Posted on 02/27/2015 8:41:40 PM PST by Signalman
Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, CA on December 22nd, 1970. At the time of his birth, his mother was an American citizen.
Now picture a female American soldier stationed in, say, Germany. She gives birth to a boy. The boy was not born in CONUS, but there is no doubt he is an American citizen because his mother is a US citizen.
To me, Cruz's situation is equvilaent.
There is nothing in the Constutution, to my knowledge stating that Cruz would not be eligible to be POTUS based on the circumstances of his birth.
Natural born isn't about the person's birth location. Natural born is about the location of both parent's birth.
The founders had a serious concern about divided allegiances if either of the president's parents were natives of a different country.
The founders alleviated their concerns by adding this restriction on presidential candidates but not on congressional candidates.
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;
Citizenship is a person's inheritance and it comes from three sources: Father, Mother and place of birth.
There are several levels or "purity" of citizenship with Natural Born Citizenship being the most pure since Father, Mother and place of birth all convey the same inheritance to the child.
Natural Born Citizenship is determined at the time of birth logically by a three input AND gate, where the citizenship of the Father, the citizenship of the Mother and the place of birth are the inputs.
If the output is True, then the child is a Natural Born Citizen.
For example, if the Father is an American citizen, the Mother is an American citizen and the child is born in America, then the child is a Natural Born American Citizen.
If any of the inputs change, then the output of the three input AND gate is False and the child is not a Natural Born American Citizen.
That is not to say that the child isn't an American citizen, just not a "Natural Born" American Citizen.
In those examples, logically speaking, the child's citizenship "purity", so to speak, has been diluted at birth by one or more of the inputs to the three input AND gate.
As such, the child could have multiple choices of citizenship, each conveyed at birth by the Father, the Mother and the place of birth.
If that's the case, then Law and Treaty and Nature would ultimately decide, not Nature alone as is the case with a Natural Born Citizen.
A statutory naturalized citizen of the United States “at birth” is not the same as a common law “natural born citizen” “by birth. Simply stated, the definition of a natural born citizen comes from the common law the nomenclature with which the Framers were familiar when they drafted and adopted the Constitution. Minor v. Happersett (1875) (positively cited and quoted in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). That definition is a child born in a country to parents who were its citizens at the time of the child’s birth. In contradistinction, the definition of a “citizen” of the United States “at birth” comes from the Fourteenth Amendment or naturalization Acts of Congress, depending on one’s birth circumstances. With respect to Mr. Obama, assuming he was born in the United States to a U.S. citizen mother and non-U.S. citizen father, it comes from the Fourteenth Amendment. Regarding Senator Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada to a U.S. citizen mother and a non-U.S. citizen father, it comes from 8 U.S.C. Sec. 1401(g), a naturalization Act of Congress. Hence, neither Obama nor Cruz satisfy the constitutional common law definition of a natural born citizen. Rather, they are made “citizens” of the United States “at birth” by positive law which did not exist at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and which did not repeal or amend the original common law definition of a natural born citizen. They are therefore not natural born citizens.
Mario Apuzzo, Esq.
Well, counselor, there’s an immigration judge up-thread who disagrees with you.
The Constitution distinguishes between Citizen and natural born Citizen, in the very eligibility requirements for POTUS in Article II, Section 1. This is a fundamental national security provision of the highest law in the land and there is no provision for ignoring the distinction.
Ted Cruz is well aware of this distinction and does not claim to be a NBC. He passively allows low-information voters to recognize the difference - or not. This tactic worked fine for Obama.
Every US President born after Ratification (a salient point; see Art. II, Sec. 1) was born in the US to two citizen parents, except for two:
1. Chester A. Arthur, who lied about his citizenship status and burned his vital records just prior to his death.
2. Barack Hussien Obama, who claimed for at least 16 years that he was born in Kenya until two months after he launched his 2008 POTUS campaign.
Now Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio feel at liberty to further erode the law of the land. Is there no statesman willing to honor their oath of office to defend the US Constitution?
Your appeal to authority does not win your argument. Please provide the historical and legal sources and reasoning that support the immigration judge’s opinion. I hope that you know what they are since you have accepted his opinion.
No, you show me in the US Constitution the definition of “Natural Born Citizen.”
Is Ted Cruz a natural-born citizen eligible to serve as president? [Yes! And I support him! JimRob]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3084490/posts
They don’t do too many 2008 zots, but that’s not to say they never do any.
