the 20th US Air Force in charge of 9,600 people and 450 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (Oct. 2013)
� Colonel James Christmas - U.S. Marines Commander 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit & Commander Special-Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response Unit (July 2013)
� Major General Peter Fuller U.S. Army Commander in Afghanistan (May 2011)
� Major General Charles M.M. Gurganus - U.S. Marine Corps Regional Commander of SW and I Marine Expeditionary Force in Afghanistan (Oct 2013)
� General Carter F. Ham - U.S. Army African Command (Oct 2013)
� Lieutenant General David H. Huntoon Jr. (3 Star) - U.S. Army 58th Superintendent of the US Military Academy at West Point, NY (2013)
� Command Sergeant Major Don B Jordan - U.S. Army 143rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command (suspended Oct 2013)
� General James Mattis - U.S. Marines Chief of CentCom (May 2013)
� Colonel Daren Margolin - U.S. Marine in charge of Quantico's Security Battalion (Oct 2013)
� General Stanley McChrystal - U.S. Army Commander Afghanistan (June 2010)
� General David D. McKiernan - U.S. Army Commander Afghanistan (2009)
� General David Petraeus - Director of CIA from September 2011 to November 2012 & U.S. Army Commander International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] and
Commander U.S. Forces Afghanistan [USFOR-A] (Nov 2012)
� Brigadier General Bryan Roberts - U.S. Army Commander 2nd Brigade (May 2013)
� Major General Gregg A. Sturdevant - U.S. Marine Corps Director of Strategic Planning and Policy for the U.S. Pacific Command & Commander of Aviation Wing at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan (Sept 2013)
� Colonel Eric Tilley - U.S. Army Commander of Garrison Japan (Nov 2013)
� Brigadier General Bryan Wampler - U.S. Army Commanding General of 143rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command of the 1st Theater Sustainment Command [TSC] (suspended Oct 2013
Commanding Admirals fired:
� Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette - U.S. Navy Commander John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group Three (Oct 2012)
� Vice Admiral Tim Giardina (3 Star, demoted to 2 Star) - U.S. Navy Deputy Commander of the US Strategic Command, Commander of the Submarine Group Trident, Submarine Group 9 and Submarine Group 10 (Oct 2013

Naval Officers fired: (All in 2011)
� Captain David Geisler - U.S. Navy Commander Task Force 53 in Bahrain (Oct 2011)
� Commander Laredo Bell - U.S. Navy Commander Naval Support Activity Saratoga Springs , NY (Aug 2011)
� Lieutenant Commander Kurt - Boenisch-Executive Officer amphibious transport dock Ponce (Apr 2011)
� Commander Nathan Borchers - U.S. Navy Commander destroyer Stout (Mar 2011)
� Commander Robert Brown - U.S. Navy Commander Beachmaster Unit 2 Fort Story , VA (Aug 2011)
� Commander Andrew Crowe - Executive Officer Navy Region Center Singapore (Apr 2011)
� Captain Robert Gamberg - Executive Officer carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower (Jun 2011)
� Captain Rex Guinn - U.S. Navy Commander Navy Legal Service office Japan (Feb 2011)
� Commander Kevin Harms - U.S. Navy Commander Strike Fighter Squadron 137 aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln (Mar 2011)
� Lieutenant Commander Martin Holguin - U.S. Navy Commander mine countermeasures Fearless (Oct 2011)
� Captain Owen Honors - U.S. Navy Commander aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (Jan 2011)
� Captain Donald Hornbeck - U.S. Navy Commander Destroyer Squadron 1 San Diego (Apr 2011)
� Rear Admiral Ron Horton - U.S. Navy Commander Logistics Group, Western Pacific (Mar 2011)
� Commander Etta Jones - U.S. Navy Commander amphibious transport dock Ponce (Apr 2011)
� Commander Ralph Jones - Executive Officer amphibious transport dock Green Bay (Jul 2011)
� Commander Jonathan Jackson - U.S. Navy Commander Electronic Attack Squadron 134, deployed aboard carrier Carl
Vinson (Dec 2011)
� Captain Eric Merrill - U.S. Navy Commander submarine Emory S. Land (Jul 2011)
� Captain William Mosk - U.S. Navy Commander Naval Station Rota, U.S. Navy Commander Naval Activities Spain (Apr 2011)
� Commander Timothy Murphy - U.S. Navy Commander Electronic Attack Squadron 129 at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island , WA (Apr 2011)
� Commander Joseph Nosse - U.S. Navy Commander ballistic-missile submarine Kentucky (Oct 2011)
� Commander Mark Olson - U.S. Navy Commander destroyer The Sullivans FL (Sep 2011)
� Commander John Pethel - Executive Officer amphibious transport dock New York (Dec 2011)
� Commander Karl Pugh - U.S. Navy Commander Electronic Attack Squadron 141 Whidbey Island , WA (Jul 2011)
� Commander Jason Strength - U.S. Navy Commander of Navy Recruiting District Nashville , TN (Jul 2011)
� Captain Greg Thomas - U.S. Navy Commander Norfolk Naval Shipyard (May 2011)
� Commander Mike Varney - U.S. Navy Commander attack submarine Connecticut (Jun 2011)
� Commander Jay Wylie - U.S. Navy Commander destroyer Momsen (Apr 2011)

