Posted on 01/18/2016 7:19:37 AM PST by Cboldt
My letter to Jason Savage, the executive diretor of the Maine GOP ...
There is evidence that Cruz is a naturalized citizen of the US. He was born in Canada, and the SCOTUS case of Rogers v. Bellei, if applied, would assign Cruz the status of naturalized citizen of the US.
I understand that certification of his qualifications emanates from the RNC, and that the Maine GOP is powerless to challenge the certification. A certification that is clearly false, as any competent court would find, if it found it had jurisdiction.
I also understand that I am voting, in the general, for an elector, ant that I am not voting for the eventual nominee of the party.
Nonetheless, what is occurring is in the nature of perpetrating a fraud on those who are considering the slate of candidate offered in the primary. The party should offer only qualified candidates.
What should be done about this, and what are you going to do about this?
I went to college in Upstate NY 1968-72, and as such, I had a few classmates with one American and one Canadian parent. Without exception, they had dual citizenship until age 18 (or 21, I forget), at which point they had to choose one or the other.
Since free scholarships to Tan Son Nhut university were all the rage back then, being able to choose Canadian citizenship and remain in the US without penalty was a much-admired thing.
Anyway, another angle to this is the following: Senator Cruz did NOT have to choose at age 18/21, since he remained a Canadian citizen until recently. Now, perhaps the rules for persons born in 1970 were different than for my classmates. But it would be interesting to see how, when, and where Mr. Cruz, as an adult, accepted and affirmed his American citizenship.
I appreciate your sharing. Good insights, I hadn’t considered them, and I find them plausible. It’s in that “white lie” group, to use my vernacular.
Maybe they didn't see a reason to define something so obvious.
The natural born citizen concept isn't new and has similar application and use in property law and inheritance.
Oh well...they did their best, but they never counted on kids like US in times like these.
I believe that even the Founding Fathers themselves wouldn't have standing to challenge a candidate's eligibility in our courts today, not in 2016's Amerika, and they wrote the Constitution!
When I was in school, which was admittedly several decades ago... we were taught that you had to be a natural born citizen to be president. The reason given to us was that the founders did not want someone with “divided loyalties” leading the country.
Ted Cruz did not formally renounce his Canadian citizenship until 2013. He said that despite being a lawyer and constitutional scholar he did not realize that he could have claimed to be a Canadian Citizen until that time. I find this completely disingenuous... everyone that I have known who has had dual citizenship has known about it since they were little kids. And Ted didn’t? Completely unbelievable to me. Everyone and I mean even the dumbest kid in school knew if he was a dual citizen.
I am not a lawyer but because we live close to the border I have had many friends and acquaintances who I have known and worked with who like Ted because of the circumstances of their birth have had “dual citizenship”. It has always been a strange concept to me. It seems to me that especially upon reaching adulthood one should have to pick one team or the other. But it doesn’t work that way.
None of my friends and acquaintances who have had dual citizenship with Canada have had any desire to give it up; it gives them perceived advantages over the rest of us. In my age group one always suspected that they perceived it as an ace if they were to have been drafted. But even women like having that ace in their pocket. Ted chose not to formally give up his dual citizenship until he decided he wanted to become president. That is about how much it would take for everyone else I have known to give up their dual citizenship, so I do not blame him.
When my wife was going to High School, one of the top football players from another district moved to her school. The coaches wouldn’t let him join my wife’s school’s football team because they said that they couldn’t be sure of his loyalties. No one fought the decision because everyone understood the reasoning.
And I am actually a big Cruz fan; he is the smartest man in the race. He also has the best conservative credentials of all the republican contenders. I would love it if he became our next president.
But Trump is correct that Cruz needs to put this issue behind him because it will be used against him in the general election. Hillary is disintegrating even before the real contest begins and Bernie Sanders is a full fledged communist who has no business near the halls of congress let alone the Whitehouse. Their only real hope is that at last minute the candidate they are running against either dies or has some type of total melt down... like being declared ineligible shortly before the general election.
The media would be all over this and they would love it. It really needs to be put to rest right now. Cruz needs to push for some type of formal legal clarification himself. Unlike Obama... Cruz isn’t black and the press doesn’t like him so trying to call people “birthers”, “racists”, etc. won’t catch on and won’t work as a defense.
The constitution put the power in Congress per Article I Section 8.
“To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;”
To follow the logic put forward by the NBC definition crowd, there would not be uniform rules of bankruptcies because of some extra-constitutional document that defines the word bankruptcies in a manner different from Congress’s definition.
I think the GOP was planning to find him unqualified during the convention.
A person can be born a citizen of the US without resort to an Act of Congress, and with resort only to the constitution.
Art IV, born the citizen of a state; 14th amendment, born in the US. Those are not exactly synonymous, but they look to be pretty close to the same thing. Just saying, literal "born on the soil" is perhaps NOT required. Might have to litigate it, in light of statutes, etc., but I see a person can be born citizen of a state, via domicile of the parents.
