Posted on 01/23/2015 7:32:10 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
WEST DES MOINES, Iowa – Billionaire Donald Trump, the most prominent “birther” to question Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president, asserted Friday that Sen. Ted Cruz must clear up legal doubts about his own eligibility due to his birth outside the United States.
“It’s a problem. It could be a difficult problem, but he admits that he was born in Canada,” Trump told reporters in Iowa on the eve of the first major gathering of 2016 presidential hopefuls.
“He’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him. But …certainly it’s a stumbling block and he’s going to have to have it solved before he goes too far,” Trump said.
Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, on Dec. 22, 1970, while his parents worked in the Canadian oil patch. His mother is a native-born American. His father, a Cuban émigré who later became a naturalized American, was still a Cuban citizen at the time.
Cruz’s birth in Canada was never a secret. But it has proven a political liability, with detractors occasionally taunting him as “Canadian Ted,” and critics suggesting that his birth outside the United States makes him ineligible to run for president.
In August 2013, The Dallas Morning News reported that the circumstances of his birth made him both a Canadian and an American. The dual citizenship came as a surprise to Cruz and his parents, and the senator quickly vowed to shed his Canadian citizenship. That became official last June.
For Trump, that’s not yet good enough if Cruz wants to run for and become president....
(Excerpt) Read more at trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com ...
I do not believe that is his motivation. For a long time I've suspected he is part of the official Obama push-back brigade; People hired or volunteered to provide propaganda support for the legitimacy narrative. Agents provocateur.
He's out of San Diego. Not a hotbed of conservative activism if you ask me. Far more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican. Even if he is a Republican, he is more likely from the Limousine Liberal Rockefeller Country Club wing of the party.
It’s definitely not going well right now. More and more people are, at a minimum, figuring out that Obama is as sharp as a bowling ball. He’ll be a laughingstock before it’s all over. The smartest Obots are beginning to figure this out, and it’s got them depressed.
It is only by dent of some serious delusional thinking that anyone could have ever considered this idiot as anything but an idiot. I think most of his white supporters simply wanted to vote for a black guy to demonstrate how non-racist they were, completely oblivious to the fact that voting strictly on the basis of race is about the most racist thing you can do. An honest non-racist person would have recognized that the man is an unaccomplished idiot who only got where he is due to various affirmative action programs, and that he has always been in way over his head.
Merit played little role in picking this fool to represent the Democrat ticket for the Presidency, and the power wielded by the Liberal Democrat media union members in New York and Los Angeles did the rest.
It is the eligibility challengers who have used the courts a grand total of 349 times (original jurisdiction, state and federal appellate and Supreme Court of the United States applications and petitions). The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
The judiciary has no power to remove a sitting president. Once Obama’s electoral votes were counted and certified by both Houses of Congress in January of 2009, the 12th Amendment is clear and precise, the person with a majority of the votes of the electors “shall be the president.”
Railing against the judiciary is irrelevant.
The only constitutional means to remove a sitting president is via a Bill of Impeachment, a Senate trial and 67 guilty votes for High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
I would be most supportive, even at this late date, of a congressional investigation into Obama’s legitimacy to be president and if the evidence is there, of the drafting of a Bill of Impeachment. Many people in the ineligibility movement have been patiently waiting for new evidence to emerge from the Maricopa County, Arizona Cold Case Posse’ investigation. Whenever that new evidence is released, perhaps it will spur congressional action.
Call me crazy, but in the blood sport of American politics, I have always favored employing strategies that win over strategies that fail.
Different people trying different things, but I completely agree. Trying to solve serious civil issues through the courts is destined to failure. *THEY* are a large part of what is wrong with this country.
The judiciary has no power to remove a sitting president.
And as slow as they are to get off their @$$, they are no threat to any *candidate* either.
So now we have a constitutional requirement with no agency of enforcement. Those stupid founders. How could they have been so foolish?
What are the cases of those 349 in which a court granted standing? It would be interesting to know. It would also be interesting to know how many decisions on the merits of the issue, with regard to the eligibility of the man in the Oval Office were rendered on the merits by the Supreme Court and United States Courts of Appeal and in what circuits.
Its a shame that none of the people who would definitely have been granted standing to bring suit actually filed suit or even agreed to enter a lawsuit as a co-plaintiff. Those people were/are John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the only other people to be able to show DIRECT injury caused by Obama if he were to be ruled to be ineligible.
In the 2012 election cycle, Obama eligibility challengers changed legal tactics and went after Obama’s ballot eligibility. That resulted in many more actual “trials on the merits” because most state laws permit any citizen to challenge a candidate’s eligibility to be on the ballot. The most well known of the trials on the merits were the four combined trials in Georgia: Farrar v Obama, Powell v. Obama, Swensson v. Obama and Welden v. Obama. That was the trial where Obama’s attorney, Michael Jablonski refused to show up for the trial and the plaintiffs were offered a default judgement by the judge but they refused it in order to have their which they lost.
I’ve also been surprised/disappointed that there has never been a formal criminal complaint filed for forgery, counterfeiting, fraud or altering a government document. There is no issue of standing to get in the way of a criminal trial. Standing is only a civil issue.
The Founders established the impeachment process as the way to remove a sitting president from office. They made removal extremely difficult to implement, but not impossible.
