by CDR Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret), blogging at CDRKerchner, ©2023
(Apr. 27, 2023) — I originally posted the quote (in italics further down in this article) from Emer de Vattel’s legal treatise “The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law” in the BlogSpot blog of the now deceased Attorney Mario Apuzzo back in June 2009 and then also in my WordPress blog. I re-post Vattel’s words and revisit the subject again as a reminder and warning about what is happening to our country, our constitution, and the rule of law.
The disregard of the rule of law and the abrogation of the true original-intent meaning and purpose of a key term in our U.S. Constitution the supreme law of our land as to whom can be the President and Commander in Chief of our military (and VP) has led to a very serious crisis in our nation with a cognitively challenged puppet in the Oval Office on a part-time basis and the rest of his time in a basement in Delaware with a culturally anti-American usurper who was unconstitutionally elected and sworn in twice still pulling the strings, making the decisions, and giving the orders behind the scenes in effect in a 3rd term, leading from behind as the “National Community Organizer in Chief (NCOinC), i.e., Obama. And with the NCOinC effectively in charge of our country, enabled by the mainstream media and corrupt judicial system, things are getting more bizarre and dangerous every week. The pernicious suppression of our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is becoming more and more obvious to more and more people.
If this willful attack on our unalienable rights given to us by our Creator as declared in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution continues, the complete destruction of public tranquility will soon be entailed. And it appears that is what the far, far-left anti-American, anti-Constitutionalist Marxists pulling the puppet strings behind the curtain want. As Dan Bongino said recently in one of his podcasts the far, far left is trying to provoke and will use asymmetric violence to do it.
By asymmetric violence Dan Bongino means they can and will get violent and they will get away with it. If arrested at all, they will soon be released by the sympathetic judicial system and not prosecuted. And if during their violence they provoke a physical response to their violence by someone they are attacking and/or militantly provoking, that person will get arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. That is the goal of asymmetric violence by far-left organized street thugs like Antifa, to provoke a response to entrap their target(s) and then use the law and law-fare to prosecute or financially ruin their target(s). Dan Bongino said to be careful in the coming days. We must not fall for their planned trap(s). But like all such evil people and tyrants in history, at some point, they will go too far. Let us hope this is all resolved in the 2024 election before it is totally too late to save our Republic, which is what Benjamin Franklin said the constitutional framers of our new U.S. Constitution have created … if we can keep it.
See these words by the legal scholar Emer de Vattel from his writings about Natural Law in the last half of the 18th century which apply equally well today.
” … The constitution and laws of a state are the basis of the public tranquility, the firmest support of political authority, and a security for the liberty of the citizens. But this constitution is a vain phantom, and the best laws are useless, if they be not religiously observed: the nation ought then to watch very attentively, in order to render them equally respected by those who govern, and by the people destined to obey. To attack the constitution of the state and to violate its laws, is a capital crime against society; and if those guilty of it are invested with authority, they add to this crime a perfidious abuse of the power with which they are intrusted. The nation ought constantly to repress them with its utmost vigor and vigilance, as the importance of the case requires. It is very uncommon to see the laws and constitution of a state openly and boldly opposed: it is against silent and gradual attacks that a nation ought to be particularly on its guard. Sudden revolutions strike the imaginations of men: they are detailed in history; their secret springs are developed. But we overlook the changes that insensibly happen by a long train of steps that are but slightly marked. It would be rendering nations an important service to show from history how many states have thus entirely changed their nature, and lost their original constitution. This would awaken the attention of mankind: — impressed thenceforward with this excellent maxim (no less essential in politics than in morals) principiis obsta, — they would no longer shut their eyes against innovations, which, though inconsiderable in themselves, may serve as steps to mount to higher and more pernicious enterprises.”
The U.S. Constitution is the glue that holds this nation of diverse immigrants and their descendants together. Without it, this nation, this republic is lost and will end up on the trash heap of history. The 2024 election will decide whether we still have a constitutional republic and a constitution that is the supreme law of the land and that it is enforced, or if we will totally lose it all forever.
CDR Charles Kerchner, P.E. (Retired)
https://cdrkerchner.wordpress.com
http://www.scribd.com/user/52640192/protectourliberty/lists
http://www.protectourliberty.org
Read the rest here.
Question for Kerchner and DeMaio:
Were the terms citizens and subjects used synonymously by the writers who influenced the Founders?
Some examples:
Vattel’s Law of Nations;
Book I, Chapter XIII §168
1758 French edition
“Il est une autre espèce de Justice, que l’on nomme attributive, ou distributive. Elle consiste en général à traiter chacun suivant ses mérites. Cette vertu doit un État règle dans distribution des Emplois publics, des honneurs et des récompenses. Une nation se doit d’abord encourager les bons citoyens, exciter tout le monde à la vertu par les récompenses les honneurs et les récompenses, et ne confier les emplois qu’aux sujets capables de les bien desservir.”
1760 English translation;
“There is another kind of justice named attributive or distributive. Which in general consists of treating very one according to his merits. This virtue in a state regulates the distribution of public employments, honors and rewards. A nation ought, in the first place, to encourage good citizens, to excite everyone to virtue by rewards and honors, and to trust employments only to such subjects as are capable of properly discharging them.”
Book III Chapter XV §223
1758 French Edition;
“Un sujet peut bien repousser la violence même d’un concitoyen, quand le secours du Magistrat lui manque, à plus forte riason pourra-t-il fe défendre contra l’attaque inopince des étrangers.
