Posted on 04/15/2016 1:58:02 AM PDT by markomalley
On Tuesday, New Jersey Administrative law Judge Jeff Masin ruled against a lawsuit claiming that Senator Ted Cruz is not eligible to become president because he is not a natural born citizen. The plaintiffs claimed that Cruz is ineligible because, although he is the son of a US citizen, he was born in Canada (where his parents were living at the time). Judge Masins opinion is notable for its detailed analysis of the evidence on the original meaning of the natural born citizen and recent scholarship on the subject. I think the opinion is well-reasoned and very persuasive.
Judge Masin relied considerably on legal scholar Michael Ramseys excellent recent article on this subject. Prof. Ramsey has put up a thoughtful post about the decision at the Originalism Blog (a blog which is also cited in the opinion).
While Judge Masin relies almost entirely on originalist arguments, living constitutionalists have every reason to support his conclusion. Quite simply, there is no good living constitutionalist reason to interpret the natural born citizen requirement in a narrow way that would exclude people who have been American citizens since birth, but happen to have been born abroad. Even nonoriginalist critics of Cruzs eligiblity generally rely on on originalist arguments rather than trying to justify their position based on living constitutionalism. That is likely because there is no plausible reason to conclude that barring this category of citizens from running for the presidency benefits the nation in any way. Some of them are likely to be bad candidates, unfit for office. But the same thing can be said of numerous candidates born within the US...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Not that I agree with this time-watered down interpretation but the accepted definition is if a citizen was not required to pass through the naturalization process to attain citizenship then they are a NBC. Gets me to wince real hard.
I used to believe the same thing - 2 citizen parents, born on US soil.
McCain & Obama - not eligible
Rubio, Cruz...same
Obviously, I was wrong. A court is going to have to decide...or we continue with the ‘honor’ system.
That said, in my list of 4 above, I believe that none of them loves this country or has a better understanding of what makes it great more than Cruz. I get that they had to put into the constitution some sort of limits, and they chose parents/birth as a measure of commitment to the US. But today, we have many that would qualify under the most strict reading of the ‘natural born citizen’ clause, but they still have no love for what made this country unique and great.
“What would this Judges ruling have been if he knew that at the time of Tedd birth his mother had given up her American citizenship and become a Canadian citizen? Would that fact (if true) make a difference?”
There is absolutely no evidence that anything like that happened. There was absolutely no motivation for her to do so, either.
I don’t care if like Cruz or not but that’s just silliness.
As I have believed all along.
Yet I STILL believe that if he wins, the Democrats will manage to find some Federal judge out there who disagrees.
Thanks.
I have probably seen this info before but, thru the clutter around this place anymore, it is hard to keep it all straight.
yep
Absolutely right. I read in the National Enquirer he has a secret plan to make hockey the national sport and require school kids to eat poutine for lunch every day!
Of course, Trump knows better otherwise he would have followed through on that feckless threat to sue Cruz. The only people not aware of the sham are his supporters who refuse to believe anything but what Trump tells them.
It doesn’t matter what this judge says. It’s a constitutional issue. Until SCOTUS rules definitively on this issue, it remains an open question.
Even if SCOTUS rules that a “Ted Cruz” is a natural born citizen, it won’t change the fact that natural law, the framers, and original intent meant otherwise. It will just be another “Obamacare” ruling. A rogue SCOTUS run amok, but we will have to live under it.
I feel that we constitutionalists, (birthers), will end up losing this argument, even though we are absolutely in the right.
The Supreme Court is a political animal, and will rule politically just like this judge did.
Unless Donald Trump can pack the court with constitutional, original intent, conservatives, we are finished as a constitutional nation. The liberals will have won, reducing the constitution to an antiquated, worn out, piece of parchment, only fit for use as toilet paper.
(Please don’t knee jerk respond with “Cruz will appoint better judges”. Cruz is not going to win, thus he won’t be in any position to appoint anyone)
America has been losing herself and her integrity while she is being lead down a false trail by the Deceiver himself, the same trail he took the old Soviets down.
I have to admit, it's no longer maddening nor surprising to me now that the young idealists raised in this new reality would behave like that to such a fallen symbol of great hope and promise.
We, the people of rebellion in this great apostasy, are fundamentally transforming our nation-self through redefinition, disconnecting ourselves from truth through our rewriting/redefining fundamental truths in our own current politically correct image of the moment.
Over and over again we fall for this trick and it's heartbreaking that we are doing this to our selves and our integrity again now with this redefinition of our basic "self", first with obama, and now with Cruz.
The basic, fundamental truth is: someone who was born in country to citizen parents is, and can only be, a citizen of that country. There are no other options. It's a boringly exclusive and basic, fundamental truth.
This has been the historical definition for "Natural Born Citizen" and maintained by court ruling from the beginning. It is how a nation legally defines it's most basic component, the unit "self" of which it is made.
In our times, rather than re-writing our Constitutional eligibility requirements for POTUS, as Integrity would have US do, we have instead forced yet another redefinition to corrupt yet another basic and fundamental truth once again, just as we did with a human fetus and with the definition of marriage.
This is scary dangerous bad delusional stuff for a society to play with and a bad street for kids like US to be playing in the middle of.
We, the sheeple, are being lead down a false trail by the Deceiver himself by our being made to call "born in Canada to a Canadian or Cuban citizen father/American(?) citizen mother" by the exact same term as someone who was "born in the USA to American citizen parents".
Don't believe it? I understand. But, in all seriousness, if you listen in silence to your heart while reading our new dictionary, you'll hear the prophets of Scripture saying: "Here's your sign."
Obama was born in Hawaii. His birth certificate is a forgery, but the reason for the forgery is much more interesting than the fantasy that his mother flew to Kenya to give birth.
Obama was adopted by his mother’s second husband, Soetero and became an Indonesian citizen. When he return to the U.S. and became an adult, he could have recoverd his natural born citizenship status as he could not have voluntarily relinquished his citizenship while a minor. But, Obama did not do this, instead he used his foreign citizenship status to gain entrance into prestigious universities as a foreign student. With his grades, he couldn’t get into a top university. That action was prima facia evidence that he was renouncing his U.S. Citizenship.
When Obama decided to go into politics, this was a problem, certainly legally and probably politically. That issue needed to go away, and the Obama team went to work, spending several millions of dollars to make the evidence disappear. The brilliance of their plan is that they planted a bit of disinformation suggesting that Obama was born in Kenya, taking advantage of some braggadocio by Obama when being born in Kenya was thought to help sell books. It was a lie, as are many of Obama’s stories. But, the Birther Movement emerged and took the bait.
Believing anything that the Birther Movement claims is a fool’s errand as is believing anything that Obama has said, “written”, or thought.
With the death of Barrack senior shortly after the 1963 divorce filed by S.A Dunham, she did marry Soetoro, a Muslim Indonesian citizen and Barry moved to Jakarta around the age of 5 and he was adopted. He was registered and educated in Muslim schools in his early age.But a dual citizenship, British and American was filed for him. He would have no problem using his British citizenship to file for foreign tuition. It was already in place with the birth in Mombassa, Kenya, and was witnessed by his paternal grandmother and her sister. Thanks. red
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