We need to become as VICIOUS as they are. We need to fight as hard as they do, and we need to pull publicity stunts the way they do, (See James O'Keefe)
but we don't have to do anything immoral or unethical.
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.”
And on this, I agree with you. As Abraham Lincoln said:
I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensabale means, that government -- that nation -- of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it.
When I read some of the posts of some of these (for lack of a better word) “birthers”, I get very discouraged and I frankly believe that we really lack the political will to mount a campaign to save this Republic and restore our Constitution. If we, on Free Republic of all places, are going to quibble over whether we will allow a patriot like Ted Cruz to become president based on three archaic words that are subject to reasonable interpretive differences, then we might as well pack it in right now and let Chris Christie take the nomination and give us the defeat at the polls that we so richly deserve.
We need to become as VICIOUS as they are. We need to fight as hard as they do, and we need to pull publicity stunts the way they do, (See James O'Keefe)
but we don't have to do anything immoral or unethical.
So where are Cruz' potential divided loyalties?????????? To Cuba? Really? Canada? Oops, nope.
Did the Framers say that?
I've already stated my position on Cruz;
Post #72
Well, I don’t know if the words are archaic, but I agree with this author and Levin and many other constitutional scholars and accomplished lawyers who have successfully argued and won supreme court battles that Cruz is indeed a natural born citizen. To me, unless or until the SCOTUS rules otherwise, in this voter REBELLION, that’s the end of the argument. I’m certainly not going to place much weight or confidence in the unsubstantiated words of anonymous sea lawyers or the birther cottage industry. I’ll take another look if and when they get it to the SCOTUS and win.
Well..........they sure differentiated between "Natural Born Citizen" and "plain old Citizen" regarding presidential requirements. What do you think they meant?
The fact that folks in the late 18th century understood what the term meant.....is not even a debatable issue.
but you still haven’t supported your “two parent” theory......yet you quote it as if it’s Biblical.....
They never used “plain ole citizen” so you are making a straw argument. What they clearly meant was to keep folks who have divided loyatlies from becoming President, and that is the ONLY thing beyond debate. They clearly were NOT trying to single out folks like Cruz for ineligibilty....
Accordingly, when it comes to selecting presidents, the views of Supreme Court justices deserve no special weight. I recognize that there have been court opinions which have discussed the NBC clause, but never in the context of measuring the qualifications of any presidential candidate.
Our Constitution assigns to electors the power and the duty to interpret and apply the NBC clause to presidential candidates. They have done so without the assistance of courts for 57 straight presidential elections. After 2016, you can expect that number to be 58.
So, as a citizen, as a voter, you should make up your own mind about the precise meaning of the NBC clause. The courts and court opinions aren't going to perform that duty for you.
Yes they did, but "native" means something different today. It nowadays simply means "born here", but in 1787 it meant born here to people who are supposed to be here. It was not applied to the children of transient aliens.
In the 1790s, transportation to and from Europe was hard. The Fastest it could be done was 1 month, but it often took as long as two. (It was faster going west than it was going East.)
People didn't generally come here for frivolous reasons, they came here to stay permanently, to settle. Within those demographic constraints, being born here was pretty much a given that you would be born to citizen parents or people who intend to be citizens.
The Exceptions were simply too rare as to deserve note, and therefore no one made much effort to distinguish one from the other. They were, in effect, the same thing.
The Ease of Modern Transportation has left our laws in need of catching up. Anchor Babies and Birth Tourism are now taking full advantage of an oversight in clarification of what is meant by "subject to the jurisdiction thereof".
Even George Will and Ann Coulter have pointed out that the 14th amendment doesn't mean what people think.
United States Secretary of State Thomas F Bayard.
If the USSC can’t get “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” right; can’t get the definition of marriage right; can’t get the basic God given right to life right, I believe that leaving the issue to those NSA threatened justices may not play out as we’d hope.
i wholeheartedly agree that the opinions expressed in this thread don’t have enough weight to determine the eligibility issue against Cruz.
That’s an interesting quote. When was it written???
Essentially he wasn’t pretending that what he was doing was Constitutional. He was admitting openly that it was unConstitutional.
That to me would be understandable given that half of Washington’s senators and representatives were no longer in Washington but down in Richmond shooting at you.
It’s a wonder anything functioned during those years.
This article can be summed up as Canadian author with a green card disproves his own point.
According to this author, the Canadian with a green card, Cruz gets his American citizenship through statute. The Nationality Act of 1940.
An act of law was needed to give Cruz American citizenship. Without that statute Cruz is just plain old Canadian. That statute is not capable of conferring natural born citizenship status. That statute does not overrule Article 2 Section 1
A Canadian with a green card. Too much.
Hopefully, my message will get clearer as time goes on:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3061339/posts
We are in open rebellion (tea party rebellion) against the ruling class and Ted Cruz is one of our strongest fighters and leaders.
There’s no crying in rebellion!
Damn the torpedoes. Damn the naysayers! Full steam ahead!!
The VOTER Rebellion is ON!! JOIN OR PERISH!!
We’re done. Bye. Don’t claim you weren’t warned.
No, look to the words “considered as”. And don’t overlook that that Act. was repealed just five years later and that particular wording was changed to simply, “considered as citizens” and required that the U.S. citizen father of such a child be resident of the U.S..
http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/naturalization/naturalization_page3.html
If only all Americans loved our country as much as Rafael Cruz, and I’m certain Rafael’s history is why:
“....suffered beatings and imprisonment for protesting the oppressive regime”[15][12] of dictator Fulgencio Batista and fought for communist revolutionary Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution[16][17] when he was 14 years old but “didn’t know Castro was a Communist” and a few years later became a staunch critic of Castro when “the rebel leader took control and began seizing private property and suppressing dissent.”[18][12]
The elder Cruz fled in 1957 at the age of 18, landing in Austin[15] to study at the University of Texas, knowing no English and with only $100 sewn into his underwear.[19][20] His younger sister fought in the counter-revolution and was tortured by the new regime.[17]
He remained regretful for his early support of Castro, and emphatically conveyed this remorse to his young son over the following years.[17][12] “
excerpt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz
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