Discussion for article #247037
A New York state judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging Sen. Ted Cruzās (R-TX) presidential eligibility on Monday because the lawsuit was filed too late, according to USA Today.
āplease donāt let the petitioners be Democrats or progressives.ā
Aside from that thoughā¦
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Between these kinds of time limits and the considerable standing issues, itās going to be very tough to get this issue to be judged on its merits. Even if it cleared those hurdles, the appeals would grind on for quite a while.
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Great news. More fuel for the GOP bonfire in July. It really wouldnāt be the same without him.
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Three days sounds awfully tight.
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It would be unfortunate to actually judge the issue on its merits. That might ruin the GOP convention.
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No matter what, Cruz is a Cuban Canadian.
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This means the Obama birther thing was always a complete hoax that we were made to suffer by a corrupt media. That simple.
or this lawsuit was just filed too lateā¦
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My guess is still the only way one of these gets heard is if a state actually refuses to put Cruz on the ballot and HE sues the stateā¦sort of the reverse approach.
Any other way is going to continually get knocked down for lack of standing. And its one of those things that the SCOTUS really have very little desire to hear.
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That would be my guess, as well. Anything else falls short.
SCOTUS may not want to hear it, but ultimately, only a SCOTUS decision would provide the clarity needed to put the issue to rest.
Yes, obviously the SCOTUS is the one who can definitely answer the question of what ānatural born citizenā means. But its one of those things they would be loathe to do,and would prefer it stay ambiguous. Because any case that they have that would require them to define, by its very nature requires them to weigh in on a political question and instantly it becomes questioned as partisan. There is no way around that.
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I think that even with the current SCOTUS (or even the previous one) there would almost certainly be a willingness to agree on a definition just to shut the issue down. For better or worse, that would probably involve agreeing on the most permissive possible interpretation of ānatural bornā just to make sure the issue never arises again with someone trying to test the boundaries.
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I disagree. The Court will hear such a case if one could ever make its way into the system, but it would hear it begrudgingly. Its not like its a constitutional issue that keeps cropping upā¦in over 200 years this is the only time I can think of it that a question of any legitimacy has been raised. But it IS a big political question. From Roberts, or any Justiceās perspective, that is a high risk, low return case. They get tarnished by one side or the other regardless of the ruling, and from a precedent standpoint it never gets raised again for another 200 years.
Maybe Iām dumb but I really donāt understand how a state court can rule on a candidateās eligibility to run for POTUS as a ruling would have to apply to all states. Can you imagine the mess if one candidate for POTUS was allowed on the ballot in some states and not others?
This isnāt the first time this has happened. In 1880, when Chester A. Arthur was running for president there were frequent rumors that he was born in Canada (possibly true). His supporters denied it of course, and he always claimed a birthplace of Vermont. His mother was an American Citizen and his father was an Irish immigrant. Kind of like a certain senator currently running for president. Ironically, it was the democratic party that launched that particular attack.
In 1916, it came up again. This time, it was Charles Evans Hughes, who ran against Woodrow Wilson (he lost to Wilson by just one state (California which he lost by just 3,800 votes). He was born in New York, but both his parents were British subjects at the time. There was frequent discussion of whether he was a natural born citizen. A lawyer for the Democratic party at the time wrote an article against Hughes that said the following:
Whether Mr. Hughes is, or is not, a ānatural bornā citizen within the meaning of the Constitution, so as to make him eligible, or ineligible, to assume the office of President, presents an interesting inquiry.
He was born in this country and is beyond question ānative born.ā But is there not a distinction between ānative bornā and ānatural bornā? At the time he was born his father and mother were subjects of England. His father had not then been naturalized.
Then, in 1967, when George Romney (Mittās father) ran for president it came up again. George was born in Mexico to American parents. There was discussion at the time whether he met the natural born requirement. Here is a link to an article from the New York Times on the issue from 1967 (sub required).
So it has come up before, and no doubt, in our increasingly international world, with more and more expats, it will come up again. It isnāt every 200 years. It seems to come up every 50 years or so. That is actually pretty frequently.
It wouldnāt apply to other states. The Secretary of State of each individual state is responsible for determining the eligibility of every candidate on every ballot. That includes the federal races. Which means that if you are going to sue someone over a presidential candidateās eligibility, due to standing, the first place you would start would be by suing your stateās secretary of state. If the court ruled in your favor, it would no doubt be appealed by the candidate, but other states would take notice, and it would snowball from there.
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Plus, we only have 8/9ths of a Supreme Court at the moment anyway. Which creates the very real the chance of a deadlock.
I am an attorney (like everyone else here it seems), and this question intrigued me enough to look into it a while back. I must confess that I am baffled by the seeming consensus that this is in any way an open or undecided legal question.
It is true that the Constitution nowhere defines what was meant by ānatural born citizenā in the qualifications to be president, but perhaps that was because it is utterly unnecessary.
It has been the universal law pretty much everywhere for perhaps thousands of years that one can become a ācitizenā of a place in one of two ways, and only in one of those ways: by birth or by naturalization. Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S. 815, 841, 91 S. Ct. 1060, 1074, 28 L. Ed. 2d 499 (1971).