Actually, the U. S. Constitution itself says you are wrong. Here is the actual quote from the Constitution:
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President
If natural born citizen is equal to citizen, then the phrase "or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution" would have been unnecessary. The Founders, who were wiser than you, intentionally added it for clarification, to make it clear that the two terms are not the same.
WTF are you talking about, that was put in there for people born in other colonies and Britain and who were active Americans at time, like Alexander Hamilton (born in the Caribbean). It has zero relevance to anyone alive today.
You must be kidding.
Those foreigners would have been United States citizens at the adoption on the Constitution. That is the issue here and the reason for the important distinction between natural born citizen and citizen.
You imply they are equal, but it is clear they are not.
You must be kidding because I cannot follow your train of thought.
It is ironic that you mention Hamilton. He was in favor of changing the wording of this section to change the requirement to merely citizenship and land ownership. He understood the distinction that was being made.
Do you have any idea what this poster is talking about?
Since the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1865, and specifically the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, the courts have consistently ruled that there are two, and only two forms of U.S. citizenship, born citizenship and naturalized citizenship. Born citizens can become president, naturalized citizens cannot become president. Its really that simple.
For example: The Supreme Court’s ruling in Elk v Wilkins, 112 U. S. 94 (1884)
“The distinction between citizenship by birth and citizenship by naturalization is clearly marked in the provisions of the constitution, by which ‘no person, except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall be eligible to the office of president;’ and ‘the congress shall have power to establish an uniform rule of naturalization.’Const. art. 2, § 1; art. 1, § 8.”
“This section [of the 14th Amendment] contemplates two sources of citizenship, and two sources only: birth and naturalization. The persons declared to be citizens are ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
I am not an attorney so I am only stating an opinion, but my undersanding is that res judicata (claims preclusion) can only apply to civil or criminal court actions with the same parties. So a suit challenging Senator Cruz would have no relationship to any of the Obama challenges other than possibly as precedent.
Perhaps an attorney will answer your question definitively.
I’m not sure what he’s talking about, but I do know out of what part of the anatomy he’s talking.
He seems to believe that by adding “or a citizen of the I.S. at the time of adoption of the Constitution” would make the NBC language irrelevant. He’d be correct if the Constitution was meant to last not more than 35 years. But given that the Constitution was meant to last until such time as the People repealed it (and, with respect to a particular clause, amended such clause), it was necessary to establish which persons born after the adoption of the Constitution qualified for the presidency.
You know it’s not that simple. You also know that the USSC has ruled against the Constitution a number of times. That doesn’t change the Constitution.
You also know that the USSC has never ruled on the natural citizen clause in the Constitution.
‘I do not believe that is his motivation. For a long time I’ve suspected he is part of the official Obama push-back brigade; People hired or volunteered to provide propaganda support for the legitimacy narrative. Agents provocateur.’
Thanks for that interesting info. It may be true that NeroG is a volunteer Obama-defender/disrupter. I cannot, however, believe anyone would pay him. They’d do better to take the $ and flush it down an industrial strength commode. At least that way they wouldn’t be paying simply to have people irritated and turned even more strongly against Obama—and that includes the lurkers.
As to how/why Obama got elected, what you said is true. A lot of LIV just wanted to show how non-racist they were. But don’t overlook the fraud, which was rampant. & then there was the full court press of the MSM. The coverage of both elections was mortifyingly [for the press] lopsided. Even ten years ago I would never have dreamed it could get this bad. Journalists tend not to be the brightest bulbs. Combine that with a brainless embrace of liberalism, and wholesale corruption results.
One thing I recently noticed. Among the top words associated with Obama [in a Pew Research Poll] was “incompetent.” Some of the other top words were even less complimentary. I’ve also noticed he’s finally taking a little criticism from the likes of Menendez, Gates and Guthrie. Not very pointed criticism, but 100 percent more than he was getting a year ago.
History will not be kind to this pathologically lying radical leftist. His Obots better enjoy the present; their salad days are behind them, and it’s all downhill (for them) from here.
You’re right. It doesn’t change the Constitution. What has changed since 1865 is judicial interpretation of the Constitution regarding citizenship.
In 1874 in the Supreme Court decision in Minor v. Happersett, the Court said: “The Constitution does not say, in words, who shall be natural born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to determine that.”
“Elsewhere” that the Minor decision mentions turned out to be the 1898 ruling of the High Court in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Justice Gray, writing for the six Justice majority said: “[An alien parent’s] allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Coke, 6a, ’strong enough to make a natural subject, for, if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject’
The Wong court also said: “Subject’ and ‘citizen’ are, in a degree, convertible terms as applied to natives; and though the term ‘citizen’ seems to be appropriate to republican freemen, yet we are, equally with the inhabitants of all other countries, ’subjects,’ for we are equally bound by allegiance and subjection to the government and law of the land.’”
and Justice Gray went on to write:
“…every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.
The same rule was in force in all the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the constitution as originally established.”
So for the last 117 years, the Courts have ruled that there are two classes of U.S. citizens: “Citizen of the United States At Birth/natural born citizen” and naturalized U.S. citizen.”
No court ruling and no action of Congress has created a separate category called “natural born citizen” that is distinct from “Citizen of the United States At Birth.”
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