Posted on 01/25/2016 8:03:19 AM PST by justlittleoleme
Liberals won't like it.
If Ted Cruz is elected president, he has big plans for the Supreme Court -- namely, picking extremely conservative candidates to fill any vacancies among the nine justices.
In an interview with Bloomberg, the Senator and former solicitor general from Texas said that Republicans are generally bad at picking nominees for the high court, and that he'd be different.
"Unlike many of the other candidates, I will be willing to spend the capital to ensure that every Supreme Court nominee that I put on the court is a principled judicial conservative," Cruz said.
As solicitor general, Bloomberg notes, Cruz argued in front of the court on behalf of his state.
Cruz specifically called out Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, and Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan, as bad picks. Roberts has gotten a lot of flack among conservatives in recent years for voting to uphold Obamacare, while Kennedy was castigated by the right for writing the opinion this year to legalize gay marriage.
The next president will likely have a few vacancies to fill. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy will all be over 80 years old by election day, while Stephen Breyer will be 78.
So how would Cruz find truly conservative justices? He said he'd look for candidates with "a long paper trail as principled conservative jurists." This means jurists who've actually made decisions, rather than the sometimes more politically palatable candidates without as much of a record.
“In an interview with Bloomberg, the Senator and former solicitor general from Texas said that Republicans are generally bad at picking nominees for the high court, and that he’d be different.
“Unlike many of the other candidates, I will be willing to spend the capital to ensure that every Supreme Court nominee that I put on the court is a principled judicial conservative,” Cruz said. ..”
I LOVE IT!
Donald Trump would pick pro-eminent domain judges, and they would be liberals.
Remember it was the liberal justices who UNconstitutionally voted for eminent domain.
Our courts are a mess. We canNOT elect Trump.
Is Mrs. Cruz running for President too?
>>It only takes a spark to get a fire going. A good example is Rhinehard Bonnke’s ministy. The Lord placed a desire for him to minister to Africa when he was a small boy living in Germany.
Yes, Africa. I mentioned the work of the Holy Spirit in Africa and Asia a few posts ago. Those continents had not heard the gospel before and they soaked it up and still do. But, everyone in the USA knows the basics of the Jesus story and it is not working in them. Do you think that Cruz can accomplish what Billy Graham and a million other preachers have not accomplished? The gospel is spreading throughout the world, but the wave has already washed over America and moved on. Another wave could wash over us at any moment but it won’t be started by anyone in the White House.
Ur ignorance of 6he law is showing...!
Ignorance is bliss huh!
Thanks for the compliment - yours was good too.
“The point is that there really is no way to predict what any of our guys will do, we only know for certain what the enemy will do. Therefore, the smart play is to make sure it is our guy picking the next 4-6 Justices rather than the enemy, and even if we bat .500 or less, that is still better than .000.”
While obvious, this needs to be restated often and loudly.
“So that brings up the 800 pound gorilla in the room. If you nominate what you consider the great selector and in the election he does the same or worse than McCain/Palin 2008 ( 173 electoral votes ) or Romney/Ryan 2012 ( 206 ) then you not only get to select ZERO Supreme Court Justices...”
Not sure what you’re getting at here?
Reagan had a completely Dumbocrat Congress to deal with.
Or else yours is.
http://www.thepostemail.com/2009/10/18/4-supreme-court-cases-define-natural-born-citizen/
Absolutely correct. And Ted is NOT a naturalized citizen because he was a citizen by birth. A citizen by birth is a natural born citizen.
[Do you think that Cruz can accomplish what Billy Graham and a million other preachers have not accomplished?]
That is silly to even mention on a thread.
I believe there will be a final great harvest in America before the LORD returns. What it will take, GOD only knows.
Ted is NOT a natural born citizen. The constitution says “No person except a natural born Citizen........”
Natural born means born of two citizen parents on the soil of the country. This is the definition given in Vattel’s Law of Nations.
People try to insist the Constitution does not define natural born. It does by referencing Vattel’s Law of Nations in Article I Section 8 , “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;
Ctuz is NOT a natural born citizen as the Constitution has not been amended by an Article 5 as is required to make any change.