Thank you for confirming that you have nothing of substance to support your position.
The Constitution distinguishes between citizens and natural born citizens, not between naturalized citizens and natural born citizens.
I go by the constitution, what do you go by?
I said the Constitution distinguishes.
You’re a lawyer. Show us all where it does so.
I stood up and cheered at the TV when he said that! GO TED!!!
Anyone who is literate can see the distinction in Article II, Section 1, not just an attorney. If you were born before ratification of the Constitution you must be a Citizen to be President. After that, you must be a natural born Citizen.
See here:
“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...”
Okay, now define natural born citizen and show us how Ted Cruz isn’t one.
I can admit that I have no credentials and nothing new to add to this discussion; however, I think I am at least enough familiar with the principle issues contested in the argument to provide a basic summary.
The framers used the phrase “natural born citizen” not “person born a citizen” although the latter was certainly an option that might have occurred to them.
The choice of those specific three words could imply that they had a specific meaning in mind for the phrase—that it was for them a term of art that held a particular application not contingent upon however congress may varyingly legislate the conditions of citizenship throughout the Republic’s future that then lay still ahead.
If they did indeed choose the words they did because they had a specific meaning in mind, it is at least plausible (I think most likely) that they meant to
invoke the definition of Vattel’s “naturels” which he defines in his Law of Nations as those born in that country of which their parents were citizens. We know that the founders depended heavily upon the ideas of Vattel as they broke new ground in establishing this Constitutional Republic. Also in the very early English translations of Vattel’s work, the word naturels was rendered “Natural born citizen”.
On this point many will counter that the framers had perhaps instead meant to invoke the idea behind British legal scholar Blackstone’s “Natural Born Subject” which was broader. However, the founders saw a crucial distinction between the meaning of “subject” and that of “citizen.” The former is deemed such in service to and under the dominion of the monarch, while the latter implies privilege and to some extent responsibility are owned by the individual. Thus “subject” denotes all people upon whom the king may make some claim as beholding unto the throne and as such would naturally seek to apply to a broader class of people than the idea of citizenship. The framers intentionally preferred “citizenship” for founding documents since it conveyed the idea that the individual is the privileged stake-holder in his country, not a being living and serving unto the pleasure of his king.
One of the key factors in support of reading Vattel’s meaning in Article II is the fact that in Minor v. Happersett, the supreme court’s decision specifically connected the term “natural born citizen” with the meaning found in Vattel. The decision went on then to add that whether lesser conditions were sufficient to designate one to be a “citizen” (not natural born citizen) was less certain. The implication of their language in determining whether the plaintiff was a citizen was that the term “citizen” was uncertain or in doubt because it could be variously construed, but that the subclass of citizen, “natural born citizen” had a specific definition which they stated was “never in doubt”. Thus it seems very reasonable to interpret the earliest and perhaps most prominent time when natural born citizenship was contemplated by the Supreme Court as declaring the exact meaning Vattel had in mind. If so, it would seem Obama and Cruz are excluded. And that would be the case despite whatever statutory legislation is in effect to regard them citizens at the times of their births. Again, as Mr. Apuzzo said, why would this phrase of the Constitution be subject to being redefined at the whim of congress without the need to meet the burden required for amending its meaning in any other significant way.
For what it’s worth the quotation from the LA Times attributed to an immigration judge you mentioned near the beginning of this thread doesn’t seem to state an opinion specifically with regard to whether or not Cruz is a “natural born citizen.” Yes, I know it’s implied, but I mean to make the point that there is only one office in America impacted by the the natural born citizen clause. Immigration judges may be interested all day long in who is a citizen and and by what virtue a person is a citizen, and even on occasion perhaps whether a person is born a citizen, but an immigration judge never has any practical cause to contemplate much less make a ruling upon whether a person satisfies the framers specific “natural born” criterion.
Sorry if you were already familiar with all of that. I just got the impression that some here, including perhaps the original poster, were not up to speed on some of the complexities that come into play regarding the “natural born citizen” debate. Though I am not as confident as Mr. Apuzzo and lack the legal training from which he draws, I personally am inclined to interpret historical, linguistic and literary evidence as indicating that the framers never intended that their idea of natural born citizen would apply to people born under the circumstances Obama or Cruz—or even Chester Arthur—were born under.
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