Following is partial summary of Sotomayor’s Dissent to Pres. Trump’s order denying ‘birthright citizenship’ to illegal alien children.

Sotomayor paints with a broad brush, ignoring essential details. Her legal analysis is more political and propaganda than the law. Those who read it or of it will side with her on grounds of race and ignorance. For the gross negligence exhibited in Sotomayor’s Dissent, nothing less than impeachment is justified.

A Few Points to Ponder

‘Jurisdiction’ is not ‘absolute,’ not entirely. While laws are enforced equally with exceptions for those with diplomatic immunity, more cracks in ‘jurisdiction’ appear when one considers the reality of ‘allegiance’ to one’s ‘fatherland.’ In fact, the 1866 Civil Rights Act that gave birth to the 14th Amendment specifically states that ‘born in the United States’ did not apply if the father had ‘subjection to any foreign power.’

Can a child born in the United States to a foreign father be conscripted into the military to fight a war? No. Not unless in the course of residency the child essentially ‘renounced’ the father’s nationality. For example, in British law, a child born outside the country had to be registered within a year with the British version of the state department. If this wasn’t done, British citizenship expired. This was the case also if the father abandoned the family.

In fact, there is a case of a Greek immigrant who claimed U.S. citizenship based solely on the word of his mother that he was ‘born in the United States’ to avoid deportation (and conscription into the Greek military), but when the U.S. went to war he claimed he was a Greek citizen. How convenient.

Sotomayor cites English common law, from feudal times when people rarely ventured beyond their villages, their lives controlled by ‘lords’ installed by a monarch. Yet, in those same feudal times (jus feudalis), the children of ‘sojourners’ were exempt from forced allegiance.

FORCED ALLEGIANCE

Sotomayor cites various case law and even Blackstone to support the immutable power of ‘jus soli,’ the place of birth. Yet, while early American jurists took pride in their mastery of the ‘master,’ Blackstone, even he had exceptions and modified his position on ‘place of birth.’ After all, like George Washington and other founders, he followed the ‘bible’ of nationality law, Emmerich de Vattel’s ‘Law of Nations.’ Vattel made it clear that a nation replenishes its population with children of its native citizens. Conversely, if a nation only replenishes its population with children of foreigners, it soon no longer is that nation.

So, there are more powerful and superior standards of law that came not only from Nature (the jus sanguinis) but statute itself not cited by Sotomayor, because the scope of the case did not require or involve it. Or, let us just say that it those higher laws were superfluous and inconvenient as it was contrary to her broad stroke of ‘Latina Wisdom.’

To the contrary–Sotomayor’s argument be damned–In the case of a birth on U.S. soil, the ‘national character’ of the father came first in both statute and natural law. Feudal law of monarchs be damned as well, because the allegiance of the father first passed to the child as a ‘blood’ succession of inheritance. And wasn’t the United States created to cast off the abuses of monarchs?

In fact, regardless of feudal common law and oral exhalations of ‘judges’ in one case or another, both the 1790 Uniform Naturalization Act (James Madison’s argument for ‘place of birth’ was made in 1789 in the ‘Case of Mr. Smith’) and the 1772 British Nationality Act defined the primary arbiter of Natural Born Subjection or Citizenship of the child to be determined by the national character and allegiance of the father! The ‘place of birth’ was inconsequential.

Read that again. Both U.S. and British statute! So who are you going to believe? The law as written, or some opiniated judge?

Any deviation from statute by a judge was to determine an outcome favorable to one side of an argument, or the other. But the statute was violated, but in its text and intent, inviolable.

And that is what Sotomayor was doing in her Dissent, misinterpreting the narrowly defined ‘class’ of persons in the 14th Amendment as ‘global.’ And that is what the U.S. Supreme Court did, unconstitutionally, in 1898 in the Wong Kim Ark case as well except it admitted the 14th Amendment did not apply, so relied solely on jus feudalis common law from ancient times, long superseded by statute, plus foreign law having no power of precedent or stare decisis. It was just a convenient grab bag of law to give birthright citizenship to a Chinese national!

