Rand Paul Hammers Cruz—Nominee with Canadian Birth Would Be ‘Extraordinary,’ Challenged

Brietbart Television ^ | January 27, 2016 | Jeff Poor

[2001convSVT]

Is Mitch McConnell pulling Paul’s string on this, I sense a rat behind all this.

[ManHunter]

That’s cute - infantile, but cute, like most of your posts.

It’s clear to me that the definition of what the Framers meant by “natural born” is not, by any means, “settled law” at all. With very few exceptions, I lean strongly toward the originalist view of the Constitution and rely on the text of the Constitution, communication between the Framers and the Framers’ writings on specific subjects to infer their intent.

Some of the legal arguments on both sides of this issue are very convoluted and amount to “pretzel logic”. I cannot find a single source to substantiate some of the claims regarding the Framers’ intended meaning of the term “natural born”. Even scholarly legal articles on the subject use qualifiers like “seems to” and “suggests” or “implies”. Applying what some represent as the originalist view of the Framers’ intended meaning of “natural born”, i.e., only the Constitution itself or amendments thereto - not subsequent legislation, can be used to determine or infer the intended meaning of “natural born”. Therefore, an American Indian child born to Indian parents on a reservation in the United States would not be a “natural born” citizen of the United States since American Indians were not conferred citizenship until 1924 with passage of the Indian Citizenship Act (legislation). Thus, applying the (unsupportable in this case) originalist view, an American Indian cannot become president.

Does anyone really believe that? The fact that this view is supported by Donald Trump - who is obviously no originalist and probably knows less about the definition of the term originalist than he does about the nuclear triad is laughable.

What bothers me and many others about this debate over the meaning of “natural born” is the fact that Senator Cruz has never denied or attempted to obfuscate the fact that he was born in Canada of an American mother and Cuban father. That is not the case with Obama, wherein virtually everything about his past has been lied about, concealed or purposefully obfuscated, but somehow the meaning of natural born is now an issue - to Donald Trump and many of his followers.

[ManHunter]

And therein lies my objection to Rand Paul. On numerous occasions, Paul - a supposed Libertarian, has chosen to side not with Cruz and Lee, but with McConnell.

[JimRed]

What did he say about the Kenyan birth?

[2ndDivisionVet]

So? Two or three individuals have already done so.