>>That is silly to even mention on a thread.
Why is it silly? A lot of Cruz fans are giving him superpowers in their minds. They think that he can “restore the Constitution” or bring America back to God. Whatever his personal attributes are, he has a proven track record of not really accomplishing much when he needs to lead others.
>>I believe there will be a final great harvest in America before the LORD returns. What it will take, GOD only knows.
Why do you believe that? I hope it’s true, but I have no reason to believe that it will or will not happen. God doesn’t need the United States for anything. We aren’t mentioned in any End Times prophecy. Our usefulness was as an island away from Europe and the Middle East where the promise of the Reformation could occur unmolested by old world prejudices. Now, we are the old world as God sweeps through the most heavily populated areas on earth. His work in the history of mankind is still playing out right before us. That’s where the harvest is! Rejoice in what he is doing and realize that each of us in the remnant are still with him.
You should know. You're the one who asked that stupid question.
"So that brings up the 800 pound gorilla in the room. If you nominate what you consider the 'great selector' and in the election he does the same or worse than McCain/Palin 2008 ( 173 electoral votes ) or Romney/Ryan 2012 ( 206 ) then you not only get to select ZERO Supreme Court Justices..."
Not sure what you're getting at here?
By great selector I mean what our grandstanding purist friends are speaking of, nominating Ted Cruz because he is better at picking Justices.
800 pound gorilla in the room is metaphor for a gigantic issue everyone either cannot see or wants to ignore.
So I meant that nominating a great selector of Supreme Court Justices is an awesome thing but only if he wins ... however what if that candidate does the same or worse than McCain/Palin ( losing 365-173 ) and Romney/Ryan ( losing 332-206 ), when you need 270 electoral votes to win, but our "red" states only supply 180.
So that paragraph was merely a reinstatement of the earlier one you complimented ( thanks ). I'm just cutting to the case here. We cannot run our purist playbook any longer on this office. The purple states, and the "blue" states are not interested. And if we ignore that new paradigm we lose again. Then we get zero Justices as before and this will be fatal this time around because the Heller decision interpreting the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear firearms was a 5-4 decision. We are at the end of game with one play left - win this damn thing for once and get the next set of Justices and buy some time on the game clock.
Absolutely correct. And Ted is NOT a naturalized citizen because he was a citizen by birth. A citizen by birth is a natural born citizen.
( NOTE: this discussion surely pushes up against the unwritten rules here so I am going to specifically leave candidate names out of this. Moreover, since the Supreme Court punted this to the people to decide for themselves, this is an academic discussion and we should refrain from saying that a person is or isn't qualified and vote for what you believe. Absent a Supreme Court decision or a Constitutional Amendment, this is where the issue will remain forever ). ~sigh~ this gonna be a long one ...
--- List of Facts only --- ( we can call these the "dots" we'll try to logically connect later )
The first problem that jumps out is when people excitedly run to statutory law, such as the Naturalization Act of 1790 or 1795, or any law to look for references or guidance as to what the Founders meant by Natural Born Citizen in the Constitution ( from 1787 ) or presumably what we should think of it today! This is the first MASSIVE logical disconnect - looking for guidance in subsequent documents. That is clearly asking for the Constitution to be redefined, clarified, interpreted, edited by Congress! This is a Separation of Powers violation and illogical by any measure. Only the Supreme Court's limited enumerated and still arguable powers fit this scenario, but certainly not the Congress.
Importantly, Congress has never specifically even tried to tie their phrase: Citizen by Birth to the Founders phrase: Natural Born Citizen, nor have they said that they are referencing an *identical* pool of people. They cannot really say they are *identical* because (1) they would be clearly usurping Judicial power redefining and interpreting the Constitution, and (2) they would also be backdoor stealth modifying the qualifications for a Constitutionally defined office, the President. Only We The People get to do that.