As a final test, if the father had a natural and statutory right to pass on his nationality and citizenship rights to his children (which also happened if he naturalized while the child was a minor), then what now of Sotomayor’s MONARCH-LIKE MANDATE as a judge; that the child now had U.S. citizenship for being born within ‘her’ (that esteemed court still hasn’t made up its mind what a woman is yet) jurisdiction.

How capricious and fluid, amorphous and ‘nebulous’ can it get?

NOW READ SOTOMAYOR’S WISE LATINA LAW AND REALIZE HOW STUPID IT IS

“As the Government would presumably concede, virtually everyone born in the United States and present in its territory is subject to its authority and its laws. After all, “[t]he jurisdiction of the nation within its own territory is necessarily exclusive and absolute.” Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon, 7 Cranch 116, 136 (1812) (Marshall, C. J., for the Court). Once a citizen of another nation steps onto United States soil, she is (with narrow exception) “amenable to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Id., at 144. That is why “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.” Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 211, n. 10 (1982).

Few constitutional questions can be answered by resort to the text of the Constitution alone, but this is one. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship.

Unsurprisingly given the clarity of the Citizenship Clause’s text, every other source of interpretation confirms this conclusion. Consider, first, its history. Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, and indeed before the founding, the common-law rule of jus soli (literally, right of the soil) governed English citizenship. That rule rendered a person’s birthplace determinative of her citizenship status. Thus, “the children of aliens, born . . . in England,” generally were “natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such.” 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 361–362 (1765); see also H. Broom & G. Denman, Constitutional Law Viewed in Relation to Common Law 31 (2d ed. 1885) (describing Calvin’s Case (1608), which established that “[e]very one born within the dominions of the King of England . . . is . . . entitled to enjoy all the rights and liberties of an Englishman”).

That English common-law rule carried over to the United States after the founding. Shortly after the Constitution’s ratification, James Madison observed that “it [was] an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance,” i.e., of citizenship. 1 Annals of Cong. 404 (1789). Birth, he explained, could convey citizenship in two ways: either through “place” (under the “right of the soil” principle) or through “parentage” (as for one born to United States citizens). Ibid. “[B]ut, in general,” Madison explained, “place is the most certain criterion” and “it is what applies in the United States.” Ibid. Mere decades later, Justice Story wrote that “[n]othing is better settled . . . than the doctrine that the children even of aliens born in a country . . . are subjects by birth.” Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor’s Snug Harbour in City of New York, 3 Pet. 99, 164 (1830). Well before the Fourteenth Amendment, then, it was the undisputed “law of the United States [that] every person born within the dominions and allegiance of the United States, whatever were the situation of his parents, is a natural born citizen.” Lynch v. Clarke, 1 Sand. Ch. 583, 663 (N. Y. Ch. 1844).” [NOTE: Is this New York State court a matter of higher law, or just one of judicial convenience.]

The Shanks vs DuPont case was not a holding for convenience, but based in law. The child, ‘born in a country,’ partook in the national character of the father. This complied with natural law (jus sanguinis) and both Nationality and Naturalization statutes of Great Britain and the United States (1772 and 1790 Acts respectively).

“If she was not of age, then she might well be deemed under the circumstances of this case to hold the citizenship of her father; for children born in a country, continuing while under age in the family of the father, partake of his national character, . . .” Shanks v DuPont, 28 U.S. 242; 7 L. Ed. 666; 1830 U.S. LEXIS 537 (1830)

Let’s take this case a step further–If the father naturalized to another national allegiance, the minor children followed, as would the wife. An example is Barack Obama. His father (putative) was a Kenyan national, and even Barack admitted he had British citizenship at birth from his father. But the father abandoned the family and under British and U.S. law the mother was able to confer her ‘maiden’ citizenship to Barack (8 USC 1409). It wasn’t ‘born in the United States’ for Barack (to this day, there is no official record admissible in a court of law of his Hawaiian birth), but the fact that Obama’s father was a Muslim polygamist and thus the marriage void, and the mother entitled to confer her pre-marital U.S. citizenship. And, when she married Lolo Sotero in Indonesia (a Muslim country), she was automatically naturalized to Indonesian citizenship and her children, as minors, became Indonesian as well. In fact, Barack Obama used this foreign nationality as a means to obtain foreign student benefits and housing when in college.