With Friends Like These...

(An outfit called Senate Conservatives Fund, whose non-profit job it is to raise funds for conservative candidates, actually for both the Senate and the House, recently conducted a straw poll of conservatives' preferences for the presidential elections in 2016 (which poll I wasn't aware of; but I get a lot of e-mails that I never have the time to get around to opening), and today emailed those of us on their mailing list the results.  Ted Cruz won it by a country mile over Rand Paul, with Marco Rubio in among a whole lot of also-rans.  I think the term I am looking for is 'controlled opposition'.  My email back to Matt Hoskins, Chairman of the Fund.)  

April 5

Dear Matt,

This is all well and good - but why are you supporting the illusion that either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio are even eligible for the office?  Or any other person on your list who is not a "natural born" citizen - i.e., born on the soil (jus soli) of two U.S. citizen parents (jus sanguinis).  

You should rather be helping educate even conservatives (for heaven's sakes!) to the facts of the Constitution.  Regarding this fact, e.g.: the constitutional Framers inserted that eligibility requirement into their constitutional contract for that position - and that position ONLY - for a very good reason: that of doing all that they could to make sure that a candidate for that office - who would also become the Commander in Chief of the nation's military forces - did not have CONFLICTING LOYALTIES OR ALLEGIANCES.  Like a DUAL CITIZEN.  Like - lo and behold  -  BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.  Or whatever his real, legal name is.  

This issue needs to be put out front and center.  The Constitution is hanging by a thread, in particular because conservatives like you and the Senate Conservatives Fund body won't address it the way it needs to be.  'It': the issue of the obvious intent of the constitutional Framers for putting this qualification into the Constitution for that office.  It's not rocket science.   And its definition is signaled by the fact that Alexander Hamilton, at the Constitutional Convention, during discussion on this matter, of the eligibility requirements of a person for the office of the presidency, proposed that he needed to be merely a "citizen" - AND HIS PROPOSAL WAS REJECTED.

Let alone pointing out how John Jay - who ended up becoming the first Chief Justice of the new U.S. Supreme Court; so no slouch he regarding judicial matters - sent a private letter to G. Washington, chairing the proceedings, quietly to emphasize this point.  Simply put: These statesmen types ESPECIALLY did not want either a naturalized citizen or a dual citizen possibly taking the new nation - of sovereigns in their own right; no longer 'subjects' -  back under British rule, by devious means.  

It is obvious to any open-minded soul what their intention was in this matter.  They were going by E. de Vattel's The Law of Nations, which many of them, and particularly including their elder mentor, Benjamin Franklin, were familiar with - NOT English common law, which defined a natural born SUBJECT.  Which these men would have been insulted and near-mortally offended by, if anyone had tried to call them that, after a  bloody and drawn-out War of Independence, for heaven's sakes.

Come ON. Conservatives need to get their act together on this matter.  And so does the Republican Party.  Or we're going to have another civil war in this country.  Between Constitutionalists on the one hand, and [their] various enemies on the other.    

'Stan' Stanfield 

P.S. For background info on the issue, see in particular: puzo1.blogspot.com; the two YouTube videos of Prof. Herb Titus; and the blog of CDR C.F. Kerchner (Ret.).