Posted on 01/09/2016 12:13:42 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Unless he himself becomes president, Donald Trump should serve in the next administration as Special Envoy for Getting People to Dig Up Birth Certificates for Public Consumption, because he's hella good at it. His speculation about Obama's birthplace prompted the President to release his long-form birth certificate in 2011. And now, after only a few days of muttering about Cruz's eligibility to become president, he's prompted Cruz to release… his mother's?
Wait, it makes sense.
As best we can tell there are two main strands of Cruz birtherism. One is that the Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the meaning of the Constitution's "natural born citizen" requirement. Even though it is understood by experts to mean "U.S. citizen at birth," as Cruz was, some opportunistic critics, such as Trump, have been warning about the phrase's not-totally-determined meaning and how that could open the door to distracting legal cases if Cruz becomes the nominee.
The other is that maybe Cruz was not a U.S. citizen at birth, because his mother did not meet the requirements for transmitting citizenship to her child. As we wrote yesterday, "Those born abroad between 1952 and 1986 earned U.S. citizenship at birth if their parents were married and one parent was a U.S. citizen who spent 10 years in the United States with five of those coming after age 14. Cruz's parents were married, and his mother meets the citizenship requirements." This gives Cruz birthers another person's life to inspect: that of Eleanor Cruz, the senator's mother. Democratic congressman Alan Grayson (yes, there are Democratic Cruz birthers) has said that the eligibility suit he's supposedly prepping against Cruz would focus on Eleanor. As U.S. News reported this week:.....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Tell that to Barack Obama.
Exactly! The Democrats will beat the birther drum like a tin drum. There are things they can do to keep him off the ballot in certain states while the litigation is slowly going through the court(s). This natural born citizen requirement has never been tested in court. The Democrats will drag Senator Cruz into this because they know it has been untested and the courts may be willing to test it.
And what makes you think they won’t do the same to Trump for his own dual nationality issues?
You haven't done your work yet. The US Supreme Court has addressed this specifically.
It's time we made this site a serious "WORK" and not just trash talk.
Jim Robinson, a true Visionary. We should do for Jim and His Family.
It's a wild parallel, for sure. But it pretty much describes Cruz's situation.
The real question is whether citizenship is the same as the framer’s definition of natural born citizen. That has never been tested in the courts. And, because it is untested, the Democrats will make full use of its consequences.
It depends on whether or not she was a US citizen when she moved to Canada.
Why had she gone to Canada?
Was she fleeing because of illegal activity, such has having allegiance to a foreign power that was wanting to cause the USA harm?
Mrs. Cruz was in Canada for legal reasons.
One who has been naturalized.
You must see the problem with the definition. It would qualify children of a whole lot of people who want to do us harm as "natural born citizens" and they wouldn't even have to be born in the USA.
Even the birthers made as their big deal the contention that Obama was born in Kenya. Yet nobody disputed that would've been prohibitive. Instead those defending Obama's eligibility went over the top (some say) to prove Obama was born in the USA.
The statute looks at the citizenship of the parents at the time of birth. Citizenship at the time of entry into the country doesn't matter. Some people move to a country as an alien, then become naturalized, then have a child.
What in the world does this contrived scenario have to do with the price of beans?
Like Mrs. Trump?
There's nothing to vet, except for his Mothers birth certificate verifying she is a US citizen...
That's been done, but there is a cadre of Freepers who insist we go back to the original intent of the founding framers 230 years ago and ignore current US law which makes Cruz eligible...
Not that I have a issue with what the frames wrote back then, but moving 230 years forward, we have thousands of statues and codified law which has modified, changed, altered the intent of several Articles of the Constitution....
Are we going to pick and choose which laws to obey or just the ones Trump flings on the wall ?
Unfortunately it’s a waste of effort. The clouds could part, angels could sing, and the mighty voice of God could confirm that Ted Cruz is a natural-born citizen and birthers would still be saying, “Yeah but what about...”.
Bull. Donald Trump would bulldoze his own mother if it would help him win. His worst insult is to call someone a "loser". He is not doing anything to help his closest rival for the nomination.
That makes a good point. I’m not a legal scholar of the Constitution. However, it is my observation that there was developed early in our nation’s history a definite idea of what a Natural Born Citizen is:
The Naturalization Act of 1790 provided that “the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States . . . .” This expanded the class of citizens at birth to include children born abroad of citizen mothers as long as the father had at least been resident in the United States at some point.
Was Senator Cruz’s father a resident of the United States? Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, when his parents were running a seismic-data processing firm for oil drillers. It was there Ted’s father, Rafael, became a Canadian citizen. Previously, Rafael obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. Rafael renounced his Canadian citizenship and, in 2005, became a naturalized U.S. citizen. So, Rafael had been a resident of the United States. However, will his Canadian citizenship be a larger factor?
Four years ago Trump claimed he had sent a team to Hawaii to investigate Obama's birth certificate and that they were "astounded" at what they found. Well if they found anything then, much less anything "astounding" then why has he been sitting on it for four years? Why is he waiting to release it?
HE should have put this to bed a long time ago.
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