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Posted on 08/30/2013 12:02:15 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
By Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow In Constitutional Sudies and Editor-In-Chief, Cato Supreme Court Review
As we head into a potential government shutdown over the funding of Obamacare, the iconoclastic junior senator from Texas — love him or hate him — continues to stride across the national stage. With his presidential aspirations as big as everything in his home state, by now many know what has never been a secret: Ted Cruz was born in Canada.
(Full disclosure: I’m Canadian myself, with a green card. Also, Cruz has been a friend since his days representing Texas before the Supreme Court.)
But does that mean that Cruz’s presidential ambitions are gummed up with maple syrup or stuck in snowdrifts altogether different from those plaguing the Iowa caucuses? Are the birthers now hoist on their own petards, having been unable to find any proof that President Obama was born outside the United States but forcing their comrade-in-boots to disqualify himself by releasing his Alberta birth certificate?
No, actually, and it’s not even that complicated; you just have to look up the right law. It boils down to whether Cruz is a “natural born citizen” of the United States, the only class of people constitutionally eligible for the presidency. (The Founding Fathers didn’t want their newly independent nation to be taken over by foreigners on the sly.)
What’s a “natural born citizen”? The Constitution doesn’t say, but the Framers’ understanding, combined with statutes enacted by the First Congress, indicate that the phrase means both birth abroad to American parents — in a manner regulated by federal law — and birth within the nation’s territory regardless of parental citizenship. The Supreme Court has confirmed that definition on multiple occasions in various contexts.
There’s no ideological debate here: Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe and former solicitor general Ted Olson — who were on opposite sides in Bush v. Gore among other cases — co-authored a memorandum in March 2008 detailing the above legal explanation in the context of John McCain’s eligibility. Recall that McCain — lately one of Cruz’s chief antagonists — was born to U.S. citizen parents serving on a military base in the Panama Canal Zone.
In other words, anyone who is a citizen at birth — as opposed to someone who becomes a citizen later (“naturalizes”) or who isn’t a citizen at all — can be president.
So the one remaining question is whether Ted Cruz was a citizen at birth. That’s an easy one. The Nationality Act of 1940 outlines which children become “nationals and citizens of the United States at birth.” In addition to those who are born in the United States or born outside the country to parents who were both citizens — or, interestingly, found in the United States without parents and no proof of birth elsewhere — citizenship goes to babies born to one American parent who has spent a certain number of years here.
That single-parent requirement has been amended several times, but under the law in effect between 1952 and 1986 — Cruz was born in 1970 — someone must have a citizen parent who resided in the United States for at least 10 years, including five after the age of 14, in order to be considered a natural-born citizen. Cruz’s mother, Eleanor Darragh, was born in Delaware, lived most of her life in the United States, and gave birth to little Rafael Edward Cruz in her 30s. Q.E.D.
So why all the brouhaha about where Obama was born, given that there’s no dispute that his mother, Ann Dunham, was a citizen? Because his mother was 18 when she gave birth to the future president in 1961 and so couldn’t have met the 5-year-post-age-14 residency requirement. Had Obama been born a year later, it wouldn’t have mattered whether that birth took place in Hawaii, Kenya, Indonesia, or anywhere else. (For those born since 1986, by the way, the single citizen parent must have only resided here for five years, at least two of which must be after the age of 14.)
In short, it may be politically advantageous for Ted Cruz to renounce his Canadian citizenship before making a run at the White House, but his eligibility for that office shouldn’t be in doubt. As Tribe and Olson said about McCain — and could’ve said about Obama, or the Mexico-born George Romney, or the Arizona-territory-born Barry Goldwater — Cruz “is certainly not the hypothetical ‘foreigner’ who John Jay and George Washington were concerned might usurp the role of Commander in Chief.”
I say it that way because I do not believe that Cruz has ever afforded himself of any of that privilege.
He is a Red Blooded American.
Cruz is a natural born citizen. Get over it.
Meant to say ‘We all ‘know’.
It's certainly NO confirmation of Constitutional eligibility.
Upon these things the continued existence of this free republic, and the survival in liberty of my children and grandchildren, absolutely depend. Therefore, I will never “give it a rest,” while I’m still drawing breath. Not for you, or Ted Cruz, or anyone else.
“These communities [the Fathers of the Republic], by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’
“This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures.
“Yes, gentlemen, to all his creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.
“Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.
“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me — take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever — but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity — the Declaration of American Independence.”
— Abraham Lincoln, speech in Lewiston, Illinois, August 17, 1858, four days before his first historic debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Printed in the Chicago Press and Tribune.
I think you do not fairly represent the strategy of the fetal pain legislation.
Don’t spam me bro.
Whenever Conservatives make a stand on a particular issue (gun-control, immigration, etc...) we are accused by moderates of being "single issue voters" .
Look, Tom You want to hold Teds Feet to the fire over abortion, and give him ultimatums, when the man is pro life.
Show the man some respect.
He can’t do anything at the Federal level without 2/3rds of the House and Senate.
We got the guy in the door.
Let him work.
The USCIS has already proven that false. "Natural born citizen" and "citizen at birth" are NOT the same.
Details here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3059469/posts?q=1&;page=179#174
There is a difference, and it's a notable difference. Cruz's mother fulfilled the residency requirement as the law requires. Obama's mom did not necessarily do so. Therefore, the birth certificate became an issue.
It was NEVER about some odd interpretation of the term, "natural born citizen." It was about fulfilling the requirement to be ANY kind of natural born citizen, whether by blood or by place of birth.
Labels are easy. Policies that comport with the principles and purposes of the founding, and the most important explicit, imperative requirements of the Constitution require a bit more than sloganeering.
So those of us who support the grassroots tea party conservative and probably strongest conservative in the senate if not the entire Republican party are now considered to be moderates by birthers? Don’t look now, but I’m beginning to think the people who say birthers are nutcases aren’t that far off base. You people are imploding. Best rethink your strategy.
I am sure you are right. But then, Barry never took advantage of the "privilege" of his Indonesian citizenship either. So he must be good to go too.
Never mind. Expediency and hypocrisy shall rule the day.
Jim,
Could you please define “destroy his chances” and exactly which criticisms won’t be tolerated?
And did I correctly understand that these prohibitions will be effective at the time of his announcement, and not on receiving the party’s nomination?
I’m a strong believer in almost everything that Senator Cruz claims to represent, but I intend to support the strongest conservative candidate available, and I’m not yet convinced that Senator Cruz will be that candidate.
Only when you vote on the weaker single issue guy and not the stronger candidate that holds the same values but does not dance to your tune.
I fully expect Ted Cruz will not be all things to all people, but by God! I like the way this fellow carry’s himself.
Ted has enough on his hands without us snarking at him, but snark away.
This guy does not get rattled.
He did not get to Pohkystan on a US Passport.
“Nope. “natural born citizen” = “citizen at birth”.”
“born citizen” = “citizen at birth”
If the citizen at birth / born citizen was the qualification what function does the word “natural” have.
Do you speak English as a first language?
Can you not read the words.
Not according the Supreme Court of the United States.
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