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When he's willing to engage in a fair debate without hiding behind the edit button, then we can debate the merits of his pseduo-legal blather.

The Constitution, Article II, Section 1, reads:

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.

The Supreme Court has obviously never specifically ruled on the meaning of “natural born Citizen” in a case involving presidential qualifications, because such a controversy has never been before the Court. This is not likely to change, since most citizens do not have the standing to bring the question before the court. So, at best, this is little more than a parlor game with historical interest, but it will not affect the fate of the current President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama II.

We start from the recognition that the Court has referred to the “natural born Citizen” clause in dicta on a number of occasions in cases involving citizenship (see below). That alone is suggestive of the fact that the Court views the relationship between citizenship laws and presidential eligibility as interrelated concepts.

The Court has acknowledged, as have we all, that the Constitution is silent on the meaning of “natural born Citizen.” “Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that,” noted the Court in Minor v. Happersett in 1875. So what did the Founding Fathers understand the term to mean, and how did courts in successive years understand it?

Birthers frequently claim that the Founding Fathers were very familiar with de Vattel's 1758 treaties, The Law of Nations. This is certainly true. Toward this end, they point to the following paragraph as guiding the Founders on the meaning of “natural born Citizen”:

§ 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.

There's a fundamental flaw with the theory that this understanding a “natural born citizen” (which was to de Vattel synonymous with citizenship by birth) guided the Founders on the meaning of “natural born Citizen”: at the time of the Constiutional Convention in 1787, de Vattel's work made no mention of “natural born citizen.” At that time, English translations of The Law of Nations used the original, untranslated French term indigenes, not “natural born citizens.” The latter term did not enter into English language translations until roughly 1797, a decade after the term first appeared in the Constitution.

But if de Vattel didn't influence the term, what did? As it turns out, the term “natural born subject” was part of English common law dating as far back as the fifteenth century. This term was understood to mean that all persons born in the monarch's realm (i.e. on English soil), were English subjects, with minor exceptions that we still recognize today, including children of foreign diplomats born in the realm.

Birthers may point to the stray claim here and there that the United States did not adopt English common law, but the evidence from everyday courts from the very start of the republic is overwhelmingly at odds with this assertion.

For example, even before the adoption of the Constution, the term “natural born citizen” was already in use in the United States. In 1786, the Massachusetts legislature naturalized a Michael Walsh, giving him all the rights of a “natural born citizen”:

An Act for Naturalizing Michael Walsh

February 7, 1786.

After the Constitution was adopted, courts recognized the common law heritage of the term “natural born citizen.” Here's an excerpt from the syllabus of an 1824 U.S. Supreme Court decision:

The statute of 11 and 1 Wm. III. c. 6., which is in force in Maryland, removes the common law disability of claiming title through an alien ancestor, but does not apply to a living alien ancestor, so as to create a title by heirship, where none would exist by the common law, if the ancestor were a natural born subject or citizen.

M'Creery's Lessee v. Somerville, 22 U.S. 354 (1824).

Or how about this passage from the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1829:

The country where one is born, how accidental soever his birth in that place may have been, and although his parents belong to another country, is that to which he owes allegiance. Hence the expression natural born subject or citizen, & all the relations thereout growing. To this there are but few exceptions, and they are mostly introduced by statutes and treaty regulations, such as the children of seamen and ambassadors born abroad, and the like.

Leake v. Gilchrist, 13 N.C. 73 (1829).

In fact, the New York Court of Chancery spoke at great length about whether the use of the term “natural born Citizen” in the Constitution served to break the United States from common law tradition with regard to citizenship:

The term citizen, was used in the constitution as a word, the meaning of which was already established and well understood. And the constitution itself contains a direct recognition of the subsisting common law principle, in the section which defines the qualification of the President. “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,” &c. The only standard which the existed, of a natural born citizen, was the rule of the common law, and no different standard has been adopted since. Suppose a person should be elected President who was native born, but of alien parents, could there be any reasonable doubt that he was eligible under the constitution? I think not. The position would be decisive in his favor that by the rule of common law, in force when the constitution was adopted, he is a citizen.

Moreover, the absence of any avowal or expression in the constitution, of a design to affect the existing law of the country on this subject, is conclusive against the existence of such design. It is inconceivable that the representatives of the thirteen sovereign states, assembled in convention for the purpose of framing a confederation and union for national purposes, should have intended to subvert the long established rule of law governing their constituents on a question of such great moment to them all, without solemnly providing for the change in the constitution; still more that they should have come to that conclusion without even once declaring their object.

