Ted Cruz has had plenty to say about immigration and immigrants becoming USA citizens during his presidential bid. President Obama is without question eligible for the office he serves.
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Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, explains the basic question in the Ted Cruz natural-born citizenship debate in a constitutional minute. To his kind of judge, Cruz ironically 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.
I’m not known for my clairvoyance – it would be impossible to make a living predicting what the Supreme Court will do – but as the latest round of birtherism continues into successive news cycles, I do have an odd sense of “deja vu all over again”.
“The concept of natural born’ comes from common law, and it is that law the Supreme Court has said we must turn to for the concept’s definition”, she writes in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
“When an immigrant is naturalized, his or her citizenship becomes as natural as ‘natural born.’ The oath taken and the pledge of allegiance given make the immigrant 100 percent American, with all the rights, privileges and obligations appertaining thereto”.
Cruz’s citizenship was at the center of one of the most heated moments of the sixth GOP debate Thursday night. At the time of his birth, and now, federal law explicitly provides that the child born overseas to an American citizen is also a United States citizen. That law does not say, McManamon argues, that they are natural born.
In fact, this is not new.
Mr. Cruz was born in Canada, to an American mother and a Cuban father who had legal resident status in the United States at the time. For example, there were several decades in the 19th century when children of Americans born overseas were not given automatic naturalization. John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican nominee, was challenged in two lawsuits because he was born to American parents in the Panama Canal Zone.
George Romney, who sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1968, had been born, in 1907, to American parents who were then living in Mexico. But the meaning from context and history is clear.
More constitutional law scholars are weighing in on the question of Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be elected president, and most seem to concur with the conclusion that, under the best reading of the phrase “natural born citizen”, Ted Cruz is eligible to be elected President of the United States.
The Court went on to hold that Bellei’s statutory citizenship was lost because of his failure to comply with another condition in the statute, requiring a five-year residency in the USA between the ages of 14 and 28. Why does he want to deprive them of something he was clearly granted?
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At a minimum, the citizenship clause should be clarified to include all birth citizens. There is no reason to say that the person has to have been born in the United States. “Were you aware the qualifications for President and Vice-President are the same?”
