Posted on 01/28/2016 12:59:06 PM PST by Kaslin
If you attend a presidential campaign event, you may come across someone wearing colonial garb or an Uncle Sam costume or body paint. But a Ted Cruz rally in Iowa last weekend featured something possibly unprecedented: guys dressed up as Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This was not a random choice of attire. The guys in scarlet tunics were protesters, who passed out copies of Cruz's Canadian birth certificate to highlight the questions about his eligibility for the American presidency. The Constitution says the president must be "a natural born citizen" of the United States.
There is no dispute that the Texas senator was a U.S. citizen from birth, since his mother was an American. Donald Trump has raised questions, though, about whether Cruz, being born in the great state of Alberta, qualifies as "a natural born citizen."
Cruz dismisses the issue. "It's settled law," he says. "As a legal matter it's quite straightforward." In fact, it's never been settled, it's not straightforward and some experts don't agree with his reading.
The fact that it was Trump who raised the issue made it deeply suspect. But though it's unlikely that anything coming out of Trump's mouth is true, it's not impossible. And his claim that this is an unresolved question that could end up throwing the election into doubt happens to be correct.
When it comes to parsing the crucial phrase, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe has noted, "No Supreme Court decision in the past two centuries has ever done so. In truth, the constitutional definition of a 'natural born citizen' is completely unsettled."
Tribe says that under an originalist interpretation of the Constitution -- the type Cruz champions -- he "wouldn't be eligible, because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and '90s required that someone actually be born on U.S. soil to be a 'natural born citizen.'"
Cruz retorted that this is just what you'd expect from a "left-wing judicial activist." But Tribe, an eminent constitutional scholar, is not so predictable. He surprised gun-rights advocates years ago, before the landmark Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment, when he said it protects an individual right to own firearms.
Even if he's a judicial activist, the Supreme Court might agree with him. Cruz should know as much, because he has denounced the court for its "lawlessness," "imperial tendencies" and, yes, "judicial activism."
Nor is Tribe alone among experts. University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner says, "The ordinary meaning of the language suggests to me that one must be born on U.S. territory." Chapman University's Ronald Rotunda, co-author of a widely used constitutional law textbook, told me a couple of weeks ago he had no doubt that Cruz is eligible. But when he investigated the issue, he concluded that under the relevant Supreme Court precedents, "Cruz simply is not a natural born citizen."
Catholic University law professor Sarah Helene Duggin wrote in 2005, "Natural born citizenship is absolutely certain only for United States citizens born post-statehood in one of the fifty states, provided that they are not members of Native American tribes."
Steven Lubet, a Northwestern University law professor, spies another possible land mine. Cruz qualified for citizenship because his mother was an American citizen (unlike his father). But "under the law in effect in 1970, Cruz would only have acquired U.S. citizenship if his mother had been 'physically present' in the United States for ten years prior to his birth, including five years after she reached the age of fourteen," Lubet wrote in Salon.
That raises two questions: Did she live in this country for the required amount of time? And can the Cruz family prove it?
Whether the justices would take the case is another question. Unless some state election official bars him from the ballot on constitutional grounds or a rival candidate goes to court, it's unlikely a lawsuit would get a hearing. But if that happens, the Court may elect to resolve the matter -- and no one can be confident of the ultimate verdict.
Trump, believe it or not, is onto something. Cruz's candidacy suffers a potentially fatal defect. If Cruz is nominated or elected, he could be disqualified. When Republican voters cast their ballots, they have to ask themselves: Is he worth the risk?
Yes of course. I was sure you would recognize that in a flash.
How about all those countless people born in Saudi Arabia to American mothers and Saudi fathers? They are all NBC? And eligible to become POTUS?
Note the reference to Natural Law in the first sentence of our Declaration of Independence.
It is crystal clear that the Founding Fathers used the Natural Law definition of 'natural born Citizen' when they wrote Article II. By invoking "The Laws of Nature and Nature's God" the 56 signers of the Declaration incorporated a legal standard of freedom into the forms of government that would follow.
President John Quincy Adams, writing in 1839, looked back at the founding period and recognized the true meaning of the Declaration's reliance on the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." He observed that the American people's "charter was the Declaration of Independence. Their rights, the natural rights of mankind. Their government, such as should be instituted by the people, under the solemn mutual pledges of perpetual union, founded on the self-evident truth's proclaimed in the Declaration."
The Constitution, Vattel, and “Natural Born Citizen”: What Our Framers Knew
The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God: The True Foundation of American Law
The Supreme Court of the United States has never applied the term “natural born citizen” to any other category than “those born in the country of parents who are citizens thereof”.
Neither the 14th Amendment nor Wong Kim Ark make one a Natural Born Citizen
The Harvard Law Review Article Taken Apart Piece by Piece and Utterly Destroyed
Citizenship Terms Used in the U.S. Constitution - The 5 Terms Defined & Some Legal Reference to Same
"The citizenship of no man could be previous to the declaration of independence, and, as a natural right, belongs to none but those who have been born of citizens since the 4th of July, 1776."....David Ramsay, 1789.
