Posted on 06/03/2013 4:56:19 PM PDT by Kevin in California
It isn’t that the federal law that provides birthright citizenship has a minimum age (whether 21 or otherwise) for a U.S. citizen to transmit birthright citizenship to his or her child born abroad whose other parent is an alien; it’s that the law only allows a U.S.-citizen parent to pass on U.S. citizenship to the foreign-born child if such U.S.-citizen parent has, in the past, lived a certain number of years in the U.S., of which a certain number of those years must be after turning 14 years of age. Nowadays, the U.S.-citizen parent must have lived at least 5 years in the U.S., and at least 1 year in the U.S. after the age of 14, for the foreign-born child with a single U.S. citizen parent to be a U.S. citizen at birth. But the law in the books before 1986 or so, and during the births of both Obama and Cruz, required that a foreign-born child with only one U.S.-citizen parent was a U.S. citizen at birth only if the U.S. citizen parent had in the past lived in the U.S. for a total of at least 10 years, of which at least 5 years took place after turning 14.
Ted Cruz’s New Jerseyan mother had lived in the U.S. for over 20 years, and more than 10 years after turning 14, before she and her husband moved to Calgary to work forcan oil company, so there is no doubt that Ted Cruz was a U.S. citizen at birth (and thus a natural born citizen) despite being born in Canada.
Barack Obama’s mother, on the other hand, did not meet the requirement as of 1961, since she was only 18 years old when Obama was born, and thus it was mathematically impossible for her to have lived in the U.S. for as much as 5 years after turning 14. So if Obama was born abroad, he would not be a U.S. citizen at birth, because he only had one U.S. citizen parent and at that time such parent didn’t meet the requirements to transmit her U.S. citizenship to a child born abroad. That’s why it was so important for Obama to insist that he was born in Hawaii, since otherwise he would not be a natural born citizen (or even a U.S. citizen, absent a later naturalization).
So the requirement isn’t that the U.S.-citizen parent must be at least 21 for his or her foreign-born child with just one U.S.-citizen parent to be a U.S. citizen at birth—it is that such U.S. citizen parent have lived at least a certain number of years in the U.S., including a certain number of years after turning 14. And even back when Obama and Cruz was born, it was possible for a U.S. citizen who was under 21 (but, due to the post-14 requirement, not for one under 19) to transmit birthright citizenship to a foreign-born child; and a U.S. citizen older than 21 would not transmit U.S. citizenship to a foreign-born child with only one U.S.-citizen parent if she didn’t meet the past-U.S. residency requirements.
Ok, a bit more complicated than I knew.
Otherwise I was right?
Yes, you had the gist of it: Cruz is a natural-born citizen irrespective of where he was born, while Obama would only be a natural-born citizen if he was born in the United States.
But by those standards about a dozen other presidents would not have been POTUS, but they WERE!
Plus...............
‘In short, the Constitution says that the president must be a natural-born citizen. “The weight of scholarly legal and historical opinion appears to support the notion that ‘natural born Citizen’ means one who is entitled under the Constitution or laws of the United States to U.S. citizenship ‘at birth’ or ‘by birth,’ including any child born ‘in’ the United States, the children of United States citizens born abroad, and those born abroad of one citizen parents who has met U.S. residency requirements,” the CRS’s Jack Maskell wrote.
So in short: Cruz is a citizen; Cruz is not naturalized; therefore Cruz is a natural-born citizen, and in any case his mother is a citizen. You can read the CRS memo at bottom; here’s a much longer and more detailed 2011 version.’
The only past president who quite possibly did not meet the Vattel definition of "Natural Born Citizen" was Chester A. Arthur. In his case, he was definitely born in the US, but his foreign-born father was probably not naturalized as an American citizen until after his son's birth. Arthur never ran for president in an election, but rather was elected to the vice-presidency and succeeded the late James Garfield to the presidency after the latter was assassinated. The issue of Arthur's constitutional eligibility, or lack thereof, was not widely discussed at the time, probably because of the unusual circumstances and his reluctance to get into his family history.
Then too, there's the Obama matter, where we don't even have bona fide documentation of American citizenship at all.
“The weight of scholarly legal and historical opinion appears to support the notion that ‘natural born Citizen’ means one who is entitled under the Constitution or laws of the United States to U.S. citizenship ‘at birth’ or ‘by birth,’ including any child born ‘in’ the United States, the children of United States citizens born abroad, and those born abroad of one citizen parents who has met U.S. residency requirements,” the CRS’s Jack Maskell wrote.
Jack Maskell's paper from which you took that quote, which I've read in its entirety, can only be seen to be a distortion of the Constitution and of legal history in a lame attempt to defend Obama's constitutional eligibility. The guy is an Obama shill. 'Nuff said.
Ted Cruz is definitely among the handful of potential candidates I’ll be watching. Others are Trey Gowdy and Scott Walker. Sarah Palin is wonderful, but I’m 99.9% certain we’ll never see her run for political office again.
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