Naval Officers fired: (All in 2012):
� Commander Alan C. Aber - Executive Officer Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 71 (July 2012)
� Commander Derick Armstrong - U.S. Navy Commander missile destroyer USS The Sullivans (May 2012)
� Commander Martin Arriola - U.S. Navy Commander destroyer USS Porter (Aug 2012)
� Captain Antonio Cardoso - U.S. Navy Commander Training Support Center San Diego (Sep 2012)
� Captain James CoBell - U.S. Navy Commander Oceana Naval Air Station's Fleet Readiness Center Mid-Atlantic (Sep 2012)
� Captain Joseph E. Darlak - U.S. Navy Commander frigate USS Vandegrift (Nov 2012)
� Captain Daniel Dusek - U.S. Navy Commander USS Bonhomme
� Commander David Faught - Executive Officer destroyer Chung-Hoon (Sep 2012)
� Commander Franklin Fernandez - U.S. Navy Commander Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 24 (Aug 2012)
� Commander Ray Hartman - U.S. Navy Commander Amphibious dock-landing ship Fort McHenry (Nov 2012)
� Commander Shelly Hakspiel - Executive Officer Navy Drug Screening Lab San Diego (May 2012)
� Commander Jon Haydel - U.S. Navy Commander USS San Diego (Mar 2012)
� Commander Diego Hernandez - U.S. Navy Commander ballistic-missile submarine USS Wyoming (Feb 2012)
� Commander Lee Hoey - U.S. Navy Commander Drug Screening Laboratory, San Diego (May 2012)
� Commander Ivan Jimenez - Executive Officer frigate Vandegrift (Nov 2012)
� Commander Dennis Klein - U.S. Navy Commander submarine USS Columbia (May 2012)
� Captain Chuck Litchfield - U.S. Navy Commander assault ship USS Essex (Jun 2012)
� Captain Marcia Kim Lyons - U.S. Navy Commander Naval Health Clinic New England (Apr 2012)
� Captain Robert Marin - U.S. Navy Commander cruiser USS Cowpens (Feb 2012)
� Captain Sean McDonell - U.S. Navy Commander Seabee reserve unit Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 14 FL
(Nov 2012)
� Commander Corrine Parker - U.S. Navy Commander Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 1 (Apr 2012)
� Captain Liza Raimondo - U.S. Navy Commander Naval Health Clinic Patuxent River , MD (Jun 2012)
� Captain Jeffrey Riedel - Program manager, Littoral Combat Ship program (Jan 2012)
� Commander Sara Santoski - U.S. Navy Commander Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron 15 (Sep 2012)
� Commander Kyle G. Strudthoff - Executive Officer Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 25 (Sep 2012)
� Commander Sheryl Tannahill - U.S. Navy Commander Navy Operational Support Center [NOSC] Nashville , TN (Sep 2012)
� Commander Michael Ward - U.S. Navy Commander submarine USS Pittsburgh (Aug 2012)
� Captain Michael Wiegand - U.S. Navy Commander Southwest Regional Maintenance Center (Nov 2012)
� Captain Ted Williams - U.S. Navy Commander amphibious command ship Mount Whitney (Nov 2012)
� Commander Jeffrey Wissel - U.S. Navy Commander of Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron 1 (Feb 2012) Naval Officers fired: (All in 2013):
� Lieutenant Commander Lauren Allen - Executive Officer submarine Jacksonville (Feb 2013)
� Reserve Captain Jay Bowman - U.S. Navy Commander Navy Operational Support Center [NOSC] Fort Dix , NJ (Mar 2013)
� Captain William Cogar - U.S. Navy Commander hospital ship Mercy's medical treatment facility (Sept 2013)
� Commander Steve Fuller - Executive Officer frigate Kauffman (Mar 2013)
� Captain Shawn Hendricks - Program Manager for naval enterprise IT networks (June 2013)
� Captain David Hunter - U.S. Navy Commander of Maritime Expeditionary Security Squadron 12 & Coastal Riverine Group 2 (Feb 2013)
� Captain Eric Johnson - U.S. Navy Chief of Military Entrance Processing Command at Great Lakes Naval TrainingCenter, IL (2013)
� Captain Devon Jones - U.S. Navy Commander Naval Air Facility El Centro , CA (July 2013)
� Captain Kevin Knoop - U.S. Navy Commander hospital ship Comfort's medical treatment facility (Aug 2013)
� Lieutenant Commander Jack O'Neill - U.S. Navy Commander Operational Support Center Rock Island , IL (Mar 2013)
� Commander Allen Maestas - Executive Officer Beachmaster Unit 1 (May 2013)
� Commander Luis Molina - U.S. Navy Commander submarine Pasadena (Jan 2013)
� Commander James Pickens - Executive Officer frigate Gary (Feb 2013)
� Lieutenant Commander Mark Rice - U.S. Navy Commander Mine Countermeasures ship Guardian (Apr 2013)
� Commander Michael Runkle - U.S. Navy Commander of Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2 (May 2013)
� Commander Jason Stapleton - Executive Office Patrol Squadron 4 in Hawaii (Mar 2013)
� Commander Nathan Sukols - U.S. Navy Commander submarine Jacksonville (Feb 2013)
� Lieutenant Daniel Tyler - Executive Officer Mine Countermeasures ship Guardian (Apr 2013)
� Commander Edward White - U.S. Navy Commander Strike Fighter Squadron 106 (Aug 2013)
� Captain Jeffrey Winter - U.S. Navy Commander of Carrier Air Wing 17 (Sept 2013)
� Commander Thomas Winter - U.S. Navy Commander submarine Montpelier (Jan 2013)
� Commander Corey Wofford - U.S. Navy Commander frigate Kauffman (Feb 2013)

Since Barack Obama has been in the White House, high ranking military officers have been removed from their positions at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented. Things have gotten so bad that a number of retired generals are publicly speaking out about the 'purge' of the U.S. military that they believe is taking place. As you will see below, dozens of highly decorated military leaders have been dismissed from their positions over the past few years. So why is this happening? What is going on right now is absolutely crazy especially during a time of peace. Is there a deliberate attempt to reshape the military and remove those who don't adhere to the proper 'viewpoints' ? Does someone out there feel a need to get officers that won't cooperate out of the way?
Throughout world history, whatever comes next after a military purge is never good. If this continues, what is the U.S. military going to look like in a few years? Perhaps you are reading this and you think that 'purge' is too strong a word for what is taking place.
Well, just consider the following quotes from some very highly decorated retired officers:
Retired Army Major General Paul Vallely:
The White House protects their own. That's why they stalled on the investigation into fast and furious, Benghazi and Obamacare. He's intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.

Retired Army Major General Patrick Brady:
There is no doubt he (Obama) is intent on emasculating the military and will fire anyone who disagrees with him.

Retired Army Lt. General William G. Jerry Boykin:
Over the past three years, it is unprecedented for the number of four-star generals to be relieved of duty, and not necessarily relieved for cause.
Retired Navy Captain Joseph John: I believe there are more than 137 officers who have been forced out or given bad evaluation reports so they will never make Flag (officer), because of their failure to comply to certain views.
A Pentagon official who asked to remain nameless, because they were not authorized to speak on the matter said: Even young officers, down through the ranks have been told not to talk about Obama or the politics of the White House. They are purging everyone and if you want to keep your job just keep your mouth shut. Now this trend appears to be accelerating.
General Vallely's comment:
Coincidence? Every communist regime on the planet did this as soon as they gained power. I am doing my part by sending this email, I hope you will do the same.

Paul (General Paul) Vallely
This is what we're dealing with now? Who or what has replaced these men?

