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Posted on 08/26/2013 1:51:55 PM PDT by SoConPubbie
This article appeared on Daily Caller on August 26, 2013.
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.”
State courts? Since when do state courts have jurisdiction over nationality law?
And on what are those state courts basing their inapplicable rulings, anyway? I see no statements in either case asserting that U.S. Secretary of State Bayard’s citizenship determination that U.S.-born Richard Greisser wasn’t a born citizen was incorrect.
Thank you for your patience with this discussion xzins. Please bear with the following.
The following question is not meant to be belittling, but I've got to start somewhere. Can you tell me why the Founding States made the federal Constititution?
As does yours, a single corrupt judge will eventually tell you which opinion will prevail. I suspect it will ultimately depend on the political bent of the person they are considering the correct NBC interpretation for.
One of them.
This is her mother:
http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=inauthor:%22Julia+Anne+Garza+Cruz%22
State courts have jurisdiction over who is allowed on the ballot in a state and therefore who can acquire electoral votes.
But if you need federal court rulings:
Rhodes v MacDonald, US District Court Judge Clay D. Land: “A spurious claim questioning the president’s constitutional legitimacy may be protected by the First Amendment, but a Court’s placement of its imprimatur upon a claim that is so lacking in factual support that it is frivolous would undoubtedly disserve the public interest.”—US District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, September 16, 2009.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19809978/RHODES-v-MacDONALD-13-ORDER-denying-3-Motion-for-TRO-granting-8-Motion-to-Dismiss-Ordered-by-Judge-Clay-D-Land-on-09162009-CGC-Entered-0
Barnett v Obama, US District Court Judge David O. Carter: “There may very well be a legitimate role for the judiciary to interpret whether the natural born citizen requirement has been satisfied in the case of a presidential candidate who has not already won the election and taken office. However, on the day that President Obama took the presidential oath and was sworn in, he became President of the United States. Any removal of him from the presidency must be accomplished through the Constitution’s mechanisms for the removal of a President, either through impeachment or the succession process set forth in the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Plaintiffs attempt to subvert this grant of power to Congress by convincing the Court that it should disregard the constitutional procedures in place for the removal of a sitting president. The process for removal of a sitting president—REMOVAL FOR ANY REASON—is within the province of Congress, not the courts.”—U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, October 29, 2009
http://ia600204.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.cacd.435591/gov.uscourts.cacd.435591.89.0.pdf
Taitz v Obama (Quo Warranto) “This is one of several such suits filed by Ms. Taitz in her quixotic attempt to prove that President Obama is not a natural born citizen, as is required by the Constitution. This Court is not willing to go tilting at windmills with her.”— Chief US District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, US District Court for the District of Columbia, April 14, 2010
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30040084/TAITZ-v-OBAMA-QW-23-MEMORANDUM-OPINION-dcd-04502943496-23-0
Tisdale v Obama, US District Court Judge John A. Gibney, Jr.: “It is well settled that those born within the United States are natural born citizens.”— Tisdale v Obama, US District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia, January 23, 2012.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/82011399/Tisdale-v-Obama-EDVA-3-12-cv-00036-Doc-2-ORDER-23-Jan-2012
Because the articles of confederation were not working well for them. So they went federal.
The reason that the Founding States made the federal constitution was to limit (cripple) the federal government's powers.
And the reason that many patriots get zealous about supporting a particular person for president, the so-called most powerful office in the land, is because generations of parents have not been making sure that their children are being taught the constitutionally limited powers of Congress and the Oval Office.
In fact, it can be argued that one of the very few constitutional powers that the feds have to regulate anything within a state's borders is to regulate postal services as evidenced by the Constitution's Clause 7 of Section 8 of Article I.
And since the president and federal senators were originally not elected by popular vote, ideally citizens would now have to guess who current president is. Otherwise, if they don't like the way that the postal service is being run, they can complain to their elected lawmakers in the House of Representatives.
In other words, most of the government powers that Congress and the Oval Office now exercise are actually 10th Amendment protected state powers which corrupt federal lawmakers have wrongly stolen from the states as the Founding Fathers had feared.
Again, it doesn't help matters when parents don't make sure that their children are taught the federal government's constitutionally limited powers.
State courts have no jurisdiction over nationality law.
Furthermore, NONE of the federal court rulings you cited ever asserted that U.S. Secretary of State Bayard’s citizenship determination that U.S.-born Richard Greisser wasn’t a born citizen was incorrect.
