Nice rant but there was no such thing as political correctness in 1790 when the ORIGINAL Congress exempted children born “beyond the sea or out of the limits of the United States” from needing naturalization and declared them to be “natural born citizens.”
The fact that a later Congress changed the wording is irrelevant to what is clearly the original thinking of the Founders and Framers.
But hey, if you can find any evidence of a Certificate of Naturalization ever being issued to Senator Cruz, I’m willing to change my mind.
Yes, I’d love to see a link to a textbook because in my humble opinion no such statement was ever made in a textbook, but I can be proven wrong if you can find such a statement.
All those who believe Senator Cruz is ineligble need to do is convince a judge or get a bill through Congress which states that a “Citizen of the United States At Birth” is not necessarily synonymous with being a “natural born citizen.”
Obviously you didn’t bother to read previous posts for the basis of my “rant.”
The Naturalization Act of 1790 stated “children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens,” but “considered as” does not change the definition of the term or the fact of the physical circumstances of birth, nor can conferring a privilege by statute change an eligibility requirement in the Constitution. The 1790 Act also provided that its terms only applied to the law then in effect, which was changed by the Naturalization Act of 1795.
When this Act was reconsidered, Madison himself pointed out that Congress only had constitutional authority to naturalize aliens, not U.S. citizens, and reported a bill that amended the statute to eliminate the words “natural born” and simply state that “the children of citizens of the United States” born abroad “shall be considered as citizens.” This indicates that Madison’s view was that children born abroad of U.S. citizens were naturally aliens, rather than natural born citizens, and thus could be naturalized by Congressional statute but should not be called “natural born.” Congress adopted this amendment in the Naturalization Act of 1795.
The 1790 Congress made a mistake, using sloppy language, which was corrected in the next act on the subject. It is also irrelevant. It is a naturalization act, and a statute cannot change the meaning of a term in the Constitution. For that one has to go back to the usage of the term before 1787, and that means usage by Coke and Blackstone, especially Coke, in Calvin’s Case. That case controls the meaning for the Founders, who regularly referred to those authors when they were unclear on legal terms of art. The early Congresses often made constitutional errors. Then as now they did not always think everything through.
If you go to the bottom of page 48 of the following link you will see that in 1848 children were taught that you must be born in the U.S. to be eligible for president. Hell, I was taught that in the1950’s!
https://archive.org/stream/elementarycatech00stanrich/elementarycatech00stanrich_djvu.txt
You say, “But hey, if you can find any evidence of a Certificate of Naturalization ever being issued to Senator Cruz, I’m willing to change my mind.”
That is precisely the point, Cruz SHOULD have one to ascertain his U.S. citizenship according to the State Department but his parents failed to get one. I myself had to get a CRBA for my two children born overseas because statute declares them alien born and I was certainly a U.S.citizen stationed in London. See
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/A4en.pdf
Hope this helps.