OBAMA IS DECIMATING OUR MILITARY FROM WITHIN

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

THE CLINTON MAFIA EXPOSED. WHAT THE PRESS WILL NOT TELL YOU!


 THE DEEP DARK SECRETS THE CLINTON AND THE LEFTIST MEDIA WILL NOT EXPOSE!
 


 
 By Shepard Ambellas |

(INTELLIHUB) — A plethora of controversy and allegations of steamy sexcapades, treasonous business scandals, illicit criminal activity, drug trafficking, and even a number of mysterious deaths has surrounded the Clinton family for years.
In fact, these scandals, many of which have been documented, may be some of the best kept secrets hidden from the American people to this day.
According to an underrated documentary film titled “The Clinton Chronicles,” which contains scores of multiple eyewitness testimonies, the Clinton family is “sick” and may be one of the biggest criminal syndicates to have ever occupied the White House, aside from maybe the Obama Administration.
The film points out just how energetic and inspirational former U.S. President and Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton was in his younger years before he started trafficking cocaine and successfully laundering drug money from the illicit operations conducted through the Arkansas Development Finance Authority ( ADFA) and other channels – to the tune of millions of dollars.
Larry Nichols, former Director of Marketing for the ADFA, was brought in by Clinton in 1988 to help with “loan” operations when he stumbled upon what Bill Clinton had previously touted to Nichols as “the best kept secret in Arkansas” at the time.
Nichols spoke a little about his time at the ADFA, about a month into his employment:

“I was literally working, setting, in the middle of Bill Clinton’s political machine. It was where he made payoffs, where he repaid favors for campaign support. I was in an interesting seat and I knew it.”

Nichols said the ADFA was the “epicenter” of the Clinton’s money laundering operations.
Doc DeLaughter, a former Arkansas police investigator, also came forward in the film, detailing how law enforcement had a grand jury case with witnesses built who would confirm that Dan Laster was indeed involved in cocaine trafficking and was one of Clinton’s largest financiers and best friends.
According to Larry Nichols, Dan Laster and the Clinton crew would give “piles and piles of cocaine […] ashtray after ashtray full at parties and they were giving it to young girls,” including a 14-year-old girl who eventually became devirginized after the group had a physician place her on birth control.
Nichols also reported that both Bill and Hillary were complicit in the money laundering scheme, which used a state program, the ADFA, that was ostensibly set up “to provide low-interest bond loans to churches, schools, and colleges”. Moreover, Nichols also reported that Bill Clinton’s signature had to be on every single loan, which would theoretically empirically link the former U.S. president to the alleged scandal.
Additionally, Nichols said that both Webb Hubble and Hillary Clinton, who at the time worked for the Rose Law Firm, had a hand in the illicit operation and even helped get ADFA approved by drafting legislation “Act 1062″ and more.
Interestingly, it turns out Webb Hubble also received the first loan from the ADFA. Webb Hubble and Hillary Clinton also did the “audit and evaluation of the loan application” they were employed at Rose Law Firm, according to Nichols.

“The first loan was $2.85 million, and never was a penny of that paid back.”

Nichols also noted that the “same cast of characters” were smuggling in loads of narcotics into Mena, Arkansas back in 1982 as Bill Clinton’s ego and drug use slowly got out of hand. At one point, according to a reporter, Bill Clinton was admitted into the hospital for “sinus problems” related to his “cocaine abuse and overdose”.
One woman even claimed that she “had sex” and did “cocaine” at toga parties” with Clinton’s crew and other prominent members of government and the police department on a number of occasions when Hillary, Bill’s wife, was “nowhere to be found.”
At one point the criminal activity became so blatant that it was said to be commonly known throughout certain circles exactly what had been taking place, people even ended up dead. Many were awaiting indictments but the Clinton family tentacles were just too long and the path taken by investigators led to nowhere.
As the documentary points out there were two kids who witnessed low-flying aircraft drop narcotics in Mena on several occasions who were later found with their bodies placed on train tracks to be ran over after being killed because “they saw something they shouldn’t have seen,” said the mother of one victim.
Their deaths were ruled “accidental” though the victims bodies showed signs of a stab wound and blunt-force trauma which was later proven to have taken place before the two were hit by the train.
“The fact is we know who killed these kids,” said one man who was involved with the case. Everyone who covered-up the case was promoted by Bill himself.
All in all “a total of six people with information about the boys murders were eventually murdered as well,” the film’s narrator said.
Eventually it was discovered by the former head of Arkansas Drug Task Force, Jean Duffy, that “drug trafficking in Arkansas was linked to government officials in frightening proportions” and a “grand jury” was being built.
Duffy said, “Although there was an abundance of evidence and word kept reaching me from members of the grand jury that they were ready to indict, no indictments came” because the U.S. District Attorney at the time blocked all attempts.”
Out of the ten years the smuggling ring was operating not one single load was busted and not one single arrest was made. To top it all off it’s been said that the operations continued for years to come and yet still nothing has really come of it.

All of this seems to only be a small snippet of what the Clinton family has actually had their hands in. In fact, I exposed another one of Bill’s escapades back in January in an article titled “St. James Island exposed: The elites best kept secret, until now.”

Jet-setters from around the world meet on private island for ‘orgies’ and other sexual acts with young, sometimes underage, women