And, in fact, most of those federal rulings are specifically based on FALSE assumptions. For example, the Tisdale v. Obama ruling states: “It is well settled that those born within the United States are natural born citizens,” but I have already quoted a U.S. Secretary of State citizenship determination that states specifically otherwise: a man born in the U.S. to an alien father was not only NOT a natural born citizen, he wasn’t even born a U.S. citizen at all. That’s a FACT. It’s a matter of actual historic record.
Well settled, my assssss. [rolleyes]
How many of you are truly duped by that windbag BS? Why do you fall for it so easily?
Do you really think that the policy determination of a Secretary of State trumps a federal court ruling? Each presidential administration and each Secretary of State can make a different determination.
Furthermore, if plaintiffs in state or federal eligibility lawsuits did not cite Secretary of State Thomas Bayard’s determination, judges are under no obligation to rule on its relevance.
You mean, like honest men, and honest voters?
Then you're either a cynic and hypocrite, or a fool.
I see the way through the Natural Born Citizen clause for Cruz as requiring either an amendment to the Constitution or a radical shift in view from the prevailing Con Law Bar view of the law by the Supreme Court.
But the best case and easiest way through starts with the assumption of citizenship at birth and my analysis in #263 is designed to lay out a partial view of that path.
However the citizenship statutes are fairly complicated because they reflect periodic modifications by Congress. If you take as the basic facts, Rafael is married to Eleanor; Rafael being a Cuban citizen; Eleanor being a US Citizen; given all the right periods; no other marital or non marital relationships; the answer works out as Big Ed suggests in #260 and we work through in #263.
The real world is never that simple.
I don't have time to brief this issue completely. As I recall, one element of the mother citizen statute is that the Mother is married to the Father. Not only no reason to believe that is the case not having seen a marriage certificate but the birth certificate says she is Mrs. Wilson, not Mrs. Cruz.
That may work in favor of Cruz--Wilson was presumably a US Citizen and you have a Texas statute presuming the husband is the father--so maybe Cruz has a two citizen parent position--maybe that helps; maybe it does not.
And if not, maybe a second statute which we haven't looked at gets a better result if Eleanor (Cruz's mother) is single.
Although I would guess that Cruz's attorney's have looked at all these issues and all the permutations of the issues and concluded he was a citizen at birth, I haven't and so have not yet seen how they get there.
We owe Brown Deer for significant work in addressing the factual issues and at some point presume we will look at the statutory and legal questions that would control the answers.
"birth certificate says she is Mrs. Wilson, not Mrs. Cruz.
"That may work in favor of Cruz--Wilson was presumably a US Citizen and you have a Texas statute presuming the husband is the father..."
Read much more at # 295.
Thanks, David.
“And if not,maybe a second statute which we haven’t looked at gets a better result if Eleanor (Cruz’s mother) is single.”
The above snippet is interesting.
Single moms had shorter u.s. residency requirements than married moms.
Depends on when the kid was born; the Ins rules changed somewhere between 1961 and when Cruz was born.
He was a citizen at birth.
He was not NBC by virtue of his birth.
Wish like he was. But, what are we going to do here?
Sell our souls and make the openings for NWO and turn the US into a regional power but, under the views of a global government ?
That’s where this heads.
If we take Obama at his word, his father was a Citizen of Kenya.
Assuming that this is true, some assert that Obama is still a Natural Born Citizen because they claim that Natural Born means the same a born a citizen.
Let us also Assume for sake of this analysis that Obama was actually born in Hawaii.
Was he also a Natural Born Citizen?
Well, in order to understand the meaning of Natural Born, one must also understand the intent of the framers when they included this as a requirement to be President.
Here is the relevant constitutional phrase “....No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution.....”
If you have comprehension, you can easily see that the framers knew that there was a distinct difference between a Citizen and a Natural Born Citizen. You will also conclude that there was a very limited time that a citizen who was NOT natural born, could qualify for the presidency and this was only during the time of the adoption of the Constitution.
This was because so many of the first generation citizens living here during the founding were born elsewhere. There actually were no natural born citizens yet.
After the adoption of the Constitution, this first generation of new citizens would create a second generation of Natural Born Citizens. From that point forward, only a Natural Born Citizen was eligible for the presidency.
The founders included this requirement only for the presidency because at the time, they feared a subject loyal to the the crown could be elected and by virtue of his role as commander and chief, dismantle our hard fought independence.
So Understandably, they wanted to protect the new union from a person holding the office of president that may have had conflicting loyalties.
That is why Natural Born Citizen means, A person born of citizen parents both mother and father loyal only to the USA. The founders understood this.
So in my opinion this means that Republicans Cruz, Jindal, Rubio or the current occupier of the White House, Obama, are NOT constitutionally eligible.
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