My sons were born in the US to me and my wife who is a German national and permanent US resident. I find it hard to accept that neither of them is eligible to run for president. Both are over 35 and have never lived on foreign soil. Tell me it isn’t true.
NBC folk are just scab pickers.
They’d provide a better service supporting Cruz, etc.
“My sons were born in the US to me and my wife who is a German national and permanent US resident.”
Did your wife ever become a naturalized U.S. Citizen, especially before your sons were born?
I thought we had settled this with Romney the First, George.
He was physically born in Mexico, of legal American parents. Still Supreme Court found him eligible to run for President, not that he got very far. Same question was raised about McCain, born in the Panama Canal zone, and that got shot down even more quickly.
I’m happy to have Cruz as one of my Senators, I’m not sure I’d support him for a Presidential race, but my opinion, that door should be open to him.
Remember, none of our first 13 Presidents would have qualified under a strict reading. George Washington was not “born” in the United States, it didn’t exist at the time of his birth.
I am done with the “birther issue”. You don’t like Obama, you should have worked harder to defeat him.
They are both perfectly eligible to run for President, on fulfilling the other qualifications: 35 years of age, and 14 years a resident of the United States.
There is a fairly large contingent of mythspinners here, who claim it takes birth on US soil, plus two citizen parents to be a natural born citizen. Some of them post literally dozens of pages of fallacious arguments. I am in process of trying, slowly, to document these. I've got 39 so far, and have no doubt that I'm nowhere near done.
Early legal authorities and other writers are virtually unanimous in saying that being a "natural born citizen" or eligible to the Presidency meant or required being "born on US soil" or "born a citizen."
As far as I'm aware, the ONLY early "authority" who said differently was a physician, historian and politican named David Ramsay, who at least sort of argued otherwise... although he really wasn't even arguing about the children born in the after-Revolution United States of immigrant parents.
Ramsay was running a sore-loser campaign to try and disqualify one of the guys who beat him for a seat in the US House of Representatives. That was the obvious purpose of his little "treatise on citizenship." And he was voted down 36 to 1 in a vote led by Father of the Constitution James Madison. So Ramsay's opinion was officially judged by one of our most prominent Founding Fathers as being absolutely worthless.
Against this there are literally dozens of more competent voices, including a few that are abundantly clear, like that of William Rawle, early American legal expert who met regularly with Washington and Franklin to discuss politics and law, and who was in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention:
"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."
In 1787 when the Constitution was written, the Wives automatically took the citizenship of their husbands. In 1854 (If I remember correctly) they codified this into law.
This wasn't changed until the Cable act of 1922 which made it possible for a woman to convey citizenship themselves. It was further expanded in 1934 by the "Citizenship Act of 1934."
According to the rules in place in 1787, your children are qualified. Look up the legal principle "Partus Sequitur Patrem" for a better understanding.
It's not true. No court has ever ruled that someone born in the US was not a natural-born citizen (except for the children of ambassadors etc.). And more than one has ruled that they are. So tell your sons to go for it, if they're interested.