Posted on 03/23/2015 10:36:02 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Where’s that “Not this shit again” guy when you need him?
Ping to NPR NBC article including Harvard bipartisan solicitor generals affirming Ted Cruz as NBC based on 1790 Naturalization Act...which IIRC was SUPERCEDED in 1795 which kind of changed the quoted language in the article below?
Due to my ME/CFS I will leave it to others to sort the details...
And most legal scholars agree. In fact, two of the best-known Supreme Court lawyers — who are not normally on the same side — make the case that Cruz, as were McCain, George Romney and Goldwater, is eligible to run.
Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, and Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under George W. Bush, wrote earlier this month in the Harvard Law Review that “there is no question” Cruz is eligible.
They say that because Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen and his father was a U.S. resident, “Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus a ‘natural born Citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution” and the “Naturalization Act of 1790.”
They also point to British common law and enactments by the First Congress, both of which have been cited by the Supreme Court.
“Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase ‘natural born Citizen’ includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent. As to the British practice, laws in force in the 1700s recognized that children born outside of the British Empire to subjects of the Crown were subjects themselves and explicitly used ‘natural born’ to encompass such children. These statutes provided that children born abroad to subjects of the British Empire were ‘natural-born Subjects ... to all Intents, Constructions, and Purposes whatsoever.’
“The Framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like ‘natural born,’ since the statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War. They were also well documented in Blackstone’s Commentaries, a text widely circulated and read by the Framers and routinely invoked in interpreting the Constitution.
“No doubt informed by this longstanding tradition, just three years after the drafting of the Constitution, the First Congress established that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were U.S. citizens at birth, and explicitly recognized that such children were ‘natural born Citizens.’ 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. ...’
“The actions and understandings of the First Congress are particularly persuasive because so many of the Framers of the Constitution were also members of the First Congress. That is particularly true in this instance, as eight of the eleven members of the committee that proposed the natural born eligibility requirement to the Convention served in the First Congress and none objected to a definition of ‘natural born Citizen’ that included persons born abroad to citizen parents.”
Katyal and Clement conclude, “There are plenty of serious issues to debate in the upcoming presidential election cycle. The less time spent dealing with specious objections to candidate eligibility, the better. Fortunately, the Constitution is refreshingly clear on these eligibility issues.”
Reminder: The owner of FR has determined that Ted Cruz is eligible to be POTUS!
Please confine criticism to the Harvard professors analysis of the 1790 Act.
Yeah, people have a funny sort of logic. If they are arguing the first act (naturalization act of 1790) "gave" natural born citizen status to the foreign born children of American Fathers, why isn't the act which repealed it and replaced that term with "citizen" the one which is in force?
How is the repealed act still in force instead of the one which replaced it?
I would like to hear some of these legal "scholars" explain this to me. It sounds like they are trying to have it both ways.
Cruz has a non fake non Internet birth certificate and his American mom was old enough to confer her citizenship onto her baby. Next question.
Obama was born to a girl too young to confer citizenship upon her baby. If she delivered just outside Seattle (the only place she was ever seen with newborn Barack) in Vancouver, as was common with “girls in trouble” at her high school, obama was never a citizen of the U.S. And isn’t that a fair question to ask about our President? His BC was an Internet copy, a mismatched pastiche. He used someone else’s SS no to get his first job at 16. No one ever really asked the right questions.
How old do you have to be confer citizenship to your child?
In 1961 you had to have lived in the USA for 5 years after the age of 14. Stanley Ann gave birth at 18.
You are correct.
Ahnold was born an Austrian. Naturalized later. Ted Cruz was born an American. Thus, natural born.
Libs will wait until he gets the nomination and then go to court. Court will deny Cruz and the Dem (Hillary will run unopposed). Pretty simple isn’t it.
These Harvard academics and NPR all loath Cruz but they must rush to protect retroactively their support for Barry’s “transformational” (urp!) presidency!
What would have happened had congress not passed a law naturalizing the children of citizens who are born abroad?
Would they still be natural born citizens?
If the term “natural born citizen” has any meaning at all, it’s meaning was settled by what the authors and ratifiers understood it to mean, as amended since.
Therefore it cannot be modified or changed by act of Congress, such as the law that supposedly made Mom too young to transmit citizenship to him.
Are you kidding that college girls in HI routinely went to Vancouver to have their babies? Why would they do that?
Anywho, Stanley wasn’t “in trouble.” She was a married woman at the time of the birth, making her husband the legal father quite regardless of who the bio-dad might be.
The problem all along has been the Constitution’s failure to define “natural born citizen.” The argument arises from the definition as understood by the Framers at the time.
So if Barry was born in Kenya, then he is a natural born citizen because he had a American mother?— Wonder why Barry would forge a Birth certificate then? weird.. maybe he is a illegal alien like uncle omar
You might add one more “requirement” to your list of proposals (proposals by others) ... that the person whose citizenship is being analyzed not be born with dual citizenship.
Oh, I agree. With the caveat that the definition may also have been affected by 14A. But not by laws or regulations.
Inserting the term was apparently accepted by the Convention without any discussion at all, so it seems very likely they all understood what it meant.
To me, the most likely explanation is that they lifted it from common law. Most of them were trained as lawyers, and most of the rest were familiar with Blackstone and other common law books.
Blackstone never uses the term “natural born citizens,” but he does routinely use “natural-born subject.” I believe the Founders just mentally adjusted the common law term they were all familiar with to a new country where there were no subjects, just citizens. Hence, natural born citizens.
The Blackstone definition is quite similar to the one commonly accepted today as provided by 14A. Jus solis.
The constitution if you parents are from Poland.
AND they couldn’t find oblamer’s college records, or anyone who remembered him being at that school or schools or a valid Hawaii birth certificate etc. - but suddenly all of those things will be vitally important.
The problem is that the term "natural born citizen" is used in the Constitution, but it is not defined in the Constitution. Otherwise, this would not even be a discussion.
If you were to follow deVatell, if your Poland-born parents had become US citizens by the time you were born, you are a natural born citizen. If they hadn’t become citizens, according to the same treatise, and you were born in the US, you are a citizen, but not ‘natural born citizen.’
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