Posted on 01/20/2016 6:57:04 AM PST by RC one
If Ted Cruz is a “natural-born citizen,†eligible to be president, what was all the fuss about Obama being born in Kenya? No one disputed that Obama’s mother was a U.S. citizen.
Cruz was born in Canada to an American citizen mother and an alien father. If he’s eligible to be president, then so was Obama — even if he’d been born in Kenya.
As with most constitutional arguments, whether or not Cruz is a “natural-born citizen†under the Constitution apparently comes down to whether you support Cruz for president. (Or, for liberals, whether you think U.S. citizenship is a worthless thing that ought to be extended to every person on the planet.)
Forgetting how corrupt constitutional analysis had become, I briefly believed lawyers who assured me that Cruz was a “natural-born citizen,†eligible to run for president, and “corrected†myself in a single tweet three years ago. That tweet’s made quite a stir!
But the Constitution is the Constitution, and Cruz is not a “natural-born citizen.†(Never let the kids at Kinko’s do your legal research.)
I said so long before Trump declared for president, back when Cruz was still my guy — as lovingly captured on tape last April by the Obama birthers (www.birtherreport.com/2015/04/shocker-anti-birther-ann-coulter-goes.html).
The Constitution says: “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.â€
The phrase “natural born†is a legal term of art that goes back to Calvin’s Case, in the British Court of Common Pleas, reported in 1608 by Lord Coke. The question before the court was whether Calvin — a Scot — could own land in England, a right permitted only to English subjects.
The court ruled that because Calvin was born after the king of Scotland had added England to his realm, Calvin was born to the king of both realms and had all the rights of an Englishman.
It was the king on whose soil he was born and to whom he owed his allegiance — not his Scottish blood — that determined his rights.
Not everyone born on the king’s soil would be “natural born.†Calvin’s Case expressly notes that the children of aliens who were not obedient to the king could never be “natural†subjects, despite being “born upon his soil.†(Sorry, anchor babies.) However, they still qualified for food stamps, Section 8 housing and Medicaid.
Relying on English common law for the meaning of “natural born,†the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that “the acquisition of citizenship by being born abroad of American parents†was left to Congress “in the exercise of the power conferred by the Constitution to establish an uniform rule of naturalization.†(U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898); Rogers v. Bellei (1971); Zivotofsky v. Kerry (2015), Justice Thomas, concurring.)
A child born to American parents outside of U.S. territory may be a citizen the moment he is born — but only by “naturalization,†i.e., by laws passed by Congress. If Congress has to write a law to make you a citizen, you’re not “natural born.â€
Because Cruz’s citizenship comes from the law, not the Constitution, as late as 1934, he would not have had “any conceivable claim to United States citizenship. For more than a century and a half, no statute was of assistance. Maternal citizenship afforded no benefit†— as the Supreme Court put it in Rogers v. Bellei (1971).
That would make no sense if Cruz were a “natural-born citizen†under the Constitution. But as the Bellei Court said: “Persons not born in the United States acquire citizenship by birth only as provided by Acts of Congress.†(There’s an exception for the children of ambassadors, but Cruz wasn’t that.)
So Cruz was born a citizen — under our naturalization laws — but is not a “natural-born citizen†— under our Constitution.
I keep reading the arguments in favor of Cruz being a “natural-born citizen,†but don’t see any history, any Blackstone Commentaries, any common law or Supreme Court cases.
One frequently cited article in the Harvard Law Review cites the fact that the “U.S. Senate unanimously agreed that Senator McCain was eligible for the presidency.†Sen. McCain probably was natural born — but only because he was born on a U.S. military base to a four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy, and thus is analogous to the ambassador’s child described in Calvin’s Case. (Sorry, McCain haters — oh wait! That’s me!) But a Senate resolution — even one passed “unanimously“! — is utterly irrelevant. As Justice Antonin Scalia has said, the court’s job is to ascertain “objective law,†not determine “some kind of social consensus,†which I believe is the job of the judges on “American Idol.†(On the other hand, if Congress has the power to define constitutional terms, how about a resolution declaring that The New York Times is not “speech“?)
Mostly, the Cruz partisans confuse being born a citizen with being a “natural born citizen.†This is constitutional illiteracy. “Natural born†is a legal term of art. A retired judge who plays a lot of tennis is an active judge, but not an “active judge†in legal terminology. The best argument for Cruz being a natural born citizen is that in 1790, the first Congress passed a law that provided: “The children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens.†Except the problem is, neither that Congress, nor any Congress for the next 200 years or so, actually treated them like natural born citizens.
As the Supreme Court said in Bellei, a case about the citizenship of a man born in Italy to a native-born American mother and an Italian father: “It is evident that Congress felt itself possessed of the power to grant citizenship to the foreign born and at the same time to impose qualifications and conditions for that citizenship.†The most plausible interpretation of the 1790 statute is that Congress was saying the rights of naturalized citizens born abroad are the same as the rights of the natural born — except the part about not being natural born.