It is equally illogical to associate two separate terms, the Constitutional phrase Natural Born Citizen with the later Congressional term citizen at birth. Any person accepting this logic anoints himself as a super Supreme Court Justice as there is no precedent for such a correlation. But even if there was, this itself would be illogical because that later Supreme Court would be saying that a later Congress using their term somehow meant that it was identical to the much earlier Founders term, but without first ascertaining what the Founders did mean in 1787. This is tantamount to mind-reading of two different groups of people from two different eras, and then lumping them together. ( I believe this is why the current Supreme Court has punted it back to us to decide for ourselves ).
The crux of the matter is that modern politics has seen many people directly connecting Natural Born Citizen to Citizen at Birth. The only thing we know for sure is that neither term describes people who require naturalization. The first group, NBC, are who they are by virtue of who they are, by Natural Law, By Nature, By God. They are born citizens who are qualified to run for President as specified by the Founders. The second group is people who Congress has decided are already CITIZENS not ALIENS ( the extent of their legislative power ), and thus are not required to become naturalized through the very same legislation where this term is appearing. This is a classic example of reading too much into something.
There is no reason to lump these two groups of people together or state that one is not a subset of the other because they appear in two differing contexts. In fact, that itself is an un-Constitutional edit, a stealth Amendment, illustrated by the havoc such a precedent will wreak. Congress writes laws signed by the President that deals with "firearms" or "speech" and the ridiculous proposition that we can now say that "firearms" ( or whatever phrase from a Pelosi Congress ) is EQUAL to the broader "arms" in the Second Amendment is suicidal. Every single word of the Founders is then subject to redefinition. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a term reserved for Congress to consider at impeachment time and has absolutely nothing to do with always evolving statutory laws of a given time period. They CAN mean the same thing, but not necessarily. Constitutional terms are typically broadly stated, even ambiguous like "Natural Born Citizen" and "Arms" and "Speech" and "Press", therefore locking them down to a specific definition set by a later Congress instead of We The People for the sake of modern political expediency is beyond ludicrous to seriously dangerous.
Utilizing post-Constitutional events and legislation to somehow determine original intent of earlier thinking is chronologically illogical. The intent is found in preceding debates and contemporaneous writings. Since we do happen to know the actual origin of how the term NBC actually came along, from John Jay writing to the President of the Philadelphia Convention, general George Washington ...
Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.
To say that the terms Natural Born Citizen and Citizen at Birth are IDENTICAL is to also say that there is no Citizen at Birth who is excluded from running for President. This opens the door to anyone that Congress decides NOT requiring naturalization may run for President. The problem there should be obvious. Mere children of a single USA citizen are then qualified, and being born anywhere in the world ( or perhaps another planet as well ). Such children as determined by a Naturalization Act indeed do not require a naturalization procedure and are entitled to vote and receive whatever other benefits we allegedly receive. The logical flaw is taking that last step to calling them NBC which is about the loyalty to a Commander-in-Chief as suggested by Jay, passed along to the Framers by George Washington, and included into the text of the Constitution.
So what we have come to now is that geographic birth is discarded even though that is a primary and direct connection to a nation and reflects the loyalty to that nation and that nation's jurisdiction over them. Likewise, we have discarded inherited nationality because if a single parent is all that is required then that literally discards the other parent and their nationality as irrelevant and inconsequential and subordinate, and it literally ignores the FACT of competing loyalty to two or three nations and the conflicting jurisdiction from two or three nations.
The often disputed reasoning that a pure and unquestionable Natural Born Citizen is a child of two USA citizens born in USA is not something created from thin air, it is merely a quite logical KISS ( keep it simple ) approach to describing someone who has NO potential conflicts by definition. As another Constitutionalist FReeper has logically explained, it means We The People of the United States of America have clear title to such a person. No-one has to follow this logic, but it *is* the only logic that arrives at a clean and unquestionable solution.
