CATO Institute: Yes, Ted Cruz Can be President

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.”

The letter I addressed to him last month on this subject:

United States Senator Ted Cruz of Texas,

Your demeanor and plain words on many subjects have been refreshing, Senator, since your election. But your support for the so-called ‘twenty week’ or “fetal pain” abortion legislation that was just passed in your home state, and which is similarly being proposed in the great national legislative body in which you now serve, is a huge disappointment. Such support destroys your credibility and disqualifies you.

Do you think it would be right, or just, or moral, or constitutional, if a “law” were passed that explicitly allowed all paraplegics to be shot to death, since they cannot “feel pain”?

Would a “law” that gave “legal” permission to kill elderly family members, as long as they were given enough morphine, be acceptable to you?

Because that is exactly what these sorts of bills are predicated upon. An arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, irrational, baseless, immoral claim concerning whether or not the victim can feel anything when they are destroyed at the vicious, bloody hands of the abortionists.

The Fifth Amendment:

“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law.”

The Fourteenth Amendment:

“No State shall deprive any person of life without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Personhood - what you intrinsically are, a unique person, made in God’s image and likeness - is the constitutional criteria, not “pain,” not calendar age, not stage of maturity or human development, not location, nor anything else.

America’s founders clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence, our nation’s charter, that the equal protection of the God-given, unalienable right to life of EVERY PERSON, FROM THEIR CREATION, is the raison d’etre, the primary reason, for the existence of government.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...”

And, the ultimate stated purpose of our Constitution is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to Posterity.”

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Any bill that grants express permission, as this legislation does, to kill certain disfavored classes of innocent persons, violates EVERY SINGLE CLAUSE of that statement of purpose, in fact.

The equal protection of every innocent person within the United States, from the first moment of their physical creation, is NOT optional. IT IS IMPERATIVE, if you are to fulfill the obligations of the sacred oath that you swore to God Himself.

If you will not act according to that supremely important imperative, frankly, you’re not fit for any office of public trust. I must say, without any reservation, that you, and every one of your colleagues who agrees with you, should, if you will not immediately change your thinking, resign in shame and disgrace and go home. Let someone who understands the basics of the obligations of the oath serve in your stead.

If you, and ALL officers of government, in EVERY branch, at EVERY level, , as per the absolute requirement of Article Six of our Constitution, will not keep your oath to defend the unalienable, God-given right to life of EVERY innocent person, FROM CREATION UNTIL NATURAL DEATH, there will soon be no America. You will have destroyed it, because a building cannot long stand without its foundations. And make no mistake, respect for the individual EQUAL right to live is that foundation.

The practices of abortion and euthanasia should not exist in a republic whose form of government, and law, and claim to liberty, is predicated on the foundation of the equal protection of unalienable, God-given natural individual rights, starting with the right to live.

“Don’t worrry they won’t feel a thing” is an immoral thing to say, Senator. It’s wrong.

Your position is actually a giant evil step beyond Roe vs. Wade, which was a mere court opinion. After all, even Blackmun admitted in that infamous majority opinion that if the “fetus,” or child, is a person, “of course” they are protected by our Constitution’s explicit equal protection requirement. You, on the other hand, admit to their personhood, and, contrary to the Constitution, grant express permission for certain disfavored classes of those persons to be murdered. You are embedding, codifying, “legal” permission to kill innocent people in our laws. This is, sir, a lawless, senseless, thing to do.

One last thing:

Since “laws” such as this are not according to right reason, being clearly immoral and a gross violation of the first and most important aspect of the natural law, they are null and void in any case. The wisest men throughout the history of western civilization, right up through the generation of the founders of this great republic we call America, rightly said so.

“True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly called punishment ...”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero, 59 - 47 B.C.

“Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.”

— Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia-Ilae, q. xciii, art. 3, ad 2m.

“Good and wise men, in all ages...have supposed, that the deity, from the relations, we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.”

“This is what is called the law of nature, which, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is, of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.”

— William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England (1765)

“[A]ll men are equally bound by the laws of nature, or to speak more properly, the laws of the Creator.”

— Samuel Adams

“When human laws contradict or discountenance the means, which are necessary to preserve the essential rights of any society, they defeat the proper end of all laws, and so become null and void.”

— Alexander Hamilton

Please reconsider your immoral, unconstitutional position forthwith, Senator.

Very sincerely,

Tom Hoefling
Chairman, America’s Party

www.equalprotectionforposterity.com
tomhoefling@gmail.com

http://www.equalprotectionforposterity.com/7/post/2013/07/an-open-letter-to-sen-ted-cruz-twenty-week-abortion-bill-is-immoral-and-unconstitutional.html

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