Does that sound odd? It happens to be exactly what the Supreme Court said in Schneider v. Rusk (1964): “We start from the premise that the rights of citizenship of the native born and of the naturalized person are of the same dignity, and are coextensive. The only difference drawn by the Constitution is that only the ’natural born’ citizen is eligible to be president. (Article II, Section 1)“
Unless we’re all Ruth Bader Ginsburg now, and interpret the Constitution to mean whatever we want it to mean, Cruz is not a “natural born citizen.†Take it like a man, Ted — and maybe President Trump will make you attorney general.
Quite the quandry indeed. Endorse subverting the constitution to allow Cruz to usurp the office, or follow the constitution. Decisions, decisions.
“The fact that his mother was enrolled in classes in Seattle on August 19, 1961 makes that a pretty difficult thing to believe.”
But did she attend them?
Was she lying then, or is she lying now? Maybe she studied the law, and found out her previous position was in error.
Nobody is saying Ted is not an American.
No, they were not stupid. That’s why they would all say that Ted is eligible, as evidenced by their clear language. As I stated, I think stridency over nonsense gives pleasure to some conservatives.
I would say the birth certificate cover up was not due to location or anything else, but who the father actually was.
I am still wearing a tinfoil hat and saying the real father was Frank Marshall Davis and the forging or other perceived foul play was to remove his name.
John Armor Bingham (January 21, 1815 – March 19, 1900) was an American Republican congressman from the U.S. state of Ohio, judge advocate in the trial of the Abraham Lincoln assassination and a prosecutor in the impeachment trials of Andrew Johnson. He is also the principal framer of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Personal attacks are always a valid way of proving your point and settling a Constitutional question. In no way does it make you look like a complete nutter. More popcorn, please.
I don’t believe I have resorted to personal attacks much as it might be warranted.
If the will of Congress, expressed in a statute, was that children born in Cambodia, of Cambodian parents, are citizens of the US at birth (and it is ludicrous to think an infant is competent to participate in a naturalization ceremony), such an Act is valid under the power of Congress to naturalize. By your rule, these persons are NBC of the US. But your rule is not the one that operate in the law.
By the way, those hypothetical Cambodians would, as a matter of law, be citizens of the US.
We can look to the constitution, which contains the will of the founders. Art IV, Sec. 2 says that a person who is a citizen of a state is at the same time a citizen of the US. By your rule, Congress could change this, too, by Act of Congress.
The constitution. Where do you find in there that such child would be a citizen?
American mothers have AMERICAN children. You don’t WANT to accept the truth.
That is correct, of course, and the one-worlders do all they can to mislead and redirect the argument.
The perspective from Jay and Washington and the ENTIRE group of our founders - who, by the way had just fought an enormously bloody and costly revolution which was made even more difficult by "Americans" who were loyal to England - is apparent from both what is in the record and the fact the term NBC was included without debate:
The commander-in-chief's loyalty to the nation shall not be compromised by:
a) birth outside of the U.S. in a nation that may later attempt to influence that loyalty, nor;
b) birth to a non-citizen parent who may later be in a position to influence that loyalty.
Any who argue the founders did not intend such qualifications have the burden of demonstrating the founders intended something else. But there is nothing else, there is no better way of assuring the loyalty of the commander-in-chief. There is no evidence the founders intended anything but NBC in its highest form.
Was Mr. Bingham a Founder? No. This idea would have ruled ineligible our first eight presidents!
The constitution say who is a citizen of the US. If one is going to make a citizenship determination under US law, the constitution is one source of law, but not the only source of law. There are literally thousands of cases in US law on the subject of citizenship, when citizenship is in question. The determination of citizenship in those cases looks to citizenship law of other nations.
Your error, and you are hidebound to it, is to believe that as a matter of law, naturalization requires participation in a naturalization ceremony.
You are the one afflicted with magic thinking.
The question of citizenship is a question of law. I have produced my legal reasoning and argument, using the US constitution as my authority. Where there is some difficulty in understanding how that is applied, I have referred to SCOTUS precedent on the subject of citizenship, and the distinction between being born a citizen relying solely on the constitution, compared with citizenship attached solely by Act of Congress. The latter is "naturalized." Every bit an American as one born so, but not NBC.
I wasn’t referring to you, the poster of the article, but more to some of those that responded with personal attacks on each other and Ann Coulter, rather than arguing facts.
The internet.
Secondly, I will Take John Bingham's opinion over yours because, as I said, you are utterly clueless on this matter.
Thirdly, this utter cluelessness is evidenced by the fact that you don't even know what Article II, section I, clause 5 says, why it says it, or what it might mean and yet you feel qualified to assert that your opinion on this constitutional matter is somehow more valid than that of John Bingham.
Your fail is epic.
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