It would seem to go without saying that a ānatural born citizenā would fall into the former and outside the latter category. So, for example, when Justice Douglas in the majority decision in Schneider v. Rusk, 377 U.S. 163, 165, 84 S. Ct. 1187, 1189, 12 L. Ed. 2d 218 (1964) said:
We start from the premise that the rights of citizenship of the native born and of the naturalized person are of the same dignity and are coextensive. The only difference drawn by the Constitution is that only the ānatural bornā citizen is eligible to be President. Art. II, s 1,
A person who became a citizen through ānaturalizationā simply is not qualified to be president. That may or may not make sense, but whether it does is not the question.
Now we all know what naturalization is. It is a process, a ceremony. It is the transformation of a living person from a non-citizen to a citizen. Even our naturalization law says so: " The term ānaturalizationā means the conferring of nationality of a state upon a person after birth, by any means whatsoever." 8 U.S.C. Ā§ 1101(a)(23).
While that might true in every other sense of the word, it is not true for the constitutional definition of ānaturalization.ā
A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States can only become a citizen by being naturalized, either by treaty, as in the case *703 of the annexation of foreign territory, or by authority of congress, exercised either by declaring certain classes of persons to be citizens, as in the enactments conferring citizenship upon foreign-born children of citizens, or by enabling foreigners individually to become citizens by proceedings in the judicial tribunals, as in the ordinary provisions of the naturalization acts.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 702-03, 18 S. Ct. 456, 477, 42 L. Ed. 890 (1898)
Citizenship by naturalization can only be acquired by naturalization under the authority and in the forms of law. But citizenship by birth is established by the mere fact of birth under the circumstances defined in the constitution. Every person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, becomes at once a citizen of the United States, and needs no naturalization.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 702, 18 S. Ct. 456, 477, 42 L. Ed. 890 (1898).
Persons not born in the United States acquire citizenship by birth only as provided by Acts of Congress. . . . . Petitioner, having been born outside the territory of the United States, is an alien as far as the Constitution is concerned, and ācan only become a citizen by being naturalized, either by treaty, as in the case of the annexation of foreign territory; or by authority of Congress.
Miller v. Albright, 523 U.S. 420, 424, 453, 118 S. Ct. 1428, 1432, 140 L. Ed. 2d 575 (1998)
In other words, unless one wants to start throwing out Supreme Court precedent spanning an entire century, a person can be both a citizen by virtue of birth and a naturalized citizen. Whatever ānatural born citizenā means under the Constitution means, it cannot mean one whose citizenship was established by virtue of an Act of Congress because Congress has authority over āNaturalizationā and not āCitizenship.ā
Moreover, Congress has systematically (but inconsistently) regulated the citizenship of persons born to United States citizens abroad, something that it could not do to a person whose citizenship derived from the Constitution. I am not going to into all the details here, but that dates to 1790. We had times when the father had to be the US Citizen, and when it was the mother. We have had different rules for married and unmarried parents. We have had residency requirements for parents and for the offspring. These have all been upheld by the Supreme Court under the Naturalization power, meaning that such people are ānaturalized,ā which necessarily precludes them from being citizens by virtue of birth.
Frankly, it is hard to see how the quote from Miller above, in 1998, does not answer this once and for all.
And all of this was not even my own question in the end. Cruzās mother went to Canada at some point with her then-Cuban husband. Some time later (1970), Ted Cruz was born. Everyone says that his mother was a U.S. citizen at the time, but was she? Some Canadian record or records from 1974 I think list her as a Canadian citizen. Her husband (Cruzā father) became a Canadian citizen. But when? I have searched and search, but I can find no answer. Now it seems that there was a 5-year waiting period for Canadian citizenship at the time, with some exceptions. But why no records? Does Canada not have them? Has no one asked? No idea.
On top of that, we have the additional complication that even if Cruzā mother did become a Canadian citizen, she might not have lost her US citizenship depending on whether she renounced it.
For me at least, the bottom line is that from a technical Constitutional perspective, this is not some harebrained, wacko conspiracy theory question. If the qualification to be president means what it says, then it actually matters. And if Miller meant what it said, then Cruz was nationalized, even if at birth.
And if courts are not going to look at or answer this, then the only word for them is corrupt.
And perhaps there is a way to force the issue. I must confess that I have ventured so far afield of any areas where I can claim to any depth of knowledge that I should know better. The above analysis represents my best efforts to make sense of this, but I am no Constitutional scholar. At the same time, I can read, and I generally understand how the law works. If we reach the point where the Constitution does not mean what a citizen reading it would understand, then we are all doomed. Living subject to rules that one cannot understand is a kind of hell that should be reserved for a rare few.
So I wonder. Is Cruz seeking, obtaining or benefiting from federal funds in connection with his candidacy? If he is, does he submit claims for payment of some kind. If he does, and if in fact he is not qualified, might such a claim be deemed to violate the False Claims Act? If one were to conclude that it did then that person might be able to assert a claim against him under the act ex rel. the United States of America. It has been a while since I visited that Act and I forget the governmentās ability to kill a claim, but I wonder if it might be a vehicle for one so inclined with the time and resources on their hands.
I personally have enjoyed this process purely for the process of learning the history of citizenship law. I had no clue what a mess or how interesting it is. If any out there are better versed or more qualified than I am and have the time and/or inclination to comment on or correct my thinking, I would welcome it. Especially if I am simply wrong.