Posted on 01/11/2016 4:27:13 PM PST by NaturalBornConservative
:: Cruz's Dilemma
- By: Larry Walker, II -
The concept of natural born Citizenship is clear and concise, to anyone with a rational mind. Although some may wish to contort its meaning to fit the presidential candidate of their choice, natural law is incapable of such bias. It takes two parents to produce a child, one male and one female, but you would never know it if your source of information is the lamestream media. By its logic, only one parent is sufficient.
Epigrammatically speaking, if both of your parents were U.S. Citizens at the time of your birth, you are without question a natural born Citizen of the United States. The location of your birth matters little. You could have been born in Kenya, Canada, Panama, or perhaps on the Moon, but as long as both parents were U.S. Citizens, at the time of your birth, you are without question a natural born Citizen.
According to Vattel's Law of Nations, Chapter 19 § 212: "The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights... The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent."
You can think of natural born citizenship as free and clear citizenship. In other words, the rights of the parents (plural) are passed to their children. Thus, when both parents are U.S. Citizens, their offspring are natural born U.S. Citizens, free and clear. No other country has a claim of right. Comprende?
However, if at the time of your birth, your father was a Citizen of Kenya and your mother of the U.S., this would pose a problem. Oh no! What's the problem? The problem is duality. Under such circumstances, the child would be a Citizen of Kenya (a British subject pre-1964) by virtue of its father, and equally a Citizen of the United States by virtue of its mother. There's nothing free and clear in this circumstance. Upon the age of consent, such a child may claim citizenship with one country or the other; however, citizenship does not equal natural born citizenship.
You might not like the result of the above graphic, but that's simply the way it is. Here are some recent examples.
Is John McCain a natural born Citizen? John McCain's parents were both U.S. Citizens at the time of his birth, thus he is a natural born Citizen. It matters not that he was born on a military base in Panama. He could have been born in Siberia. No matter where he was born, McCain is a natural born American Citizen by virtue of his parent's common nationality, at the time of his birth. You got that?
Is Ted Cruz a natural born Citizen? Ted Cruz's father was a Cuban Citizen and his mother a U.S. Citizen, at the time of his birth. Thus, whether born in the U.S., Cuba, or Canada (where he was actually born) he is not a natural born Citizen of either.
Cruz was born with citizenship rights to both Cuba and the United States. Although he may have chosen U.S. citizenship, at the age of majority, natural born citizenship is not something one chooses. Natural born citizenship is a right passed from one's parents at birth. As such, Ted Cruz is no more a natural born Citizen than is Barack Obama.
The U.S. is filled with undocumented aliens, birthright Citizens, permanent residents, dual status Citizens, naturalized Citizens, and natural born Citizens. Whether the children of undocumented foreigners, born on U.S. soil, are U.S. Citizens by birthright is questionable. However, without question, such children are not natural born Citizens of the United States.
The main issue is this. According to Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution, "No Person except a natural born Citizen shall be eligible to the Office of President." So where does that leave Ted Cruz? Is he a U.S. Citizen? Sure, if he affirmed. Is he a natural born Citizen? Due to the citizenship status of his parent's, at the time of his birth, he clearly is not.
Is Ted Cruz eligible to run for the presidency? Technically no, since he is not a natural born Citizen. But since you allowed Barack Obama, who is plain as day not a natural born Citizen, why stop Ted Cruz or anyone else for that matter? If it weren't for that confounded Constitution, we could nominate whomever we yearned, without conscience. But, since we do have a blessed Constitution, it's up to us, rather than fainthearted federal judges, to see that it is upheld.
Reference: #NaturalBornCitizen
Only if they are not citizens by birth.
Their acts have naturalized Cruz.
Not so. Ted Cruz is a citizen by birth. He was never naturalized because he didn't have to be. If he were naturalized, he'd have a naturalization certificate. You produce one of those in Ted Cruz's name and I'll switch sides in this argument.
He needed the power of congress to write law for his citizenship to be.
What gives you this idea? And even if true that legislation extended natural born citizenship to those born outside the US, that is merely an expression of what natural born citizenship already is: the recognition of the natural affinity of a child for the societal and family ties that bind the child to the parent's homeland and polity.
