Replies

No - it's not.

Do people honestly believe that liberal activist judges are going to avoid the argument the way that conservative judges have?

1) The Republicans, and conservative judges avoided the issue out of fear of being called racists, liberal judges do not have that concern.
2) Obama provided a birth certificate showing that he has born in the State of Hawaii.

All a liberal judge has to do is cite SCOTUS precedent of Minor v. Happersett . In this case, a women in Missouri sued the SOS of Missouri demanding the right to vote, because voting was a right of Citizenship, and the 14th Amendment made her a US Citizen.

"The Constitution does not in words say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents."

So, the court determined that Minor did not become a US Citizen as a result of the adoption of the 14th Amendment, because she was already a citizen, because she was what the Constitution recognized as a "natural-born citizen", explicitly, because she was born in the US to two US Citizen parents.

Some argue that the above is not precedent, and was merely dicta, but that is clearly not the case. How is that known? Because the SCOTUS cites that part of the ruling in another case it heard - Ex Parte Lockwood. In Minor the SCOTUS construed the legal term-of-art natural-born Citizen, and in Ex parte Lockwood the Court cites it;

"In Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, this court held that the word 'citizen' is often used to convey the idea of membership in a nation, and, in that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution as since; but that the right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, and that amendment did not add to these privileges and immunities. Hence, that a provision in a state constitution which confined the right of voting to male citizens of the United States was no violation of the federal constitution."

If the above Supreme Court precedent is not enough, then in order to dispel the myth that "Citizen at birth" equates to "natural-born Citizen", all you need to do is look at the rules of Constitutional construction, and the principle of verba intelligi ut aliquid operantur debent - words should be interpreted to give them some effect. If the two terms above were equal, then there would be no meaning giving effect to the word 'natural', therefore the definition would not be valid. The writers clearly intended for the word to have some meaning, otherwise it would not be there.

The word 'natural', in the term-of-art 'natural born Citizen' is a reference to 'natural law'. Natural law is law that exists without 'positive law' (written laws created by governments). So, the term 'natural born Citizen' means exactly this - someone who would still be a Citizen without need of any positive (man made) law.

The framers relied heavily on Vattel and his The Law of Nations when creating the Country. Ironically this is the book that a few years back there were a number of stories that George Washington never returned to the library.

Â§ 212. Citizens and natives.
The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.

http://www.constitution.org/vattel/vattel_01.htm

I believe there is a 100% chance that a liberal judge will rule him ineligible. They will argue that since Obama was born in Hawaii, and his mom was a Citizen, he fits the definition, but since Cruz was born in Canada, he does not.

The above is not what I want to see happen, but as conservatives we do not have 1) the race card to avoid scrutiny, and 2) the media to bury it's head in the sand. If Cruz runs, and gets the nomination, you will first see legal analysts on every liberal news outlet citing the above cases, and declaring him ineligible. And then a liberal judge will rule that yes, he is ineligible.