“100% MADE-IN-AMERICA ORGANIC”
by Ron Smith, ©2016
(Feb. 16, 2016) — How on earth could a single word become so misunderstood over the course of just a couple of hundred years?
I mean, the word ‘natural,’ as in ‘natural born Citizen,’ isn’t a complicated, nor new, word. But we find ourselves in 2016 utterly unable to agree on the plain meaning of the word to the extent that some among us want to march right to the Supreme Court and demand they tell us what it means!
Say what?
How ‘bout we try the dictionary first?
Here’s the first, and most-relevant, definition:
nat·u·ral
adjective: natural 1. existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.
So if we apply that definition to decipher ‘natural born citizen,’ I’m thinking it’s not a stretch to come up with something like, “a person who was born in such a way that there were no other acts of humankind needed to establish that he was a citizen of the community into which he was born.”
In other words, no law of man or Act of Congress was needed for the community to say, “Yep, he’s one of us. We know his parents, and he was born right down the street.”
If on the other hand, a child was born in a distant land to even one parent that the community doesn’t ‘know,’, something needs to be added, a law, a rule, or an act, to establish whether or not that child should be considered as ‘one of us’ in the same way that the kid born down the street is.
Once you do start ‘adding’ steps into an otherwise ‘naturally’ occurring event, that end result no longer happened ‘naturally.’ Man had to intervene to complete the process of citizenship based on the laws of that community.
Therefore, that child born abroad can be a citizen as a result of the laws and processes established by man, but he can’t be a citizen as a result of the laws established by nature.
This is not a complicated concept, but boy, many people are missing it.
As a result, with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek I’m calling for an amendment to the constitution to change ‘natural born’ to ‘organic born’ because today, we seem to be a lot more concerned about the purity of our morning latte than about the purity of the guy with his finger on the nuclear button.
In fact, changing the term makes it really simple going forward because according to the legal definition of the word ‘organic’ (I’m not kidding…it’s already been litigated and international agreements signed), a product must contain at least 95% organic ingredients in order to earn that label. Since the heavy lifting has already been done to legally define that word, I say we just steal that term and insert it into the Constitution.
Heck, we may not even need an amendment since apparently nobody reads the dang thing anymore anyway, but I digress.
Anyway, assuming we can change the requirement to ‘organic,’ where does that leave us with Cruz and Rubio, and the 95% criteria?
Well, before we can consider that, let’s agree on another concept and that is that under commonly-accepted principles, the evaluation of a person’s citizenship status includes three criteria, or ‘legs’—place of birth, citizenship status of mother, citizenship status of father, and both of the last two legs are based on the parent’s status at the time of the child’s birth.
OK, so let’s see…Cruz has an ‘organic’ American mother, so we can give him 33% credit, but he has a Cuban father, so that’s 0%, and he was born outside the U.S., which earns him 0% again on that leg. Total that up and we get Cruz being just 33% organic, and therefore, doesn’t pass the ‘organic’ test. In fact, not even close.
Now let’s go to Rubio. Being born in America earns him 33%, but since his mother was not a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth, we have to give him 0% there, and since his father also was not a citizen at the time of his birth, he again earns 0% on that leg as well.
Add it up and you’re at 33% for Rubio, too, and between the two of them you’re still only at 66%!
So maybe it is time to do away with the ‘antiquated’ term of ‘natural born Citizen’ and replace it with a term that more people seem to be familiar with today, and that we’ve already collectively agreed on its meaning.
Going forward, by the power vested in me, I hereby declare that “No person except an organic born Citizen can be president or vice-president of the United States of America.”
There, that was easy. Now pass the chips, organic of course.
The Founders should have put “natural law Citizen” in Article 2 Section and there would have been no question where the term came from. The word “natural” is there for a reason, to show you to look to natural law.
Vattel’s Law of Nations (natural law) §212. 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.”