Posted on 03/12/2015 12:32:49 PM PDT by SoConPubbie
Two of the top lawyers for the Obama and Bush administrations agree on this: Sen. Ted Cruz can become president. Legally speaking, anyway.
Paul D. Clement, former solicitor general for President George W. Bush, and Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general for President Obama, penned a piece for the Harvard Law Review tackling the question of what the Constitution means when it says that the president must be at least 35 years old, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a “natural born Citizen.”
“All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase ‘natural born Citizen’ has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time,” they wrote. “And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States.”
Cruz was born in a Canadian hospital to a mother who was a U.S. citizen. But he’s only the latest potential presidential candidate who has had his qualifications questioned. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Former Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) was born in Arizona before it was a state. Gov. George Romney (R-Mich.) was delivered in Mexico to U.S. residents. All were qualified to serve, . . . .
The First Congress, they noted, established that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were themselves citizens at birth “and explicitly recognized that such children were ‘natural born citizens.’
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The way I look at judicial opinions that are writtten by idiots is that they are immediately challenged and quickly overturned by reasoned legal scholars. Opinions written by idiots do not become precedents and do not get cited in other rulings.
The ruling in Ankeny was the unanimous opinion of a three judge state Appeals Court panel upholding the arguments of a Republican Attorney General in a midwestern state.
In the time of the founding, since travel far from one's birthplace was rare, I suspect that Madison in fact was referring to the place where one was born and raised.
If you think about what confers thoughts, ideas and allegiance, what shapes a person's being, then what should be driving the eligibility issue becomes crystal clear.
In the beginning of a person's life a child cares nothing about the place where he was born and raised. All of his formative influence is from family (parentage). As he grows, the child soon begins to interact with his peers and gains an awareness of where he lives. Over time, he naturally begins to form an attachment to his community, its customs and its history. This is the natural allegiance to place (the birth allegiance to which Madison referred). But the allegiance to the teachings and memories of ones parents never leaves. It remains a strong influence throughout life. Even if one or both parents have been largely absent, there is a natural longing to learn of who they were, where they lived, what they thought in order to learn of one's natural roots and characteristics (exhibit one: aka obama's Dreams from My Father.)
The founders claimed that the presidential eligibility clause was intended to provide a strong check against foreign intrigue. Mere place of birth does not provide this check as is immediately obvious from considering the case of an anchor baby born here to alien parents, but then raised to adulthood in the land and culture of his parents only to return as an adult (for example, to attend college). By your weak eligibility check, such a "citizen" (who could never be considered a one hundred percent red-blooded American) could legally become president after meeting the residency and age requirements. Is that what you want? Is that what the founders had in mind? Really?
To me, it is obvious that a strong check against foreign intrigue can only be met by requiring that one have been born and raised one hundred percent American so that by one's very nature no other possibility exists. A strong check is only provided by requiring both blood AND dirt.
For the most part I don't think it matters where one was born, but only that one was raised by Americans in the culture of Americans. Thus a foreign birth, such as McCain's or Ted Cruz's, really has little influence on their allegiance (the only exception to this being if one is born in a country that claims jus soli citizenship birthright and that that birthright is officially recognized by the USA.)
I do not think Ted Cruz's Canadian birth influenced his allegiance one whit. I worry more about the influence of an alien father who could not trouble himself to become an American citizen until decades after he was first eligible. What kind of lesson to Ted was that? (Rafael Cruz was a Cuban when Ted was born, but became a Canadian before moving to the USA when Ted was four. He didn't bother becoming an American until 2005.)
Ankeny is a straightforward application of Wong Kim Ark, as I long ago illustrated here. But since you don't understand WKA, you accordingly misunderstand Ankeny.
Time will tell. We’ll have to wait for Senator Cruz to announce and for his eligibility to be challenged.
A bureaucratic document may not mean anything to you but under the law of the land, specific documents can be used to verify citizenship and identity. The courts use those documents to make rulings when there is a dispute.
42CFR435.407: “Types of Acceptable Documentary Evidence of Citizenship” https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/435.407
And a "Certificate of Citizenship-At-Birth" issued by a U.S. consulate is one of them.
I think that the three branches of government, both state and federal, plus the voters and the Electors should be the ultimate determiners of eligibility.
A majority of voters and Electors plus the Chief Election Official in every state in the Union plus every state’s legislature and the state courts as well as Congress and the federal judiciary have had a chance to review the circumstances of Obama’s eligibility. All told, there have been about 350 judicial rulings over the last seven years.
