Posted on 03/12/2015 12:32:49 PM PDT by SoConPubbie
Two of the top lawyers for the Obama and Bush administrations agree on this: Sen. Ted Cruz can become president. Legally speaking, anyway.
Paul D. Clement, former solicitor general for President George W. Bush, and Neal Katyal, former acting solicitor general for President Obama, penned a piece for the Harvard Law Review tackling the question of what the Constitution means when it says that the president must be at least 35 years old, a U.S. resident for at least 14 years and a “natural born Citizen.”
“All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase ‘natural born Citizen’ has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time,” they wrote. “And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States.”
Cruz was born in a Canadian hospital to a mother who was a U.S. citizen. But he’s only the latest potential presidential candidate who has had his qualifications questioned. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Former Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) was born in Arizona before it was a state. Gov. George Romney (R-Mich.) was delivered in Mexico to U.S. residents. All were qualified to serve, . . . .
The First Congress, they noted, established that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were themselves citizens at birth “and explicitly recognized that such children were ‘natural born citizens.’
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Fascinating.
If Obama was born in HI, as I believe, then Obama meets more of the proposed criteria for NBC than Cruz.
If Obama was born in Canada or British East Africa, as some believe, then his situation is pretty nearly identical to that of Cruz.
Which is interesting, because I suspect a good many of those claiming Obama was not NBC would back off the same complaint against Cruz.
I don't think that's exactly right.
Until that unambiguous definition is provided, there will be some ambiguity about whether he is eligible, as indeed there has been for Obama.
All citizens are under that Act and no, not all citizens require naturalization.
This is one reason why I do not like the idea of pushing Cruz as President; it solidifies the precedent.
Which is interesting, because I suspect a good many of those claiming Obama was not NBC would back off the same complaint against Cruz.
Which is exactly the reason I will not — the Constitution's restrictions must apply when they are inconvenient to me and my preferences/convenience, otherwise it has no restrictive power at all as it would only constrain me where I agree with it.
Interesting. That would mean, to me, that such children aren't NBC.
Which gets us back to the dreaded three categories of citizens: NBC, citizen at birth by act of Congress, naturalized. Rather than two: citizen at birth = NBC, naturalized.
Nope.
Congress has no power over any citizenship other than naturalization.
To say otherwise is to say that they can modify the Constitution at will, and amendment is utterly useless.
But that's not the case — Congress only has power to set a uniform rule of naturalization, if such rules include birth, then it is still naturalization… and then there are only two.
This three types
is exactly the sort of confusion that the open-borders/NWO types want: it flushes nationalism down the drain and opens the door to allowing naturalized citizens to hole the office... which is a stepping stone to their goal of being able to put just anyone there. (To do this means that they've either successfully destroyed the nationalistic identity of the US, altered the Constitution to allow it, or [more likely] rendered the Constitution functionally useless.)
Well, good for you!
While I don’t agree with your opinion on the issue (I think NBC means citizen at birth as opposed to naturalized) I greatly respect that you would apply it against a candidate you like as well as one you don’t like.
The only problem with my theory is that it appears Congress has changed the definition of who is a citizen at birth several times. Which conflicts badly with a constitutional definition of NBC.
I wish somebody could get the Supremes to define the term and we could drop the issue. :)
I would personally have no objection to making naturalized citizens eligible for president by an amendment. Perhaps after 20 years or so.
Not that I think naturalized citizens are better, but simply because so many indisputable NBCs are so fervently anti-American.
The notion that an NBC will be definition be more loyal is quite simply false on its face. While the NBC requirement remains in the Constitution, it should be followed, but to my mind there is no logical reason to retain it.
I’m no attorney, but that doesn’t seem quite right.
You are defining children born to American citizens overseas as on subgroup of naturalized citizens.
The definitions I have seen make the naturalization process one of abandoning a prior citizenship and allegiance to become an American.
A child born to Americans overseas has no such “other” allegiance or citizenship to give up. He’s a citizen at birth, not a naturalized one.
Kenya all just get along?
Thank you — it's kind of odd, but I've been called [essentially] traitor
and phoney conservative
for refusing to hold Cruz to a different standard than Obama.
Personally, I think there's issues that have a much more pressing need to be amended than presidential requirements, even with as much distaste as I have for the use of what is now essentially undefined. See here.
Not a priority for me at all.
But I do have a very strong preference for making such changes by amendment rather than by just ignoring constitutional requirements, which has been the norm for most of the last century.
Except Congress only has power over naturalization, which is the point.
Well, there is one other option: Congress is exercising an usurped power.
President Walker,Vice-president Cruz.....Governors do things, senators vote on things that other people do
Sorry, but your Fiscal Responsibility Amendment is a Bad Idea.
Making the value of US currency highly variable by gold mines found or by technological improvements in transmutation or extraction from seawater is not wise.
Not that the process we have now is so great...
Citizen at birth includes naturalized citizens, citizen by birth does not.
It is amazing how many people there are who cannot distinguish between the USE of a term in the Constitution and the DEFINITION of a term in the Constitution. I couldn’t count the posts on FR I’ve read that say that “the Constitution defines a Natural Born Citizen as...”
No, because US law recognizes every kind of citizenship, to include yours and mine. That doesn’t mean we’re made citizens by naturalization, does it?
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