Lynch v. Clarke, (N.Y. Chancery 1844) 1 Sandf. Ch. 583.

In fact, early courts had little trouble interpreting the meaning of “natural born Citizen” in the Constitution:

The 5th section of the 2d article provides, “that no person except a natural born citizen,” shall become president. A plain acknowledgment, that a man may become a citizen by birth, and that he may be born such.

Amy v. Smith, 11 Ky. 326, 340 (Ky. 1822).

It is very clear that these courts viewed natural born citizenship as the same as “citizenship by birth,” and not some subset thereof. They saw “natural born citizen” and naturalized citizen as mutually exclusive categories of citizens. And if a person fell into neither of these categories, he was an alien/foreigner:

In regard to the etymology, alien is derived directly from the Latin alienus, and has in common parlance the same signification — foreigner is a modern word, derived either mediately or directly from fores and origo; whenever properly used, it refers to the origin, and not to any present relation. One of the authorities cited, employs the expression, “a foreigner who has been naturalized, and has become a denizen.” It would be a solecism in language, to use the phrase “an alien who has been naturalized;” to be equalled only by the language employed in one of the Maryland statutes which has been referred to, which in express terms, calls foreigners who have been naturalized, “natural born subjects.”

Spratt v. Spratt, 26 U.S. 343 (1828).

There is abundant evidence to demonstrate that the founders adopted the common law meaning of “natural born Citizen,” and that the Fourteenth Amendment merely restated this law. The Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark in 1898 expounded at great length on the fact that the United States retained the common law, jus soli roots of “natural born citizen.” Although the dissent cited to de Vattel in opposition to this position, the best it could argue was that the United States should adopt jus sanguinis, it never claimed that this had been the law of the land in the United States.

Over the past century, the Supreme Court has evidently had little difficulty understanding “natural born citizen” as it is used in terms of presidential qualifications to mean nothing more than the opposite of naturalized citizen, and nothing more:

The distinction between citizenship by birth and citizenship by naturalization is clearly marked in the provisions of the Constitution, by which “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;” and “the Congress shall have power to establish an uniform rule of naturalization.” Constitution, art. 2, sect. 1; art. 1, sect. 8.

Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, 101 (1884).

We start from the premise that the rights of citizenship of the native born and of the naturalized person are of the same dignity and are coextensive. The only difference drawn by the Constitution is that only the “natural born” citizen is eligible to be President. Art. II, § 1.

Schneider v. Rusk, 377 U.S. 163, 165 (1964).

Apart from the passing reference to the “natural born Citizen” in the Constitution's Art. II, § 1, cl. 5, we have, in the Civil Rights Act of April 9, 1866, 14 Stat. 27, the first statutory recognition and concomitant formal definition of the citizenship status of the native born: “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States . . . .” This, of course, found immediate expression in the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, with expansion to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . .”

Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S. 815, 829 (1971).

There's simply no doubt on the question of where the Supreme Court would land if it had to decide head-on whether a person born on U.S. soil is a “natural born Citizen.”

Now, where's the research suggesting otherwise? The ball is in your court…

1. Orly Taitz is a real estate agent who got her degree in dentistry from a foreign country, and a law degree from an online correspondence school that is unaccredited (California is the only state in the country that lets unaccredited graduates pass the bar exam). She has never won a single case in her legal career. She has never argued a single case before any appellate court in the nation. She has no background in constitutional law although her entire argument is a constitutional one. Every single birther lawsuit she has filed has been tossed out of court.

2. Alan Keyes is on record as saying he believes the President of the United States is a Nazi. I'm sure the fact that he was the Republican candidate for Senate against Barack Obama in 2004, and was defeated by Obama by the largest margin of victory by any statewide candidate in the history of the state of Illinois, have nothing to do with his neutral, objective assessment of the issues.

3. Jerome Corsi is the guy who swift-boated John Kerry. He hates anyone who is a Democrat and makes millions of dollars by writing books talking about that. How this qualifies him as an “expert” is beyond me.

4. Janet Porter is a talk show host. Talk show hosts are not “experts”. Except, of course, in the crazy world of the people we all know to be: Birthers.