Echoing The Washington Post's Greg Sargent, Steve Benen over at The Maddow Blog notes that when Hilary Rosen makes inartful comments about Ann Romney, it sets off a week-long feeding frenzy, even though Rosen has no formal tie to the Obama campaign. And yet when Donald Trump—an official surrogate for Mitt Romney who's hosting a Las Vegas fundraiser for him next week—openly embraces birtherism yet again, no one cares.
But it's actually even worse than Steve says. So confident is the Romney campaign that it won't be held to account for Trump's extremism that it's explicitly assuring the world the two men are still tight.
"He'll stand up next to Donald Trump and he'll talk about why he wants to be president," campaign spokesman Kevin Madden declared on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports. "Any time the subject goes off of that, where it's something where...Governor Romney would disagree, he's going to make that very clear. Just as he has in the past, and he'll do in the present, and he'll do in the future."
Romney has said in the past that he disagree with Trump. But it's still considered fine for the two to campaign together. And apparently, the Romney camp doesn't expect that to change any time soon.
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"No person except a natural born Citizen... shall be eligible
to the Office of President;" U.S. Constitution, Art. ii, § 1, ¶ 5.
There is nothing vague about the requirement that no one is
eligible to be POTUS (or VPOTUS) except a natural born Citizen.
The only vagueness is between the ears of those who attempt
to muddy the waters, blow smoke, and throw sand in the air.
Chief Justice Waite wrote in _Minor v. Happersett— (1875), 100
U.S. 1 (or 88 U.S. 162), the clear U.S. Supreme Court interpretation
of "natural born Citizen," in Art. ii, § 1, ¶ 5, of the U.S. Constitution:
"...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." [ED.: emphasis added]
In the majority opinion for _U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark— (169 U.S 679-680),
Associate Justice Gray quoted the above definition from _Minor v.
Happersett— as authoritative on the subject of "natural born Citizen."
At 169 U.S. 693, Justice Gray quoted a Mr. Binney, from his paper
printed in "Alienigenae of the United States, 2nd ed.," in which he
distinguished between a [mere] citizen, born in the country but
not born of a citizen, and a natural born citizen, born of citizens.
In the rest of his lengthy opinion, Justice Gray appears to have
been attempting to bury the U.S. Supreme Court precedent from
_Minor v. Happersett— under a pile of British court decisions and
Common Law quotations, none of which had any bearing or
authority of precedence upon this U.S. Supreme Court case.
But after taking an extended vacation from his work as a U.S.
Supreme Court Associate Justice to present his judicial review
of British court decisions and the Common Law for fifteen
sleep-inducing pages of quotations, Justice Gray finally got
around to quoting _Minor v. Happersett— as THE relevant U.S.
Supreme Court precedent about the natural born Citizen clause.
In addition to _Wong Kim Ark_, U.S. Supreme Court decisions in
_The Venus_, _Shanks v. DuPont_, and _Perkins v. Elg— also agree
with the definition of natural born Citizen established in _Minor_:
one born in the country
of parents who are citizens.
As well they should, since that was the common understanding
of "natural born" as far back as Plato and Herodotus in the 4th
and 5th centuries B.C..
The primary exception was during the mid-to-late-1700's, when the
British Crown felt the need to include as (taxable) British subjects
anyone born on British soil, that is, anywhere in the British Empire,
even those born of foreigners. The U.S. Navy grew weary of having
U.S. sailors conscripted (or kidnapped) on the high seas by the
Royal Navy, on the pretext that those sailors had been born in
colonies of the British Empire, prior to the American Revolution.
The Treaty of Paris in 1783 expressly forbade that, but we had
to fight the War of 1812 to square away the Crown on it.
___________________________________________
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Content transmitted to the Site." - Newsvine User Agreement.
I posted the above in the "Barack Obama's citizenship questioned"
topic at Americans for Legal Immigration PAC and elsewhere,
most recently on 05-19-2012 at 10:19 AM.)