island
If you can name it–it has likely taken place on the lavish private island off the coast of Puerto Rico which boasts a beautifully landscaped plush luxury estate complete with its own helipad, privy only to certain members of the global elite.
Owned by Jeffery Epstein, a wealthy American financier and convicted sex offender, Little St. James Island appears to be somewhat of a gathering place and is a well desired hangout among key figureheads, actors, and royalty including the likes of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and even Prince Andrew.
However, the people attending the lavish residence are likely not there to discuss “cutting edge scientific and medical research” as the Epstein VI Foundation would like you to believe, but rather to experience full-on sexual encounters with underage girls as young as fourteen.
That’s right, just like a scene out of the Hollywood blockbuster film Eyes Wide Shut, wild parties, prostitution, orgies, and even underage sex all reportedly occur at Little St. James.
Back in 2005 police conducted an 11 month-long undercover investigation into Epstein and his estate after the mother of a 14-year-old girl went to police after suspecting her daughter was paid $300 for at least one sexual act on the island in which she was ordered to strip, leaving on just her panties, while giving Epstein a massage.
Although police found tons of photos of young women on the island and even interviewed eyewitnesses, Epstein was hit with a mere slap on the wrist after “pleading to a single charge of prostitution”. Epstein later served 13-months of his 18-month service in jail.
In 2008, Epstein was hit again, this time with a $50 million civil suit after another victim filed in federal court claiming that she was “recruited” by Epstein to give him a “massage” but was essentially forced into having sexual intercourse with him for $200 which was payable upon completion. The women were coming out of the woodwork.
Now Bill Clinton is back in the press and not for his controversial relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but rather his friendship with Epstein. In fact, flight records indicate that Bill would frequent the island paradise during the 2002 and 2005 era while Hillary, Bill’s wife, was a Senator in New York.
‘I remember asking Jeffrey what’s Bill Clinton doing here kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said well he owes me a favor,’ one unidentified woman said in the lawsuit, which was filed in Palm Beach Circuit Court.
The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular occurrence and that she recalled two young girls from New York who were always seen around the five-house compound but their personal back-stories were never revealed.
“At least one woman on the compound was there unwillingly,” reported the Daily Mail in a recent article. The woman was allegedly forced to have sex with “politicians, businessmen, royalty, academicians” at the retreat. Just one of  “more than 40 women” that have come forth with claims against Epstein, showing the vast scale of the man’s dark operations, which aren’t limited only to Little St. James.
Moreover, Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010 amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close friendship with the Clinton family.
To top it all off blue blood, “Prince Andrew was allegedly one of the house’s visitors. On Friday, the Duke of York was named in a federal lawsuit filed against Epstein, whom the FBI once reportedly linked to 40 young women. Filed in 2008 in the Southern District of Florida, the $50 million lawsuit claimed Epstein had a “sexual preference and obsession for underage minor girls … gained access to primarily economically disadvantaged minor girls in his home and sexually assaulted these girls,” reported the Washington Post.

Keep in mind all of this was going on the whole time and now Hillary is running on the Democratic ticket for the 2016 Presidency!
And on one last note, did you know that over 90 people surrounding the Clinton family have mysteriously ended up dead?

Saturday, December 19, 2015

Warning for Donald Trump and the Conservatives. Electronic Voting Machines are Rigged.

Be aware that even though Donald Trump is getting all the polls going his way, in the end its Voting Machines that tally the votes and its the "Electoral College votes" that count and the Democrats control the VOTING AND COUNTING in most Key swing STATES where Republicans MUST win.

 


UNDERSTAND THAT the Dems start with an almost guaranteed 217 out of 270 for a win Electoral College votes.  The states that are supposed to win it for the Republicans like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida have electronic voting and George Sorros and the Democrat operatives control that vote!



A little bit of information to share. Joseph Stalin said it best a long time ago. It does not matter who votes, it matters who counts those votes!





Question: Are Our National Elections Rigged?  Answer: HELL YES FROM A LONG TIME AGO...

 

My warning to Donald Trump. Do not sit on the happy poll numbers. Its Voting Machines and the Electoral College that will vote for a president based on the vote count in specific states and right now its winner take all in every State. 

Well of course they are. That's a foregone conclusion; not even a fit subject for intelligent debate any more. Oh, it's a little more sophisticated now than in the days of the old Tennessee custom of a Mason jar of moonshine, or the Chicago precinct captain's distribution of "walking around money." But the practice is alive and well, and more pervasive than ever. The evidence is everywhere if we choose to look.

Why do you think there is such a push to eliminate citizenship ID as a requirement to vote? Why do you think there is such a push to grant voting rights to illegal aliens? Why do you think voting machines that leave a paper trail have been eliminated in favor of electronic tabulation, far away from where the votes are actually cast? Why do you think that in the 2012 Presidential Election there were many reports of voter fraud, or intimidation, but no reports of conviction? Remember the 158.85% voter turnout in St. Lucie County Florida, the highest voter turnout in the Country? Of course it contributed heavily to the defeat of Republican Congressional incumbent, Colonel Alan West. And yes Colonel West did ask for a recount, but it was not granted.


Remember the uniformed members of the New Black Panthers, wielding billyclubs and blocking entry to the Philadelphia polling places? Charges were made but subsequently dropped by the Obama Justice Department. And I won't even get into the unchallenged Acorn voter registration frauds.
Of course, there is a pattern here that favors one political party over the other, but these are rather insignificant isolated instances compared to the big picture that is beginning to emerge. I believe it was Joseph Stalin who said, "It's not the people who vote that counts. It's the people who count the votes." That advice has been taken to heart by our current crop of politicians.
Is political tampering new? Of course not. In 1915 mass indictments for voter fraud were handed down in Terre Haute, IN, in which the incumbent sheriff, and the local judge, and the Terre Haute mayor were all sentenced to the pokey. By 1932 Louisiana senator Huey "Kingfish" Long had polished the process to the point that he won unanimously in sixteen New Orleans precincts and tallied identical votes in 28 others. New York's Tammany Hall political machine bought off judges, politicians, ward captains, and controlled Democrat Party nominations for more than a century. What is new is the size and scope of election tampering now made possible with current electronic monitoring and tabulation.

Mass corruption began in earnest in 2002 with the passage of another of those laws with the cutsie little name of the "Help Americans Vote Act," which gave states $3.9 BILLION if they would to do away with balloting that left a paper trail, and substituted what was termed "Direct Recording Electronic" (DRE) voting machines. This took vote counting away from local communities and transferred it to centralized voting centers with political interests in the outcome. (Please remember the aforementioned Joseph Stalin quotation.)


A number of hardware manufacturers got into the act with no electronic experience, but lots of political connections. None worse than Diebold, a producer of wall safes. Their voting machine subsidiary was so dysfunctional that its collection of ballots was easily hacked, remotely or on-site, using any off-the-shelf version of the Microsoft "Access" program. The US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory issued a report that the outcome of an entire election could be arranged by anyone with $26 in parts and an 8th grade science education. Diebold's reputation was so bad that they eventually changed their name to "Premier Election Solutions." But by then the damage was done, so Diebold got out of the election business altogether, selling out to "Election Systems and Software" (ES&S).
This story has so many ins-and-outs, and involves too many interconnecting politicians and entities, I will follow only one. The aforementioned Election Systems and Software (ES&S).

The date: 1996. The location: Nebraska. The event: A senate race. From out of nowhere, a virtually unknown millionaire named Chuck Hagel staged an amazing upset victory over the popular Democrat Governor Ben Nelson, who had been elected in a landslide only two years previously. It was little known at the time, but two weeks before announcing his candidacy, Chuck Hagel had stepped down as CEO of ES&S, the firm that would soon count his own senate votes. He won, of course.
Secretary of Defense - Charles Timothy "Chuck" Hagel
In 2002 Hagel was challenged by Democrat Charlie Natulka. The votes were again electronically tabulated by ES&S, and this time Hagel won 83% of the vote, the largest margin of victory ever recorded in Nebraska history! 