1760 English Edition;
“A subject can well repel the violence even of a fellow citizen, when the magistrate’s assistance is not at hand, and with much greater right may he defend himself against the unexpected attacks of a foreigner.”
Thomas Hobbs – De Cite, Volume II Chapter V #11 Page 70
“11. In every city, that man or council, to whose will each particular man hath subjected his will (so as hath been declared) is said to have the supreme power, or chief command, or dominion; which power and right of commanding, consists in this, that each citizen hath conveyed all his strength and power to that man or council; which to have done (because no man can transfer his power in a natural manner) is nothing else than to have parted with his right of resisting. Each citizen, as also every subordinate civil person, is called the subject of him who hath the chief command.”
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_English_Works_of_Thomas_Hobbes_of_Ma/JMRdAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Citizen%20subject
Wouldn’t this explains why the Founders used the terms citizens and subjects interchangeably, for example John Adam’s 1780 draft of the Massachusetts constitution?
And also why we see both natural born citizen and natural born subject in this 1791 Massachusetts naturalization act?
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Private_and_Special_Statutes_of_the_Comm/SlZNAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=AN+ACT+FOR+NATURALIZING+JOHN+WHITE+%26+OTHERS&pg=PA307&printsec=frontcover
Response from Joseph DeMaio:
———————
“Question for Kerchner and DeMaio:
Were the terms citizens and subjects used synonymously by the writers who influenced the Founders?”
On occasion, yes…, but so what? The fact that in other sections of his treatise, de Vattel may have used the terms together and interchangeably fails to explain why, in § 212 — the single section directly addressing the definition of the term “indigènes” coupled with the subsequent phrase “sont ceux qui sont nés dans le pays, de parens citoyens…. — de Vattel did not use the term “sujets.” That can be seen only as de Vattel’s intentional selection of the term, later translated, as we all know, to “natural born citizen.”
Specifically, and without regard to what the proper translation to English of “naturels” or “indigènes” may be, de Vattel explains that whatever meaning one assigns to those terms, collectively they mean “… sont ceux qui sont nés dans le pays, de parens citoyens….” or, in English: “are those who are born in the country, of citizen parents.” Stated otherwise, whether denominated a “naturel,” an “indigène,” a “natural born Citizen” (or, for that matter, a parrot), the entity at issue – in order to match its antecedent – needs to be born in the country to parents (plural) who also were “citoyens” or “citizens,” not “sujets” or “subjects.”
As for the Massachusetts documents referenced in the comment, they have approximately zero bearing on John Jay’s “intentional selection” (much like that of de Vattel in § 212) of the term “natural born Citizen” (underscoring by Jay) in his July 25, 1787 “hint” letter to George Washington. If, in 1787, and as posited by the commenter, the terms “citizens” and “subjects” were synonyms, then why does not Jay’s “hint” letter and Art. 2, § 1, Cl. 5 of the Constitution say “natural born Subject” instead of what they actually say? I’ll wait for the commenter’s reply.
The answer — clear to some but obscure to others — is because the Founders, having then-recently defeated the most powerful army in the world, determined to jettison any “subject-liege” relationship theretofore existing and replace it with the “citizen-constitutional republic” model we now enjoy…, despite ongoing and current efforts of many to “fundamentally change” and destroy it from within, as Benjamin Franklin warned.
All:
I am very pleased to announce that my new book, “Natural Born Citizen – A Presidential Eligibility Qualification Requirement” is now available for purchase via Amazon.com. Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3YD377J/
Of course copies signed or otherwise can also be purchased directly from me on my website link at: http://www.kerchner.com/books/naturalborncitizen.htm
CDR Charles Kerchner (Ret)
Lehigh Valley PA USA
http://www.ProtectOurLiberty.org
By some folks standards, this lowly old Marine, educated only in life’s experience, remarks should have no relevance in this subject. However, it is my firm belief that Emer de Vattel’s “The Law of Nations” should be taught as a major subject in our higher edu…indoctrination centers and a per-requisite of any law degree.
Tremendous research and narrative, Charles. This and all of your writings should be available to all government officials and any civilians who want to view them. Library of Congress? Appropriate U.S. Senate and House archives? Pentagon “papers.” ETC. I’m serious. What you have compiled, together with some of the works of other researchers, needs to be preserved! I don’t suppose the Obama presidential library would be interested!
Tom:
Thank you for the kind words and suggestions. Preservation of my words for the future in physical paper form is one of the reasons I published my new book. The internet is too vulnerable and getting increasing more vulnerable to censorship with the advances in AI to suppress information the Marxist subversive tyrants, oligarchs, and deep state far-left government operatives do not want people to easily find and read.
For my new book on nbC see: http://www.kerchner.com/books/naturalborncitizen.htm
My new book has already been accepted and cataloged at the Library of Congress. I have donated copies to other libraries and plan to donate more copies to other key libraries.
All can help me do this and even more in spreading my words and writings by ordering a copy of my new book about the constitutional term “Natural Born Citizen” and donating it to your local library and/or by aiding and providing me with additional funds to do this via purchasing a copy or several copies of my book as gifts to educate their friends and associates on this key national security term in the presidential eligibility clause of our U.S. Constitution, i.e., “natural born Citizen”. Send a copy to your Congress person.
As I have often said in many projects I have led: “Synergy at work – if we all do a little we together can accomplish a lot”.
CDR Charles Kerchner (Ret)
ProtectOurLiberty.org
http://cdrkerchner.wordpress.com/
http://www.kerchner.com/books/catalog.htm