Think for a moment about what you are proposing and the unintended consequences. My God!
This could be a problem for Donald Trump because as far as I know he has not renounced the British nationality he inherited from his from his dual citizen mother.
Kim Wong does stand as law?
It stands as precedent and will until an actual case on point comes before the Court that would permit the Kim Wong Ark decision to be reconsidered. that has not happened to date. In the meantime the decision is roundly discredited on every front. It was and remains a horrible precedent, and the dicta in the case is even worse, and gave Justice Brennan the fig leaf he needed for his own piece of gratuitous dicta that opened the door to the phenomenon we call 'anchor babies'.
You need a reason to hold Kim Wong Ark in contempt; just think of anchor babies. You have reason enough.
Actually, you’re leaving out a critical word of the sentence from the 1790 immigration and naturalization act. It doesn’t just say “natural born citizen.” It says that those like Cruz will be considered “as natural born citizens.” Which is the very definition of naturalization. They have been made as if they are natural born. That doesn’t mean they were natural born. They’ve simply been naturalized, by statute.
The founders seemed to have figured out that their wording could cause confusion though, and in 1795 removed that troublesome wording.
In any case, acts of Congress cannot change the Constitution. It takes an amendment process to do that.
Court opinions that violate the Constitution are null and void. They don’t have to be obeyed by anyone. In fact, those who obey such opinions find themselves also in violation of their own oaths.
The intentions of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment are crystal clear. They had absolutely no intention of granting citizenship to the children of foreign nationals who are born in our country.
“[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”
— Abraham Lincoln
“You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Jarvis
Here is how this works.
A child born to one US citizen parent on US soil is a natural born citizen. Will you dispute that?
A child therefore born on foreign soil cannot fall under some new unwritten rule where both parents are required any more than relying entirely on the lineage and citizenship of the father as in English law of old.
A child therefore born on foreign soil of a US mother is considered natural born today, and in 1870.
We can argue this till the cows evolve into hamburgers. Depending on the candidate. we will choose our sides and weapons of choice.
“Who do you think our Founder’s referenced at that time?”
The question should be broadened to include what, besides who.
Natural law, common law, Magna Carta, English Bill of Rights, Virginia Declaration of Rights, social contract, canon law, natural rights........
....and to the extent our basic laws have CHANGED, so have some of these.
In the area of women, and slaves to mention some examples.
The NBC question DOES need to be settled. Personally I would like it settled by the US Supreme Court.
Not Dr. Orly Taitz Esquire, on her days off from real estate and dental work.
Excellent post
I’ve come to the point that I do not want it settled by the Supreme Court, or by Congress. I want it settled by the real final arbiters of the Constitution and its meaning: We the People.
Which means that we, in the interest of keeping disloyal traitors like Barack Obama out of the position of Commander-in-Chief, should demand the absolute strictest interpretation of the Natural Born Citizen requirement.
Thank you.
I see you wrote parent's and not parents'.
What of the societal and family ties of a person born to citizens of two different nations?
From the Constitution: No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;
At the time of the Founding there were NO natural born citizens of the U.S. Everyone who was a citizen of the U.S. at the adoption was born to two parents who had not been citizens of the U.S.
The Founders explicitly excluded such people from the prohibition but included a prohibition which would eventually restrict eligibility such that some citizens would not qualify.
I can imagine no reason for excluding such persons aside from the possibility that their loyalty might be in question. Despite any concerns over what was "fair" some citizens were to be excluded from the Presidency.
What possible sense would it make to exclude only those who had two foreign parents. How is a person's loyalty not divided by having even one parent who is not a citizen?
The Founders would have envisioned a nation teeming with "natural born citizens" and would have had no qualms whatever about excluding those with a lesser tendency to disloyalty than those we all agree were to be excluded.
Yes, indeed, as guided by the Immigration and Naturalization act of 1790.
What possible sense would it make to exclude only those who had two foreign parents. How is a person's loyalty not divided by having even one parent who is not a citizen?
The purpose was to exclude naturalized citizens. Citizens by birth could easily include those whose mothers were not citizens, or at least not citizens by birth. Remember in those days, only the citizenship of the father was it issue. The citizenship of women was far more mutable and of minimal concern. After all women could not vote or hold office. We need to keep this historical lens in mind when thinking about how these things relate to our time, and allow the sexes to be reversed, allowing both citizen fathers and mothers to bequeath citizenship.