Matulka's request for an investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee was denied. Would not have mattered though since Nebraska law states that recounts must be conducted using the same "vote-counting device" used in the actual election, which, of course, would be the same ES&S machine.
There are many, many, other facets to this voter corruption scandal. I have only scratched the surface with this one, and I am already running out of space, but let me conclude this one part by asking that you please keep in mind that this is the same Chuck Hagel, who after serving two terms in the United States Senate, is now the Obama administration's recently appointed Secretary of Defense.

Who says that crime doesn't pay? Depends on the game, I guess. 

 

When George Sorros and the Obama Cabal took over the Voting Machine ownership and used it for their own wins, they blackmailed Chuck Hagel into silence and then offered a position in their cabal. He accepted the offer he could not refuse!


Still doubting that our elections are rigged, you can view the video below and hear first-hand the sworn testimony of a Mr. Clinton Eugene Curtiss before a select United States Senate Committee, admitting that he was retained by former Florida Congressman Tom Feeney, then Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, to develop a program for the specific purpose of determining the outcome of electronically tabulated elections.

This, and other election-throwing computer programs, became vital to the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. Voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas all reported that a vote for Romney resulted in either a direct or a default vote for Obama. The Market Daily News reported that in 100 Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Ohio precincts, Obama got 99% of the votes and Romney 0. In more than 50 different precincts, Romney received two votes or less. In Philadelphia, 59 precincts recorded not one single vote for Romney. And the list goes on. How is this possible? I will attempt to answer this question as you again remember the Joseph Stalin quotation, "It's not the people who vote that counts. It's the people who count the votes."

How could so many similar events be occurring simultaneously in so many different locations? READ ON...
In 2002, the use of "Direct Recording Electronic" (DRE) voting machines and the elimination of all paper trails of balloting was imposed upon the states through the enactment of the "Help Americans Vote Act." Since the conduct of elections is constitutionally delegated to the sovereign states, the feds came up with a $3.9 BILLION inducement for them to adopt electronic voting. Obviously, there was a lot of money and a lot of political influence involved in concentrating the tabulation of balloting into the hands of a select few. A few with connections in high places.
Enter now from left stage, the Urosevich brothers, Bob and Ted. They respectively controlled Ohio-based Diebold and its theatrical stand-in, Nebraska-based "Election Systems and Software" (ES&S). Diebold eventually sold out to ES&S, thus ending the competition charade. There then emerged another major performer in this off-Broadway production --- Sequoia. Its machines serviced nearly 9 million voters in the 2012 election.

The Diebold-ES&S collaboration was temporarily disrupted by a Justice Department ant-trust indictment, forcing ES&S to sell its Diebold interest to the Dominion Corporation --- the fourth largest name in voter technology. But a month later, the DOJ turned a blind eye as Dominion purchased Sequoia. So now, the cast of players was complete. Only two domestic voting machine manufacturers remained on stage -- ES&S and Dominion

About that time, things got a little dicey in the head offices. Many of the key staffers were accused or convicted of a dizzying array of white-collar crimes, including conspiracy, bribery, bid rigging, computer fraud, tax fraud, stock fraud, mail fraud, extortion, and drug trafficking. 

While their interests were directed elsewhere, newer technologies, including Web-based voting, emerged on the scene in the form of the Spanish-owned firm, Scytl. And to keep things nice and cozy, Scytl named our old friend Bob Urosevich, of Diebold fame, as managing director of its Americas division.
Scytl became the subject of much speculation that the tabulation of domestic balloting had been outsourced by the Obama administration to this Spanish firm, owned by international financier, George Soros. True, Scytl had been contracted to handle some overseas military ballots, but there is apparently no basis to the Obama outsourcing story, or ownership by George Soros. However, Scytl is believed to have provided the Web-based technology to Allpoint Voter Services, used by the North Carolina State Board of Elections and the Obama campaign's GottaRegister.com website to enroll at least 11,000 persons via the internet, in violation of North Carolina state law. 

So, as the curtain falls on what has now become an American Tragedy in voting, the very foundation of our Representative Republic, the right to free and open elections, is now concentrated in the hands of a few politically connected entities; entities that are neither free nor open. WE MUST BE AWARE OF THIS EARLY AND DONALD TRUMP MUST PREPARE HIS BATTLE PLANS TO FIGHT NOW AND NOT LATER!
 

Tampering of elections has progressed from the outmoded inefficiency of buying a single vote through the offering of a Mason jar of bootleg whiskey or the dispensing of a little "walking around money," to the current practice of influencing entire elections. Why? Because, as Joseph Stalin so accurately observed many years ago, "It's not the people who vote that counts. It's the people who count the votes."
Act II showed how control of the entire voting process became possible through the outlawing of the paper ballot, and its inconvenient trail of truth, and replacing it with the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine -- capable of manipulating the votes of many, in order to benefit the few.
Act III now opens to show that sinister plots were already at play in the presidential election of 2012, even before the ballots were cast. Return with us now to those golden days of yesteryear; to the mystical, magical land of Camelot; to the days of the Kennedy administration; to the enactment of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Act. This legislation requires states to accept voter-registration applications for federal (i.e., House, Senate, and Presidential) elections by three principal means:
  • By being registered to vote if applying for, or renewing, a driver's license (hence the name “motor voter”)
  • By being registered to vote upon application at all offices that provide public assistance of any kind -- including Obamacare -- thus appealing to those who are receiving free or subsidized assistance to favor the party in power.
  • By voter-registration applications being accepted on line, or by mail, with no verification of legitimacy.
Obviously, this has vastly expanded the opportunities for ballot fraud.
  • Some eight million people have registered this way, but only about five percent of them usually bother to vote -- leaving a considerable pool of names available to those bent on election mischief.
  • Only seven states require photo IDs at polling booths -- making it easier to vote in someone else's name, either in person or by absentee ballot. Last July 18th, Senate Bill S.1336 was submitted by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), et al., to amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to permit all States to require proof of citizenship for registration to vote in elections for Federal office. However, Senate Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has not brought the bill up for consideration.
  • Motor Voter made it illegal to check the IDs of applicants.
So how has that been working out for you? Motor Voter opened the door to a massive increase in fraudulent registrations. For example, the number of registered voters in Philadelphia increased by 24% from 1995 to 2004, even as the city's population declined by 13%. By 2009, an independent study estimated that America's voter registration rolls included more than 16 million invalid voters.  In St. Louis, the Postal Service says it cannot locate 28% of all registered voters. This provides fertile ground for ACORN and other groups that seek to turn phony registrations into votes.

