The strength of your arguments is that the Founders before and after the writing of the Constitution frequently used the the phrase “natural-born citizen” as intended by common law and that they left no paper trail indicating they intended otherwise. There are some other weaknesses in your arguments, but I won’t go into those because it will create too much long, boring, and frustrating argumentation.

My concern is that this needs to be argued by two knowledgeable people. If you only hear one knowledgeable person arguing a case, it would often appear that the one person is correct. When a second knowledgeable person arguing against, suddenly more information and more applied principles come into play.

If I only read the “pro” arguments on global warming given by knowledgeable persons I would believe that global warming is really happening. I read both the “pro” and “con” arguments given by knowledgeable persons on both sides, so I know global warming is a fraud. But it takes argumentation by knowledgeable people on both sides to understand the issue. There is always some truth on both sides.

If two unknowledgeable people arguing a case it turns into a blog commentary argument. I don’t want to go there. If there is a practical legal and historical case it will be argued by persons having a vested interest.

Being practical, I cannot believe that Barack Obama is loyal to the America I live in. He has been acting as a usurper since day one. The only country Barack Obama is loyal to is the America he wants to create.

To see what the country that he wants to create looks like, we need look no further than his czars. They are a bunch of leftist fringe kooks. No question there. They represent his style of government, and they represent his ideal of America.

I ask myself: Is Obama the person the Founders wanted this country to have as President, or is Obama the person they wanted keep from being President. Since he is obviously working so actively to destroy their great work, I can only conclude that wanted to keep him from being President. The Constitution must be interpreted in that light. To not do so is to accept its demise.

Obama needed to release his personal documentation; his birth certificate, passports, school records, etc. He needed to do so for the public to vet him.

The public, not civil servants, need to vet the President and test his loyalty to prevent political intrigues. That was certainly the intent of the Founders as Hamilton’s commentaries in the Federalist papers show.

He not only did not release his documentation, he went out of his way to hide it from us, and that fact alone damns Obama.

We cannot have a President who goes out of his way to intentionally hide the documentation that may show disloyalty. The production of the documentation is a customary expectation of Presidents. For this cause alone, he should be impeached immediately.

Vattel discussed what a natural-born citizen is as a matter of Natural Law, which is to say, as a matter of natural principles. As a matter of principle, the highest degree of loyalty is required of the President by necessity, not legalisms. Barack Obama, the Half-Blood Prince, is the proof of this. The President needs to be an American by birth, and by culture. Obama is living proof that the President must be born on US soil, and be the child of two American citizens.

Better still, he or she should be raised in the United States of America. Like Sarah Palin was.

[Update October 19, 2009:
I looked up the quote from Madison. The full text in context can be found here. The full quote is:
"It is an established maxim, that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth, however, derives its force sometimes from place, and sometimes from parentage; but, in general, place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States."

The word "allegiance" in this case means what country a person is a legal citizen of. It is not about loyalty to the nation. Loyalty to the country was the primary concern of the Founders when considering the eligibility of the President because of the high sensitivity of the office. So Madison's writing is not relevant.

However, note that Madison acknowledged that citizenship sometimes derives from place and sometimes from parentage. This is another example that makes it clear that the Founders were well aware of the Natural Law aspects citizenship.

Common law citizenship is about allegiance. Natural law citizenship is about loyalty. (Natural law citizenship is about the inheritance of culture. Being part of a culture naturally induces loyalty.) The Founders were primarily concerned with the loyalty of the President, so Natural Law citizenship must be the test of eligibility of the President. That is just common sense.

Based on the criteria of loyalty, Obama is not eligible to be President. His disloyalty is reflected in his refusal to reveal his public documents such as his birth certificate, passports, etc., and his various un-American acts since taking office.
]

[This discussion is closed from further comment.]

So, why didn’t they say it? When they wrote Natural Born, the law at the time held that Natural Born meant born in the country, and the law at the time said that if you were born in the country you legally had to be loyal to the country. (We still have that because if a person who is born in the USA fights against the USA, we consider her or him a traitor even if they have dual nationality.)

To be sure, being born in the USA does not really may you loyal. It only makes you required to be loyal legally. But that applies to citizens who have three generations of Americans as it does to those who have no parents who were Americans.

That being the case, who decides whether a person is loyal or not? Well, it cannot be the framers of the Constitution, they are not with us anymore. It has to be us, the voters in each election.

If the writers of the Constitution did not specifically forbid a child whose parents were foreigners from being president, that does not mean that we have to vote for that person. If we think she or he would be disloyal, we can vote against, but since the Constitution does not say, at least we have a choice.

Re: “The qualification must be understood and interpreted in light of the concerns voiced by Hamilton.”

Yes, he was talking about foreign governments. He certainly did not mention American-born children of foreigners.