We also know that the men of the time almost immediately legislated to the effect that children of citizens born "beyond the sea" were to be considered natural born citizens. Clearly these men were expressing a will to reduce the significance of jus solis and increase the significance of jus sanguinis.
Finally, I wish to point out that this issue of divided loyalty gets far too much importance attached. Dual nationality CANNOT be the criterion for determining whether or not someone is 'natural born' since it is not our polity, but theirs, who determines nationality in other nations. If dual nationality were the criterion, we would have the absurd situation where Donald Trump, without question a natural born citizen on both jus solis and jus sanguinis bases to be excluded from the Presidency due to his dual American - British nationality. That would be a truly absurd result, but one that is entirely consistent with the facts of his birth.
For these reasons, and because the Vattel hypothesis regarding natural born citizenship leads to other similarly absurd results in todays world of equality between the sexes, it can't be sustained.
If both parents are citizens, then the dual citizenship of the parents is of no concern. The concern is when one of the parents is not a citizen at all and might conceivably have NO loyalty to the nation.
Is a child born in a foreign land to a naturalized U.S. citizen and a non-citizen "natural born"? I don't believe that is what our Founders intended.
I doubt they thought much about it at all, since wives were universally considered to adopt their husband's nationality. So if the father was a US citizen, so would be his children by the operation of natural law, regardless of where they were born. Conversely if the mother were a US citizen and had married a foreigner, her children would inherit the citizenship of the father also by natural law.
In other words in the time of the founders, one need not consider the situation of mixed nationality married couples. This is a modern development and one that we must adapt to.
With the modern day acceptance of the equality of the sexes before the law, and where wives no longer adopt the nationality of their husbands, women as well as men must be able to bequeath their nationality to their children by the operation of natural law. It's not 1765 any more.
“...It says that those like Cruz will be considered “as natural born citizens.”...”
And that is enough to show original intent. No one pulled a pocket-knife on them and forced them to include that language... Pelosi/Reid didn’t go back in time and “sneak” that language in there... The founders who wrote the section of the constitution on POTUS being NBC, also knowingly and willingly wrote the other section specifically giving congress the sole authority to manage citizenship by statute.
That someone is a citizen by birth is absolutely valid. That a law can also define what a certain circumstance of birth equates to is also just as valid. A mere three years after the founders wrote the NBC clause in the constitution, they used their constitutionally granted authority over citizenship and defined one circumstance of birth as a certain type of citizen. Why would they do that if it was not what they believed? It flatly refutes Vattel (which also tends to refute the claim they wrote the constitution per Vattel), though it does align nicely with British Common Law concepts which Taft (president and justice) noted is the legal style/foundation that the founders thought, argued and wrote in because it was *most* familiar to them.
You are correct on the NBC citizenship type at birth. That is absolutely valid. But your point also does not preclude citizenship *laws* being valid. The 1790 Act, regardless of being law and or later modified is also just as valid in determining original intent. Legally speaking, the only thing that matters is what the citizenship law was when Cruz was born - and that law is valid because the founders (who wrote the NBC clause) also wrote the part of the constitution that granted congress permission to legislate citizenship.
Both are currently (and have been since the founding) valid — at least until a court of competent jurisdiction says different and/or congress acts to affirmatively resolve any related issue. Which would be yet another law, valid until changed or SCOTUS says different. Lather, rinse, repeat...
And as I’ve said, if Cruz would have been fine by the founders, who am I to argue with them?
Best of luck with your candidate!
‘Sen Cruz qualifies as a US Citizen at birth because of his US Citizen mother.’
Has this been addressed?
Both mother and father of Cruz — registered to vote in Canada [breitbart]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3381497/posts
[Was she a Canadian citizen? If she repatriates to the US, does that still make him eligibible anyway? Been asking, no solid answers yet.]
That makes no logical sense since citizenship of some other country is controlled by that other country.
So European countries allow the citizenship of grand fathers and/or grand mothers to be grounds for the claim. Thus a child born on US soil of two US citizens would be able to “claim” that other citizenship.
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