In July 2010, a newly-formed voter registration group, Houston Votes, investigated a sampling of registered voters, and brought their results to the local paper, the Harris County Registrar. Of 25,640 new registration applications submitted, only 7,193 were actually new voters, the remainder being a deliberate effort to over-burden the processing system with thousands of duplicate and incomplete voter registration applications, in keeping with the Cloward-Piven strategy of governmental overthrow by clogging legitimate government function with overwhelming public demands.
So how is all this possible? Easy. As an example, a call to the State Department of Transportation (DOT) driver's license bureau revealed that although they do require an applicant to submit a Social Security number (SS#), and although the DOT does have access to a Federal database for SS# verification, they seldom do so since the legitimacy of a valid SS# is not of concern to the issuer of drivers' licenses.

If the applicant indicates a willingness to be registered to vote, which the wording of the form encourages the applicant to do, a copy of the applicant's personal information is transmitted directly to the appropriate county Election Commission Office, where the application is processed, and a voter registration card issued.
However, although a valid SS# is required for voter registration, the Election Commission Office has no means of checking its authenticity, but assumes the information provided was verified by the originating government agency.
So the government agency with the capacity to verify the citizen's ID, often doesn't; and the government agency with the need to verify the citizen's ID, can't. The loophole is obvious. This is one reason why the Motor Voter Act, the brainchild of the same NYC Columbia University professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven mentioned previously, has been termed the nation's primary source of voter irregularities; and it's all perfectly legal.
So there you have it. Is this going to be the final act? I would like to think that we  might have a happy ending, but if so, we had better get to work on it. Time is running out, and the final curtain on legitimate elections is fast closing.

So what's the answer? Short of an armed revolution that none of you all in large numbers are willing to join and I have called for for over 7 years, it can only be found at the ballot box, corrupt though it may be.

Our voting for Donald Trump in the elections of  2016 must be so overwhelming that they defy those who would corrupt the outcome. Will it be easy? Certainly not. Can we do it HELL YES..  we must.

THE SILENT CONSERVATIVE MAJORITY MUST GET OFF THEIR ASSES AND MOBILIZE NOW.

Plan to have observers and counters at polling places with a dubious past and track the votes. We must also demand that in the case of outright fraud, this time the Republican Party will stand up and fight and not cower in fear like they did in 2012!

EXPOSED! Hagel and Obama use the same voting machines to Win their elections!

SOCIALISTS MAKE LONG TERM PLANS!!:Obama wins Ohio and PA with margins that boggle the mind. ( 100% in some precincts!)Well...Guess who was in charge of the company that makes the machines that count the votes??? The longer we allow them to use these machines the worse it becomes for the chances for Conservatives to win anywhere there are electronic voting machines.

CHUCK HAGEL:  Now he is getting his payback. So he too can cash in on the Cash Cow that is the federal Government. Look you think these guys make their money from the paycheck they get ?? HELL NO!! Its the Kickbacks and secret deals with bank accounts in Arab Countries outside the reach of the IRS. Same reason Al Gore went with Al Jazeera. Obama and got a secret kick back in QATAR or Dubai or some other Arab country. Back to Hagel:  In 1992, Hagel was CEO of Election Systems & Software, maker of computerized voting machines.

On March 15, 1995, Hagel resigned as CEO but kept millions in stock options and declared that he was going to run for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska. Although he was a virtually unknown candidate; although he ran against a former governor, Ben Nelson, who was hugely popular; and although all the polls prior to the election indicated Ben Nelson would win the election, oddly Hagel won by a landslide with 83% of the vote.
It later turned out that Hagel’s voting machines had been used in virtually all of the precincts.
When Hagel ran for reelection in 2006, his previous landslide of 83% was eclipsed by an even wider margin.
It turns out that Hagel’s former company, Election Systems & Software/Diebold now counts the votes in most elections.  Who has controlling interest in it now ? The Omaha Group with the secret backing of Warren Buffet and the other vote counting machine company is owned in some way by George Soros.
And it turns out Hagel’s voting machines have been embroiled in investigations of hacking and vote-switching that continue to this day.
Now consider this....Barack Obama won the presidential elections the same way Hagel won his senatorial seat? How? By using those machines to defraud the electorate and he was given the position of Secretary of Defense as a kick back for the favor?

Americans should demand to see each and every vote cast for both Chuck Hagel and Barack Obama.
Now. Today, WE ARE BEING DUPED PATRIOTS... TIME FOR A REVOLUTION !!!  BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

FYI: Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control
It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.”

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab’s scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor.

Previous lab demonstrations of e-voting system hacks, such as Princeton’s demonstration of a viral cyber attack on a Diebold touch-screen system relied on cyber attacks to change the results of elections. Such attacks, according to the team at Argonne, require more coding skills and knowledge of the voting system software than is needed for the attack on the Diebold system.

Indeed, the Argonne team’s attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine’s proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive “alien electronics” into the machine.
The Argonne team’s demonstration of the attack on a Diebold Accuvote machine is seen in a short new video shared exclusively with the Brad Blog [posted below]. The team successfully demonstrated a similar attack on a touch-screen system made by Sequoia Voting Systems in 2009.

The new findings of the Vulnerability Assessment Team echo long-ignored concerns about e-voting vulnerabilities issued by other computer scientists and security experts, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (an arm of the Department of Homeland Security), and even a long-ignored presentation by a CIA official given to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
“This is a national security issue,” says Johnston. “It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security.”
The use of touch-screen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems of the type Argonne demonstrated to be vulnerable to manipulation has declined in recent years due to security concerns, and the high cost of programming and maintenance. Nonetheless, the same type of DRE systems, or ones very similar, will once again be used by a significant part of the electorate on Election Day in 2012. 

According to Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for VerifiedVoting.org, a nonpartisan e-voting watchdog group, “About one-third of registered voters live where the only way to vote on Election Day is to use a DRE.”

Almost all voters in states like Georgia, Maryland, Utah and Nevada, and the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas, will vote on DREs on Election Day in 2016, says Flaherty. Voters in major municipalities such as Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh will also line up in next year’s election to use DREs of the type hacked by the Argonne National Lab.