Like the others who were leaders of the time, Hamilton used the words Natural Born to mean born in the country. Here is how Hamilton used Natural Born: “The position is founded on that clause of the British act of navigation, which forbids any but a natural-born or naturalized subject to exercise the occupation of a merchant or factor, in any of the British dominions in Asia, Africa, and America.” (
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php&title=1382&search=%22natural+born%22&layout=html#a_1602437)

As you can see, there are two kinds of subject, natural born and naturalized. Natural born means citizenship at birth. Naturalized means a foreigner getting citizenship after birth. Natural Born does not mean two citizen parents.

In 1803, shortly after the Constitution was adopted, St. George Tucker wrote the first extended commentary on the Constitution after its adoption, and he said:

“Prior to the adoption of the constitution, the people inhabiting the different states might be divided into two classes: natural born citizens, or those born within the state, and aliens, or such as were born out of it. The first, by the birth-right, became entitled to all the privileges of citizens; the second, were entitled to none, but such as were held out and given by the laws of the respective states prior to their emigration.”

He is using the term Natural Born to mean born in a state. There were only to categories, natural born, which he said meant born within the state, and aliens, who were born out of it. The meaning of Natural Born is clearly that of the common law, meaning born in a state.

Re the legal obligation to be loyal if you are born in the USA. Here is what Madison said in a speech before the House of Representatives in May of 1789, James Madison said:

It is an established maxim, that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth, however, derives its force sometimes from place, and sometimes from parentage; but, in general, place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.”

In other words, the writers of the Constitution believed that the place of birth is the most certain criterion of allegiance.

This fits nicely with the fact that they did not say that the children of foreigners were not eligible. They did not say that the children of foreigners were not eligible because they did not believe that the children of foreigners, if born in the USA, would necessarily be any more disloyal than the children of citizens born in the USA.

Of course, if we, the voters, think that the children of foreigners are more likely to be disloyal than the children of citizens, we can vote that way, but the framers of the Constitution did not want to make that choice for us.

What were the Founders concerned with, the piece of dirt the candidate was born over, or the loyalty of the candidate?

The Founders created the Electoral College to ensure that the President was as free as possible from political intrigues. In Federalist 68 Hamilton writes:

“It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.

“It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”

And he continues:
“It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.”

And more:
“Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

These comments from Hamilton, who was quite familiar with Vattel, show beyond any reasonable doubt that the greatest concern of the Founders was to have a President as loyal and as free of political intrigues as possible, especially that the President be as free as possible from foreign “cabal, intrigue, and corruption.”

The only Presidential qualification that directly addresses these concerns of loyalty and is the qualification that the President be a natural-born citizen. The qualification must be understood and interpreted in light of the concerns voiced by Hamilton. What else in the Constitution makes loyalty a prerequisite of being President? The oath of office can be said falsely, but one cannot change the fact of one’s cultural heritage.

All they had to say was “Two parents who are citizens,” but they didn’t. Or they could have said: “Natural Born as defined by Vattel,” but they didn’t.

Or, they could have said “we don’t mean the common law, we mean Natural Law,” but they didn’t.

The writers of the Constitution were not fools. They knew that if they used a term that was used in Common Law, lawyers and courts would interpret it the way it was defined in Common Law, which as you say has been the case.

But, not problem, they really did mean to follow the Common Law, or they would have said they didn’t. And, by the way, the only Natural Law philosopher (and there were many) to have said that a Natural citizen (“Natural Born” was not used in a Vattel translation until ten years after the Constitution was adopted) required two citizen parents was Vattel.

Ohe problem with making Natural Law theory really the law is that the natural law philosophers disagree. Another is that some of the things they recommend are not necessarily good. For example, Vattel recommended that countries establish their own state religions, and if people did not want to worship that way, they they could leave the country.

The Constitution bars foreigners from being president, and it bars naturalized citizens from being president, but it does not bar the children of foreigners from being president.

Alledgedly dedicated to “transparency”, Obama also signed an executive order on his first day in office, protecting his personal and professional records from public view. What kind of game are he and the Democrat National Committee playing with the voting public in our country?

Alleged birth information placed online by his campaign committee and the DNC is now suspect because FactCheck.org pulled back from its finding because of Obama’s “dual Citizenship” -not yet clarified because Obama will not release his records. An unverified Kenyan COLB (long form original copy) has surfaced. Obama is holding the truth hostage – and his country as well.

Ambiguous and contradictory certification letters to the Secretaries of the fifty states prior to the election both affirming and not affirming his Constitutional qualifications as a “natural born citizen” is another reason for him to release all records.

It is somewhat unusual that a Professor of Constitutinal Law would not be aware of possible contradictions in sworn statements to the National Convention by the candidate, and then again by Nancy Pelosi, Chair of the National Convention. The double entendre implicit in these Certification Letters, and the failure to provide certifications in Democratic Primary Elections, goes beyond dissembling, and has the appearance of deliberate equivocation.

It is past time for Governor Lingle, of Hawaii, to place a person on trust and competence as administrator of the DOH Public Information Division.

Jaxfax