A Dissertation on Manner of Acquiring Character & Privileges of Citizen of U.S.-by David Ramsay-1789
The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law (1758)
The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God: The True Foundation of American Law
Nope.
If Cruz were elected and disqualified, it would have to have been the doing of the new Congress, counting the votes early next year.
That would throw the election to the House, voting state-by-state. If the purported electoral college winner were to lose, the winning ticket (president and vice president) would be whichever they chose.
He already cleared the question up. He is a natural born citizen
But would you have a Conservative?
Oh, please give me a break. Nit picking, like a true Freeping birther. This person is a citizen but this one isn’t. Our founding fathers are rolling in their graves .
If this were a valid fear, the Democrat Party would do everything they could to get Ted Cruz nominated so they could take him out in court. They are not doing this!
Cruz is a natural-born citizen over 35 who has lived in the U.S. for more than the past fourteen years. He's constitutionally eligible to be president. But since Trump has gone all Birther over him there is no way he could retract his positions and suddenly say Cruz was the man. And I can't imagine any reason why Cruz would want to be Trump's VP.
That would throw the election to the House, voting state-by-state. If the purported electoral college winner were to lose, the winning ticket (president and vice president) would be whichever they chose.> --
Where is your authority for the proposition that the winning ticket (Pres and VP) is tossed if the Pres on that ticket is found ineligible by Congress (sitting in early January). 3 USC 15 - Counting electoral votes in Congress? Or elsewhere in Chapter 1 of 3 USC? Or directly from the US constitution?
Please cite the relevant legal authority for your proposition.
Only in your mind. I for one know different.
You realize Delaware is one of original 13 states, don't you? But to be honest, you being a birther it would not surprise me if you did not.
I very much doubt that any court would take this on.
But, in the immortal words of the NJ Supreme Court when they put Frank Lautenberg on the ballot after the deadline, “hypertechnical reliance on the statute” is no way to make decisions.
The problem for Cruz (if it ever comes to that) is that he was born to an alien father in a foreign land. THAT is what NBC was meant to prevent.
You do? Interesting
Of course, by “born on U.S. soil,” you mean also, “of citizen parents.” Otherwise, “natural born citizen” means “Anchor Baby.” And then you immediately have to deal with the question: Is an Anchor Baby more of a “natural born citizen” than a child of a citizen parents or parent born just across the border in Canada???
Yeah you do. There’s the separate but related issue of whether the 14th Amendment covers children born of aliens, it if were resolved in the negative would render moot the question of whether they are natural born citizens.
Donald Trump has famously alluded to being stalked by a Canadian Mountie.
CALGARY SUN PIC
LOL that’s why it was so humorous.
Of course the MSM ate it up.
There's not much of an issue (well, apart from online blogs).
The 39th Congress, which framed the citizenship clauses of the Civil Rights Act and 14th Amendment made abundantly clear that under the acts children born in the U.S. of alien parents were citizens. Examples:
Sen. Trumbull (draftsman of citizenship clause the C.R.A.):
"I understand that under the naturalization laws the children who are born here of parents who have not been naturalized are citizens. Is not the child born in this country of German parents a citizen?" Sen. Trumbull, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 497 (1866).
"I have already said that in my opinion birth entitles a person to citizenship, that every free-born person in this land is, by virtue of being born here, a citizen of the United States, and that the bill now under consideration is but declaratory of what the law now is." Sen. Trumbull, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong. 1st session. 600 (1866)
James Wilson, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is equally clear. He gave a long presentation to the House, which stated in part:
"It is in vain we look into the Constitution of the United States for a definition of the term "citizen." It speaks of citizens, but in no express terms defines what it means by it. We must depend upon the general law relating to subject and citizens recognized by all nations for a definition, and that must lead to a conclusion that every person born in the United States is a natural born citizen of such States, except it may be that children born on our soil to temporary sojourners or representatives of foreign Governments are native born citizens of the United States. Thus it is expressed by a writer on the Constitution of the United States: "Therefore every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural born citizen in the sense of the Constitution, and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining to that capacity." Rawle on the Constitution, pg. 86." Rep. Wilson. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., lst Sess. 1115 - 1117 (1866).
In U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the question was rather definitively settled as to children of resident aliens; such are citizens at birth, and, since the Court interpreted "born . . . in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to have the same meaning as the common law "natural born citizen," they are NBC as well.
Except for the state of Hawaii’s Media Releases and Certified Letters of Verification for his birth vital records, you are correct. No one has yet been able to successfuly impeach those statements in a court of law or present probative evidence of a birth somewhere else.
For example:
http://health.hawaii.gov/vitalrecords/files/2013/05/09-063.pdf
http://health.hawaii.gov/vitalrecords/files/2013/05/News_Release_Birth_Certificate_042711.pdf
http://archive.azcentral.com/12news/Obama-Verification.pdf
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