A federal judge in Georgia summed the situation up succinctly: “A spurious claim questioning the president’s constitutional legitimacy may be protected by the First Amendment, but a Court’s placement of its imprimatur upon a claim that is so lacking in factual support that it is frivolous would undoubtedly disserve the public interest.”—U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, September 16, 2009.
You may be okay with aka obama being our putative president, but I am not. I think all who enabled this travesty against the Constitution and the America of the founding are either traitors guilty of treason or, for the lessor enablers, guilty of misprision of treason. Aka obama is an anti-American domestic enemy marxist islamophile and a self-proclaimed citizen of the world. He is no natural born American. Animus flows in his veins.
If this was 1790, you”d be correct; but this isn’t 1790. In 2015, Naturalization of Aliens is covered in one set of statutes and Citizenship At Birth is covered in a different set of statutes.
I think that the best way to get rid of any elected politician is to vote them out of office. Unfortunately that didn’t happen with Obama, so I am working to elect the best conservative there is for 2016. The Republic is much more important to me than any one individual in the Oval Office.
You know who would prosecute treason, don’t you? The Attorney General, Eric Holder or the Justice Department under any of the 92 U.S. Attorneys, all appointed by Obama and working for Holder.
I realize that there is very little chance anything will be done to expose the aka obama fraud at this point, but those who enabled him are traitors and I refuse to call them anything else.
By the way, you didn’t really respond to my post about what really causes natural allegiance in a person, regardless of however the law is interpreted. Specifically please comment on the importance of being raised by Americans among Americans and imbued in American culture and history.
“It would be far better to nominate someone who is unquestionably NBC qualified.”
Why? The ONLY people concerned so much that they might not vote for him would be a very small handful of people such as yourself. It didn’t stop Barry from being elected.
“So, yes, if the Supremes were to issue a comprehensive definition of the constitutional meaning of NBC, it would end the discussion, at least in practical terms.”
The Supreme Court ruled that once someone certifies a candidate as being eligible as Nancy Pelosi did for Barry, NO ONE HAS STANDING TO CHALLENGE IT!
There. Said it. Who freeping cares??!! The extremely few people that might not vote for Cruz because of this issue is not even worth mentioning.
In 2015, I think that there are very few Americans who believe that a child is born with concepts of “foreign intrigue”. The Framers were concerned with European adults who might come to the U.S. and reestablish a monarchy in a fledgling democratic republic.
[In the Constitutional] “convention, it was, says Mr. George Bancroft, [author of ‘A History of the United States Volume I’ published in 1888,] 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.”— From the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Melville Fuller, U.S. v Wong Kim Ark (1898).
Once aka obama fraud is safely toxic waste water under the political bridge, there is a very real chance that the hypocritical duplicitous dems would wait until the last moment to knock out someone like Ted Cruz on eligibility grounds after it is to late to field another candidate. All it would take to seal the deal would loud support from the marxist main-stream media and the dems in congress would run with it.
Ted Cruz, if he really runs, should seek to short circuit such tactics by taking his eligibility question to SCOTUS. This whole scenario is wrong on many levels, but it may be the only way to ensure Ted Cruz gets full backing from all conservatives and does not get DQed at the last moment.
There has been no ruling by the Supreme Court and many people have been granted standing to challenge Obama’s eligibility.
In fact you can watch excerpts on You Tube from an Obama eligibility trial on the merits held in New Jersey. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5YanY9sBuu0
I'll concede the fact that many people don't care for the constraints of the Constitution.
It didn’t stop Barry from being elected.
True; but then how many things has he gotten done because the representatives [and senators] have been all too willing to ignore the Constitution's limits?
An equally strong conservative Vice Presidential candidate running on the Republican ticket would short circuit that strategy.
Oh? Cite those statuteS. Plural.
Which means, realistically, that the voters have become the group charged with deciding whether a candidate is eligible or not. If they don't care, then there is no other group that is going to come charging in and save the day by ruling a candidate ineligible.
There are 50 states, the considerable majority of which have the legislatures controlled by Republicans and (theoretically) conservatives.
They've had six years to pass a law setting up standards by which a candidate must demonstrate his eligibility in order to get on the ballot.
AFAIK, not one state has done so. If GOP state legislators won't take this rather minor step, what makes you think individual Secretaries of State, without cover of such a law, will take it upon themselves to demand such proof?
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