So, we have a pool of citizens already, setting the power to naturalize aside.
The constitution empowers Congress to increase the number of citizens, but it does not give Congress the power to increase the size of the pool that is qualified for the office of President of the United States.
Again I'll say that i see each of us being firmly attached to our opposing points of view, and that further debate between us on this point can lead only to hard feelings.
This is where we disagree:
1) The constitution does not define citizens via Article IV section 2. That passage difines the requirements for the President. Further the 14th Amendment, REESTABLISHES a means of justification for citizenship at birth (jus soli). Note that the jus soli was removed by Act of Congress and it required an amendment to re-apply it and make it more difficult for future acts of congress to alter it.
2) Article I Section 8 is not limited to making citizens out of non citizens. The power is for ALL rules, including who does not need to be naturalized (born a citizen)
Look again. Pull out your constitution and look.
The constitution is a jus soli regime. ALL nations are. A jus sanguinas regime disperses citizens to the four corners of the earth, and geographic boundaries become irrelevant, except as a historical artifact.
Congress can pass all the jus sanguinas rules it wants to. That is act of naturalization.
For the third time, I urge you to stop your civil debate with me. You are pushing close to my limit of patience.
That would not be surprising to me in the least. I also applaud your post #10 and find it applicable to the current situation with Cruz. This is something that needs to be formally decided now in a legal setting so that the GOP does not have the chance invalidate the wishes and votes of the people at the convention.
This should be fairly easy for SCOTUS to stop “evading” the issue. They can easily find a way to say “citizen mother and born outside US = not natural born” and “citizen mother and born in US = natural born”. If you want to believe 0bama’s BC is real, it protects 0bama and gets rid of Cruz.
Well if you consider the 14th amendment as part of the "whole cloth" of the Constitution the I agree. But why was the 14th needed? Article IV did not establish the rules of citizenship or naturalization other than requiring that they be entitled to all of the privileges of said citizenship.
However, that's not the only claim to citizenship Ted Cruz had at birth, nor was that the only claim on him, since citizenship is a two-way street.
By/At his birth, Canada definitely has a claim on Ted Cruz, too. Maybe a double claim or ? depending on what his father's status might have been and the laws governing marriage and citizenship at that time.
Rubio and Jindal have blemishes on their individual claims to American Citizenship, too. So does obama!
None are natural born citizens, though they are all citizens.
However, obama's situation is the murkiest of them all, since there are so many conflicting claims regarding his birth location and his citizenship inheritance from his father.
Prior to his run for POTUS, obama's claim was his being African born in Kenya.
If true, his situation is similar to Cruz's.
However, Cruz was upfront about his birth location and produced a Canadian birth certificate. Very different from obama.
obama supposedly changed his story to run for POTUS, and only when pushed and shoved did obama produce and release, which Trump takes credit for making happen, what many have said is a fake BC indicating obama's birth in Hawaii.
If the "born in Kenya" to an African citizen father story is true and obama is eligible?
Then pretty much anyone is eligible, including Cruz, but the courts have been made to dodge ruling on the NBC question one way or another.
Personally, I'm glad that Trump has gotten US to look at this issue again.
It's far from settled and VERY unsettling!
Half of the 14th amendment is jus soli, born in the US. Half of the 14th is everything else, including jus sanguinas if Congress makes a naturalization rule along those lines. And of course, it is expected the people will want a rule that makes their blood line into citizens.
The 14th amendment was needed because some states refused to grant citizenship to children born of slaves, making Art IV useless. Congress can't compel a state (which is a nation unto itself) to change it's citizenship laws, but it can make US citizens out of persons the states were obstinate about.
I have a sense that you are quite open minded about this, and I thank you for that.
Nor did it establish all the rules that would be given full faith and credit (Art IV, Sec. 1). To figure out who is a citizen of the US under Article IV, one has to look to state law.
Federalism.
That Congress did not even debate this, just blows my mind. What a bunch of useless, elitist turkeys. Oh so wise, and oh so foolish and arrogant.
Thank you. May I use that paraphrased? I want to write to my state committee, my Secretary of State and a letter to the editor of the local paper. I really would like to see some of these people go on record as to why this is being allowed.
I know the guy that was SoS here, same church, Sunday-schooled his kids. Nice guy, DEM, but nice guy. Never thought to bother the SoS with this issue, but that is a great place to complain about fraud on the public.
Make sure you refer to Rogers V. Bellei. Their lawyers will look up that case, and crap themselves. This is a hot potatoe (Hi! Dan Quayle), and none of them want to be the one that blows the whistle.
Thank you, and thank you for the suggestion.
As I read our Revised Statutes the Secretary of State and the Attorney General have to address challenges to a candidate’s qualifications based on the Constitution or NRS. I’ll have to see what they say when I write.
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