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The Three Whisky Happy Hour: From Birthright Religion to ‘Lockistotle’

Episode length: 1h 2m

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Notre Dame's Tocqueville professor of political science, Vincent Phillip Munoz (Phil to his freinds and colleagues), joins this special episode which finds all three of your regular bartenders in the same room for once while on the road in Austin, Texas. Phil is one of the leading scholars of religious liberty in the U.S., and after a progress report on the Iran War (we're still winning), and a prolonged look at the Supreme Court oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case heard this week, we pick Phil's brain about the status of school prayer, and whether a restoration of organized prayer in public schools has a prayer of happening, taking as our cue Gerry Bradley's recent and provocative First Things article, "How To Bring Back School Prayer."

From there we briefly (but alas because we were out of sufficient time) but inadequately treat Phil's terrifically concise CRB essay "Ancient and Modern: How Straussians Interpret the Founding," mostly to annoy John Yoo—and we succeeded!

Hosts:
John Yoo'Lucretia'Steve Hayward
Guest:
Vincent Phillip Munoz

Discussion (9)

  • Full Size Tabby@FullSizeTabby

    “Subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is big factor in the citizenship issue.

    As I understand the English common law origins of the concept behind that language, being “subject to” a jurisdiction (then a regional lord) meant the person had both the benefit of protection from the lord of the jurisdiction, but also owed lifetime obligations (primarily taxes and military service) to that lord of the jurisdiction. Therefore, it is unreasonable to automatically declare everyone born in a jurisdiction is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” simply because the person was born in the jurisdiction. There must be more. Logic would suggest among the potential criteria: 1) the parents exhibit an intention to remain in the jurisdiction indefinitely and to become assimilated into the jurisdiction (i.e., they’re not just passing through), and 2) the jurisdiction consented to or authorized or approved the parents’ presence in the jurisdiction (i.e., did not enter or remain the jurisdiction illegally).

    In the United States Supreme Court Wong Kim Ark case that is commonly cited for the proposition that place of birth is all that matters, the Court spent a large portion of the opinion describing the authorized immigration status of the parents that showed the parents intended to remain in the United States. If the status of the parents were irrelevant to the citizenship determination (i.e., if physical location of birth is all that matters), the Court would have no reason to spend so much space and so many words describing the immigration status of the parents.

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