I didn’t watch the debate but I cannot believe he would say that. If parents had to both be natural born citizens for the child to be a natural born citizen there never would have been ANY natural born American citizens.
“I didn’t watch the debate but I cannot believe he would say that.” “
He did, I transcribed the following quotation of Senator Ted Cruz in the debate:
I would note the Birther theories that Donald has been relying on some of the more extreme ones insist that you must not only not only be born on U.S. soil, under that theory not only would I be disqualified, Marco Rubio would be disqualified, Bobby Jindal would be disqualified, and interestingly enough Donald J. Trump would be disqualified . . . because . . . because Donald’s mother was born in Scotland, she was naturalized . . . .
“If parents had to both be natural born citizens for the child to be a natural born citizen there never would have been ANY natural born American citizens.”
It is a pleasure to finally see someone else recognizes how Ted Cruz used such an obvious lie and impossible claim, which he is obligated as the Constitutional legal expert he claims to be must know.
Somehow that quotation was changed when it posted. I’ll retype it and post again.
[Something caused the original post to become garbled, so this is the corrected post.]
“I didn’t watch the debate but I cannot believe he would say that.”
He did, I transcribed the following quotation of Senator Ted Cruz in the debate:
I would note the Birther theories that Donald has been relying on, some of the more extreme ones, insist that you must not only be born on U.S. soil, but have two parents born on U.S. soil . . . under that theory not only would I be disqualified, Marco Rubio would be disqualified, Bobby Jindal would be disqualified, and interestingly enough Donald J. Trump would be disqualified . . . because . . . because Donald’s mother was born in Scotland, she was naturalized . . . .
“If parents had to both be natural born citizens for the child to be a natural born citizen there never would have been ANY natural born American citizens.”
It is a pleasure to finally see someone else recognize how Ted Cruz used such an obvious lie and impossible claim, which he was obligated to know is a physical impossibility given his repeated claims in the debate and out of the debate about being a legal expert on the Constitution. It appears to have been a deliberate move to use the strawman argument to divert attention away from his own ineligibility by getting the audience to focus on Trump’s parentage.
Here is a quotation from the book of law used by the authors of the Constitution and its natural born citizen clause, and this is what it had to say about defining a natural born citizen and parents.
Emmerich de Vattel: The Law of Nations
BOOK I. OF NATIONS CONSIDERED IN THEMSELVES.
CHAP. XIX. OF OUR NATIVE COUNTRY, AND SEVERAL THINGS THAT RELATE TO IT.
§ 212. Citizens and natives.
The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.