SCOTUS Grants Guantanamo Prisoners Habeas Corpus

[flaja]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Ok, follow me here, because I know you want to believe it to be something other than what it says.... The opening statement sets the precedent for the document. Everything after this statement follows. You cannot cherry pick each piece and determine it to be something it is not. It begins with an opening statement which sets the stage for the rest of the document. They did not write it to apply to the Brits who were trying to kill them. They did not write it to apply to the black African slaves. They did not write it to apply to the Chinese who came and built our Rail Roads. They did not write it to apply to the Mexicans they had war with..... no.... they wrote it for the people whom they deemed to be people who were to form a new country, a new land, under a new rule of law. Not for the King of England if he came to visit, not for anyone else. Get it?

The Constitution is for US citizens alone.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

No where does it say we the people of the United States establish this Constitution for all people of the world under any conditon.

Sure... our friends in England at the time felt like this applied to them.... Give me a frigging break... the answer is NO.

The Preamble to the Constitution was not prepared until the document’s final draft was being made by the Committee on Style. The Preamble is practically an afterthought. The Delegates to the Constitutional Convention had no definite idea what We the People meant when they starting debating what the Constitution would say and whom it would apply to.

Also, if were to examine the Notes that James Madison prepared at the Constitutional Convention, you would find repeated references to the citizens of such and such state, but I have yet to find any reference to the citizens of the United States. The Delegates had no formal understanding of what a citizen of the United States was, so how could they have had any intent of denying any rights to non-citizens?

But at any rate, the 5th Amendment is just that- an amendment. It was meant to alter the document’s original meaning. Even if We the People had originally intended to deny legal due process rights to non-citizens, by saying no person instead of no citizen, the 5th Amendment altered what you We the People had intended to do and thereby gave legal due process rights to all persons and not just citizens.

Furthermore, since the Articles of Confederation did not define citizenship or grant the Confederation government any power to make naturalization laws, there was no legally recognized way for someone to be a national citizen of the United States.

The only way someone who was born outside of the original 13 states could even remotely become a citizen of the United States was to become a citizen of one of the states; foreigners like Baron von Steuben were given citizenship in several different states by legislative acts, but it is questionable whether or not state citizenship meant automatic national citizenship since no one had the formal legal authority to define what a national citizen was, although the Constitution does assume that such national citizens existed (Article II, section 1, clause 4).

I would assume that anyone living in what became the United States who was born a British subject or who became a nationalized British subject prior to July 2, 1776 was given automatic citizenship in the state where they lived once the separate states were independent of Great Britain. But if this was not the case, then there could have been people living in the United States who were not citizens thereof.

And then there are James Wilson, Robert Morris, Thomas Fitzsimons, Alexander Hamilton, William Patterson, James McHenry and Pierce Butler- all of whom were born outside of what became the United States and all of whom signed the Constitution. They were all British subjects living in what became the United States prior to July 2, 1776, but if U.S. citizenship for the foreign-born was not automatic, did every one of these men go through the process to be a naturalized citizen of a state so they could claim to be a national citizen of the United States? Or did they put their name to a document that, as you claim, would have denied them legal due process rights because they were not citizens?