I generally agree, but IMO the case is not self-evident.
IOW, I think the Supremes need to rule on it to settle the issue definitively.
Such rulings are exactly what the Supremes are supposed to do, define the meaning of the Constitution in cases where its language is open to interpretation.
Up to 1922 Cruz would have apparently NOT automatically inherited citizenship from his mother, based on the Expatriation Acts, since she might not have been a citizen when he was born. Which means these laws would have been overriding the Constitution, by your interpretation of its meaning. For you to be correct, they would have had to be unconstitutional, which is of course perfectly possible.
My basic point is not that Cruz is not NBC, I’m agnostic on the issue. It is that he meets fewer of the possible qualifications for NBC than Obama does. Which makes it really difficult to say Obama is ineligible, but Cruz is.
I’ve said all along that assuming he was born in Hawaii, Obama is clearly eligible. I’ve taken a lot of heat for it, but it’s simply the truth. In fact, there’s not a credible Constitutional authority in the country - or in history - who says otherwise.
Bottom line is, if you want the intent of the Founders and Framers, their intent was that if a person was born a citizen, then he’s eligible to be President.
As far as the fact that if he had been born in the 1800s Cruz wouldn’t have been born a citizen/ NBC goes... I think you could just as well make the argument that Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are ineligible to the Presidency because the Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate women being elected; or that Barack Obama and Herman Cain are both ineligible simply because they’re black. After all, the US Supreme Court in 1858 (Scott v. Sandford) described black people as “an inferior class of beings,” and said they couldn’t even be citizens. Well, if black people couldn’t be citizens, then they certainly couldn’t be eligible to the Presidency.
But our understandings have changed. We have equal rights for people of all races, and that was certainly the right thing to do. We have equal rights for women as well, and women have certainly filled executive roles and done a fine job. When I think of the greatest leaders of England, two names come to mind: Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.
So in the end it doesn’t matter that Ted Cruz wouldn’t have been a natural born citizen if he had been born in 1850. He wasn’t. He was born in 1970. And he has been a United States citizen from his very first breath.
When it comes to eligibility, as the actions of the First Congress and early writings such as those from James Bayard show, that’s all the Founders intended.