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results. But critics like California Secretary of State Debra Bowen have pointed out that attempts at “security by obscurity” largely ignore the most immediate threat, which comes from election insiders who have regular access to the e-voting systems, as well as those who may gain physical access to machines that were not designed with security safeguards in mind.

“This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks],” says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. “There’s a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed.”
The team’s video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a “bad guy” virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away.
“The cost of the attack that you’re going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities,” explains Warner in the video. “If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that’s another $15. So the total cost would be $26.”
The video shows three different types of attack, each demonstrating how the  intrusion developed by the team allows them to take complete control of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine. They were able to demonstrate a similar attack on a DRE system made by Sequoia Voting Systems as well.
In what Warner describes as “probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering,” the intruder would allow the voter to make his or her selections. But when the voter actually attempts to push the Vote Now button, which records the voter’s final selections to the system’s memory card, he says, “we will simply intercept that attempt … change a few of the votes,” and  the changed votes would then be registered in the machine.
“In order to do this,” Warner explains, “we blank the screen temporarily so that the voter doesn’t see that there’s some revoting going on prior to the final registration of the votes.”
This type of attack is particularly troubling because the manipulation would occur after the voter has approved as “correct” the on-screen summaries of his or her intended selections. Team leader Johnson says that while such an attack could be mounted on Election Day, there would be “a high probability of being detected.” But he explained that the machines could also be tampered with during so-called voting machine “sleepovers” when e-voting systems are kept by poll workers at their houses, often days and weeks prior to the election or at other times when the systems are  unguarded.

“The more realistic way to insert these alien electronics is to do it while the voting machines are waiting in the polling place a week or two prior to the election,” Johnston said. “Often the polling places are in elementary schools or a church basement or some place that doesn’t really have a great deal of security. Or the voting machines can be tampered while they’re in transit to the polling place. Or while they’re in storage in the warehouse between elections,” says Johnston. He notes that the Argonne team had no owner’s manual or circuit diagrams for either the Diebold or Sequoia voting systems they were able to access in these attacks.

The  team members are critical of election security procedures, which rarely, if ever, include physical inspection of the machines, especially their internal electronics. Even if such inspections were carried out, however, the Argonne scientists say the type of attack they’ve developed leaves behind no physical or programming evidence, if properly executed.

“The really nice thing about this attack, the man-in-the-middle, is that there’s no soldering or destruction of the circuit board of any kind,” Warner says. “You can remove this attack and leave no forensic evidence that we’ve been there.”

Gaining access to the inside of the Diebold touch-screen is as simple as picking the rudimentary lock, or using a standard hotel minibar key, as all of the machines use the same easily copied key, available at most office supply stores.
“I think our main message is, let’s not get overly transfixed on the cyber,” team leader Johnston says. Since he believes they “can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine,” he recommends a number of improvements for future e-voting systems.
“The machines themselves need to be designed better, with the idea that people may be trying to get into them,” he says. ” If you’re just thinking about the fact that someone can try to get in, you can design the seals better, for example.”

“Don’t do things like use a standard blank key for every machine,” he warns. “Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock. You don’t have to have state of the art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in.”


So i am warning the Conservatives and the Trump Team.  

Do not sit on the happy poll numbers. Its Voting Machines and the Electoral College that will vote for a president based on the vote count in specific states and right now its winner take all in every State. 

So if the playing field is level Trump will win. If he does.... My Advise to his new Administration. 

Do not rest on the laurels of victory. Use the 4 years you will have in office to make it a mission to remove the Electronic Voting Machines from the counting of votes in Federal elections. You cannot change how States vote but you can for Federal Selections. If you don't I fear that the cheating using electronic voting machines will become worse and worse with every election cycle and the Democrats and the Obama backers will perfect "THE ART OF THE CHEATING" and elections will always be won by the Socialist Democrats gunning to steal our country. its their long game as I said.


Donald Trump shows how to deal with Snooty Leftist Busy Bodies. He knows how to get things done! He will do it for America too!


   THE ART OF DEALING WITH A LEFTIST BUREAUCRACY. SOMETHING A CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENT WILL HAVE TO DO!!

Donald Trump puts SNOOTY Palm Beach Busy Body ordinance Police on defense.


  Donald Trump smacked Snooty Palm Beach Bullshit ordinances by putting up an outsized U.S. flag and pole. When they sued him he attacked back and then settled by DONATING THE FINE MONEY to veterans' organizations. Thats a Patriotic act. It did not go to some lefty organization right ??



When Trump purchased and rebuilt Mar-A-Lago the Grand mansion and estate in Palm beach, Florida he got into a dispute with the city, who are well known for being snooty and liberal and leftist and "strict" on zoning regulations. They are mostly against Christmas and Nativity scenes etc too! Most definitely against Patriotic Symbols.

Trump put up a 50 foot flag pole even though 30 foot is the maximum allowed.

So the city imposed a 1,000 dollar fine per day. While Trump and the city argued back and forth, finally when the fine had reached 120,000 dollars Trump proposed a solution. He would donate that amount to veterans organizations, would move the flag and pole to a different location in front of the mansion and would only use a 30 foot flag pole. The city agreed. So Trump brought in the company who does Golf course construction had them build a 20 foot high grassy hill and put a 30 foot flag pole on top of it.
See to most Regular Americans Donald Trump stands for the no-nonsense take-charge type who has the power and influence to thwart those who would insist on allowing the enforcement of petty rules or "political correctness" impede the progress of business and in keeping  with  "Making America Great Again"

The Establishment on the left and right fear that he has the ability to pull together the opposite of the Obama Leftist/Islamic/Progressive Brain Trust that is destroying America as we know it.

Trump is for the America and its values that made it the GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. He has the money and the people around him to get it done In Country and abroad.

Calling him a foolish rich business man is STUPID on its face. He is not a one trick pony like Bill Gates & Mircosoft or the Digital thief Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, or Existing Company Raider/Buyer Warren Buffet. He has built his empire one real tangible brick and mortar asset at a time. 

The basic facts are these: In 1985, Donald Trump paid $10 million for Mar-A-Lago, the name of the Marjorie Merriweather Post estate in Palm Beach, Florida. On 3 October 2006, Trump had an outsized Patriotic American flag installed on an 80-foot-high flagpole at Mar-a-Lago, in violation of local zoning regulations that established a maximum size of 4x6 feet for flags and a maximum height of 42 feet for flagpoles.

