Thanks for posting that. I learned quite a bit. Wouldn’t have looked at the case on my own.
Your welcome. The problem most have is they interpret Justice Story’s opinion in light of US Federal Law when the fact is, Justice Story, doing as he was required to do, relied upon the laws of the time when writing the opinion of the court and those laws were 100% British laws, with the one exception, the 1783 Peace Treaty with Britain, as US Federal laws did not exist therefore, they did not apply US Law to the case. Here is what Blackstone writes in regards to allegiance at birth:
“THE children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such. In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.”
Now ask yourself, at the time of the revolution, who was the Ally of the States, Britain or France? Whose laws were the colonists seeking to cast off? The Britain who held the king as sovereign and master or the France who held the people as sovereigns and masters?
1st US Supreme Court decision (Chisholm v. Georgia) written by Chief Justice John Jay:
[T]he sovereignty of the nation is in the people of the nation, and the residuary sovereignty of each State in the people of each State…
[A]t the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects…]
It doesn’t get much clearer than this, for one to be a sovereign of a nation, one must either be born to a father who is a citizen of the nation, or to a single mother who is a citizen of the nation or be naturalized as a citizen of the nation. At the time of the adoption of the US Constitution that contains the requirements to be president (vice president) there were ONLY 3 options per US Law and thus Ted Cruz was at birth a Canadian who, when upon the return of his parents to the US, through the subsequent laws of immigration and naturalization passed by Congress after WWII, Ted Cruz was able to gain US citizenship as a child. Since his father did not become a US citizen until 2005, and Ted’s parents were married, the ONLY way Ted became a US citizen was via an Act of Congress per the plenary powers held by Congress via Article I of the US Constitution.
Cboldt, it would help you to also read this commentary of one of our founding fathers: http://lonang.com/library/reference/tucker-blackstone-notes-reference/tuck-1e/