It also avoids one really crazy mathematical fallacy. By entertaining the questionable NBC candidates we accept the equation that 50% American == 100% American. Or when considering all three inputs with boolean logic ( geography AND mother AND father ) we actually find that 1/3 NBC == 2/3 NBC == 3/3 NBC. Politically correct thinking swaps out the boolean AND for OR gates. This new math results in one thing, lowering the standards by watering down the qualification criteria. Using John Jay's terminology, a full foreigner is different than a one half foreigner. A one half foreigner is surely different than a natural born citizen. The current politically correct thinking results in bias of half foreigner being closer or equal to natural born citizen than to full foreigner. That is interestingly arbitrary and anti-nationalist at the same time. The Nu-American thinking from academics who admittedly despise America and nationalism is that it is a radical and kooky opinion to seek candidates who are 0% foreigner, like every single candidate ever was until the current occupant of our White House.
Once again, since the Supreme Court has chosen to punt this issue back to We The People, then we get to choose individually for ourselves. Everything written above is purely academic. I'm not happy about their reasoning that we have no standing, but I am now forced to admit that Roberts accidentally arrived at the correct conclusion. Given the makeup of that and earlier Courts, who knows what monster they might create. So I'll leave it here, we get to decide for ourselves. If you want a President of the United States of America who was born in Canada, or Kenya, or Russia, or Iran or Libya ( ... etc ... ) then present circumstances have made this possible. Those of us who disagree are not crazies though. When did arguing for the highest standards for the highest office in the land become kooky?
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Excellent all the way through.
I would point out the danger in this entire debate is that it is INTENDED to water down NATIONALISM so that we are less resistant to fighting the loss of our borders, the loss of our standing in the world, the ultimate loss forever of our sovereignty to a one world order body in which we have no say. We will exist if we are allowed to as lemmings...slaves to the ruling order. If Nationalism, otherwise known as Patriotism cannot save us, nothing will.
We cannot allow our Constitution to be destroyed!
We cannot run our purist playbook any longer on this office. The purple states, and the "blue" states are not interested....
Disagree here. The blue and purple states haven't had to consider an actual conservative message in the voting booth since 1984. No one under the age of 50 has had an honest-to-goodness conservative Presidential candidate try to win them over. The last time it happened, he won in a landslide. Is the country different today? Absolutely. That does not mean a conservative message is a loser in blue and purple states though.
I am in the minority (on this site at least). I think Trump or Cruz would make excellent Presidents and each has a different path to victory but victory would be well within either's grasp. I also think the animosity between supporters is BS. "If I like him I have to hate the other guy" is like arguing sports in a bar. This isn't sports where Yankee fans hate the Red Sox and vice versa. You can support both up until it's time to choose in the primary.
Obviously, that just makes sense for a person occupying a position of such power.
Unfortunately, all they had to work with was the eligibility requirements for office, which they wrote in the common language and self-evident terminology of their day, while using The Law of Nations, by Emerich de Vattel, as their primary reference.
Fortunately, they understood human nature well enough to go back and add the Bill of Rights to spell out some of the more critical 'self-evident' truths.
No doubt they knew we'd argue about things if they didn't, and even if they did, but they could not have foreseen a times and a people so given to rewriting in fundamental transformation once formerly "self-evident" truths as we like to do, such as with marriage recently.
Sadly, we see only by the light of our own reason these days and can only see as far as we can see and with much hidden by our own scaly shadows and darkness.
For example, obama is a text book example of what I believe the Founding Fathers tried to protect US from.
obama's claim and fame originally was being a Kenyan born Senator from Hawaii.
By his own admission, not only he was not Born in the USA, but through his book, Dreams of My Father, we, the people, were introduced to someone with as blatantly divided allegiance, from birth, as anyone could get.
That we, the people, got the "obama test" is not surprising, but that we got it immediately after 9/11 is very surprising, intellectually fascinating and ideologically disturbing at a core level.
That we failed it twice? Yikes, fooled US twice...shame and sharia be upon US.
But now...to have the identical test repackaged and rewritten as yet another make up test and then given specifically to the self-proclaimed constitooshunalists among US?
And...that so few seem to notice?
Whoa...I'm not even sure what to make or think of that.
We are observing true masters performing their arts...on US.
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