Posted on 03/23/2015 12:06:42 PM PDT by Citizen Zed
I wrote to someone on another link that Cruz is a citizen and there is no need to search for his birth certificate. I guess he is a citizen. After awhile at least some Roman emperors were not born came from outside in Italy.
I never said he wasn’t a citizen, Obama even if he was born in Kenya is a Citizen.. The question is the meaning of Natural Born, and as far as I know the Naturalization act of 1790 made it quite clear that a child born to a father who was not a US citizen, was not a Natural Born Citizen.
This act, provided citizenship for children born abroad to US citizens, but explicitly stated that a child with a father who was not a US citizen was not and could not be a naturalized citizen.
The act was superceded in 1795, but the superceding act made no mention of Natural Born... the 1790 act is the only place I am aware of in US law where a statute defines what is a natural born citizen.
Minor v. Happersett, 1878
HamiltonJay you have read well and are correct where it counts. The minor correction is that the 1790 Naturalization act did make a child born “beyond the seas” a “natural born citizen”, but that act was entirely rescinded in the 1795 Act and clarified again in the 1802 or 03 act. The Madison and Washington clearly decided that Congress had no authority, and the framers meant what they said about presidential requirements, which after all, is the only reason the Constitution specified natural born citizenship, since every natural born citizen, the majority of citizens being natural born citizens, was also a citizen. The Constitution did not address the definition of citizens, assigning that task in Article 1 Section 8 to Congress - “...create and uniform rule for naturalization.”
Only the Supreme Court can interpret that definition given in the Constitution, and they have done so in at least a dozen cases including The Venus in 1814, Minor v. Happersett in 1874, and Perkins v. Elg in 1936. There was no mention of natural born citizenship in the 14th Amendment which assigned the phrase “citizen at birth”, to their naturalization act, the 14th Amendment. Citizens naturalized at birth included slaves, born on our soil, and Wong Kim Ark, born on our soil to alien parents. Being a citizen “by” birth was settled by our framers. Every citizen by birth is also a citizen, being born on our soil to citizen parents. Every child born on our soil is a citizen, not necessarily natural born, by the naturalization amendment, the 14th. Only an amendment or redefinition of previously accepted law can alter the meaning of natural born citizen, most concisely cited, according to John Marshall, in Vattel’s Natural Law and the Law of Nations. That definition was essential to the court’s decision that Virginia Minor did not acquire suffrage from the equal protections clause in the 14th Amendment because she was a citizen before 14th Amendment became law and couldn’t vote then. The only way to prove she was a federal citizen was to use the only constitutionally defined citizen before the 14th Amendment, a natural born citizen. Virginia was born in Missouri to two citizen parents.
I think Obama is a citizen of Kenya. I guess Ted Cruz is a citizen of the US but the birth certificate will say Canada. Ted Cruz’s mother is from America. I looked on a couple websites and there may be a law that says if one parent is a citizen of the US and lived in the US for 10 years and some other double-talk...
Citzen352, it is obviously true that there are doubts about where Obama is born, but that could simply be a diversion. The ineligible Chester Arthur planted doubts through a newspaper reporter about his birth on U.S. soil and hid his own Vermont birth certificate to divert attention from his father’s Irish birth, and lack of citizenship. Barack has never called himself a natural born citizen. He told us “I am a native-born, citizen of the U.S.” We can take him at his word, and have no alternative. American Indians and anchor babies are “native born”. When the 14th Amendment was passed American Indians weren’t naturalized as citizens because their allegiance was to their tribal governments. It makes sense.
A law, a statute, cannot alter the meaning of a constitutional definition. Term definitions are not in the Constitution because, as Madison explained, the meanings of words evolve with time. Interpreting the Constitution requires ferreting the meanings of words as understood by our framers when the wrote the Constitution.
Naturalization laws have changed many times. You don’t need to be concerned with them, unless they directly affect you or a relative because statutes cannot change the constitution. As one Chief Justice of the USSC put it referring to Marie Elg, born to naturalized Swedish parents in New York, (paraphrasing) a natural born citizen, Marie’s citizenship was established by God’s law; her citizenship cannot be denied by man’s law!. God’s law is another term for “Natural Law”, the doctrinal foundation of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is amazing to hear pundits arguing that our constitution was based upon English Common Law or English Statutory Law. British subjects are not sovereign, sovereignty from an abusive monarch a major reason for the new nation. Our founders and framers didn’t reject English laws in every instance, but naturalization laws were a major difference.
Read Mario Apuzzo’s response to a patently wrong analysis of natural born citizenship just published in the Harvard Law Review by two remarkably dishonest, or ill-informed, former solicitors general: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7466841558189356289&postID=5931178607182101999
Mr. Apuzzo quotes Jean Jacques Rousseau who examines, contrast and compares, the terms “subject” and “citizen”. The Rousseau quotation needs to be read slowly, but compliments Dr. James Ramsay’s “Dissertation on Citizenship” from 1789.
I hope those who still believe the Constitution is worth protecting will take some time to read original sources. Pundits get paid to talk and write. Too many, most it seems, will communicate what they think their audience, or their sponsors, want to hear. They don’t understand that one inconvenient provision of the Constitution ignored is certain to be followed by another and another until a provision or amendment you really thought was important gets the popular thumbs down: politicians and the media tell us that our framers didn’t really mean that one after all so even mentioning it could mean you lose your job, or your child can’t get into a school, or you get audited again and again.
By British law, and by his own words, Barack Obama was born a natural born subject of the British Commonwealth because his father was a British subject. He was eligible to be a Member of Parliament. Barack possessed at most dual US/British allegiance at birth, certainly not a natural born citizen “by” birth but probably a 14th Amendment Naturalized citizen “at” birth. By our Constitution he is not eligible to be president. No one said anything (except Congressman Nathan Deal, who was chased out of Congress using threats based upon old IRS returns), because John McCain’s eligibility was thoroughly questioned by Democrats and never resolved.
If Vattel’s assessment that overseas-born children of U.S. military and/or diplomats be “reputed natural born citizens” as stated in 1790 and rescinded in 1795 had been taken up by the USSC, McCain might have been made eligible. Otherwise an amendment was needed and only Barack Obama and his campaign co-chair, Claire McCaskill, tried, in Senate Bill 2678, Feb 2008 and Senate Resolution 511, Apr 2008. Barack was presumably born on our soil to a citizen mother and alien father. That made him naturalized at birth. Ted Cruz says the things I want to hear, but claims to be natural born, on Canadian soil and, like Obama, to an alien father, though a father intending to become a citizen some day. He has (though I have not heard him speak the words) claimed to be a natural born citizen, at odds with the Constitution he must swear to honor and defend?
“In the [constitutional] convention, it was objected that no number of years could properly prepare a foreigner for that place [the presidency]; but as men of other lands had spilled their blood in the cause of the United States, and had assisted at every stage of the formation of their institutions, on the seventh of September, it was unanimously settled that foreign-born residents of fourteen years who should be citizens at the time of the formation of the Constitution are eligible to the office of President.”— George Bancroft, “History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent,” 1854
… or change the judge.
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