Trump put up his regulation-violating flag and pole without obtaining either a building permit permit or a variance from local authorities, and the Palm Beach town council with help from the ACLU and other lefty groups who demanded it...fined him $1,250 for every day the flag remained in place 


 Trump in turn filed a $25 million lawsuit against Palm Beach, claiming that the town was selectively enforcing its rules (by not fining other properties that were flying flags in violation of town ordinances) and infringing his constitutional right to free speech.
Six months later the two sides finally reached an agreement during "secret, court-ordered negotiations," with the town agreeing to waive all fines against Trump for his code-busting flagpole and to "review its ordinances and codes dealing with flagpoles and flags during the next zoning season," and Trump agreeing to drop his lawsuit, lower the height of his flagpole from 80 to 70 feet, obtain a permit for the pole and move it farther inland, and donate $100,000 "to charities dealing with Iraq War Veterans, [the] American Flag, or the local VA hospital." 




Trump's lawsuit maintained that he couldn't bring his flag and pole into compliance with regulations because "A smaller flag and pole on Mar-A-Lago's property would be lost given its massive size, look silly instead of make a statement


 In his statements to the news media at the time he texposed the issue as being one of him standing up to anti-American, anti-flag, anti-patriotic forces. As time has gone by we all can see that these forces have gotten bolder and even more aggressive. Mosques can wail their call to prayer in neighborhoods but. A silent American Flag waving in the breeze is not acceptable to these lefty busy bodies across the country!


"Well, I put up an American flag on the front of the Mar-a-Lago Club, which is a great house, probably the greatest house in America that I turned into a private club very successfully in Palm Beach, Florida. And the flag is very proudly waving, and the town wants me to take it down. Because they say I put it up without a permit and, frankly, had I gone to the town for a permit they wouldn't have given it to me, probably. But more importantly, I say that you don't need a permit to put up the American flag.

I don't think they know what their beef is. I'm not sure they really understand what their beef is. They don't talk about the flag. They only talk about the flagpole because they're afraid politically to mention the word flag and the American flag and take it down.

And I'll say it's probably one of the most popular things I've ever done because we've had hundreds and hundreds of letters and thousands of requests for everything supporting the flag. Everybody wants it. Everybody wants it up. But the town wants me to take down the American flag, and I told them I'm not doing that.

This is probably the wealthiest town — it is the wealthiest town in America, in the United States, and frankly it's a town that wants me to take down a flag and they shouldn't be asking for that.

So it's been a very, very problematic situation. I'll be responding to them very shortly. And you know, I'm a big — I'm a very patriotic guy. I'm very proud of the country, and I don't want to take down the American flag. And I don't believe you need permits to put up the American flag."


In America today people who do not put up money seem to have power they should not. Its the Socialist way to prevent a successful person from doing what he/she wants with the property they paid money and bought.

They will use ordinances and laws and rules made by those who have no money in the game. The mealy mouth bureaucrats.

The Palm Beach Town Council shot down all of Trump’s proposed changes to the property, even when he reduced his mini-mansion plans from 10 to seven. Instead, they encouraged him to find a buyer if he couldn’t afford to keep the estate intact. A buyer who would probably toe the line.

When the town’s "Politburo"  refused to consider his proposals, Trump sued.

The lawsuit against the Town of Palm Beach, which would prove to be not his last, would eventually cause his snooty lefty neighbors to lawyer up against him too.

This is how smart Trump and his team are! This is why he would negotiate great deals for America.

After his Mansions of Mar-a-Lago plan was rejected, Trump found another way to salvage his stake in Mar-a-Lago. He offered to drop his lawsuit if council members allowed him to convert his estate into a new private club on the island. The Mar-a-Lago Club.

While Trump was playing defense against the town’s constant attempt to rein him in, he went on the attack against the county and its airport. Airlines routinely used a flight path in and out of Palm Beach International Airport in nearby West Palm Beach that brought the planes directly over Mar-a-Lago.

This didn’t sit well with Trump, who argued that the noise and fumes were ruining his investment, and that the decent thing for the county to do was to move the airport farther west. Trump had been arguing this for years, to no avail, while calling the airport director Bruce Pelly, among other things, a “moron” and “the worst airport director in the country.” ( Yup he knows how to get under the skin of bureaucrats!! )


It turned out to be a useful gripe for Trump, one that he could turn into a new business opportunity, because just south of the airport was 214 acres of vacant scrub land owned by Palm Beach County, land he wanted. So Trump sued the county for $75 million over the airport noise, then negotiated to drop that lawsuit in exchange for the county giving him a

75-year lease on the nearby property for $438,000 a year.
That land became the Trump International Golf Club, a $40 million, 18-hole, Jim Fazio-designed course that imported nearly 2 million cubic yards of dirt to transform the flat scrub land into hilly terrain with waterfalls, rock formations, and a clubhouse four stories above sea level.
Amazing how the left will allow Islamic Minarets and Mosques in places but have an aversion to OUR FLAG! Hell the left even was OK with a MOSQUE at ground Zero...but was against a beam that looked like a cross to be placed in the 9-11 memorial!

This wasn't the only instance of flagpole bickering in Trump's past. He also reached a (non-court) settlement with local government in 2014 after having raised Old Glory on a 70-foot flagpole at the Trump National Golf Course in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, 


Signaling a possible resolution to Donald Trump’s running flag feud, the California Coastal Commission said the mogul’s oversized Old Glory can stay — as long as Rancho Palos Verdes revises its municipal height rules.

While not the victory city officials had hoped for, the decision allows for a way forward to legally allow the 70-foot-tall flagpole, which was hoisted without a "permit" nearly 10 years ago. Permit to fly THE US Flag is required but no permit is needed for illegals to sneak across the border!
Having gained the support of much of the coastal city — as well as two City Councils through the years — the flag now likely can get formal state approval provided the city amends its Local Coastal Program that currently limits structure heights to 26 feet.
“I’m disappointed at the Trump Organization for putting up that flag without adhering to the rule of law,” said Coastal Commissioner Wendy Mitchell.
Commission staff members had recommended that the flagpole be reduced in height to 26 feet and moved closer to the clubhouse on the 240-acre Trump National Golf Course property.

I posted this because I want people to see that Donald Trump is a guy who knows how to use the Laws and knows how to tweak them. Yes Obama does the same thing. Now its time to have someone on our side NOT AFRAID TO TAKE THE BLOATED LEFTIST BUREAUCRACY HEAD ON AND WIN.

HE has the BRAIN TRUST ON HIS TEAM TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN!