Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada. His birth certificate doesn’t even pretend to be issued from an American city, like Honolulu. But, yet, Fox News says that Senator Cruz is eligible to run for president because his mother was a U.S. citizen from Delaware. Well, Barack Obama’s mother was a U.S. citizen from Kansas. The two men both had foreign-born fathers and U.S. citizen mothers. Yet, we’ve had years of discussion of Obama’s eligibility to be president, including plenty of discussion on Fox News. If Obama would have been eligible to be president even if he had been born in Kenya, then what was the point of all that yammering?
Oh, right, Kenyans are black and Cubans are super-patriots even when they are born on Canada.
It’s way too late now but the term “natural born citizen” in the Constitution probably did not mean what everyone now thinks it means.
Basically there were two types of citizenship – citizen at birth and citizen by legal process. The latter is called naturalization, and the root word of that term should give you a hint as to what “natural born citizen” means.
“Citizen at birth” means you didn’t have to go through a naturalization process – it doesn’t have anything to do where you were born.
When the constitution was adopted there was literally no one eligible to be president – as we interpret the constitution today. No one over 35 years old had been born in the USA because of course there hadn’t been a USA 35 years prior to 1789. Unless of course you interpret the “natural born citizen” clause differently.
Therefore, logically Ted Cruz is eligible and Obama would have been eligible even if he had been born in … whatever country the wingnuts think he was born in. And McCain didn’t need that special US Canal Zone exemption. And past discussions about whether US territories qualified were irrelevant as well.
As I said at the outset, though, it’s way too late now. For whatever reason the idea that “natural born citizen” means “born on US soil” took hold and, especially with the birther movement, is firmly embedded in the US psyche. There actually is a sliver of evidence to support that interpretation given that previously a British legal document used that term to mean “born on British soil” – alas, the context was very different (think about the expanse of the British empire and why they might want to restrict some positions to people who actually had roots in Britain itself), but in the absence of other incontrovertible evidence as to intent it is all that stands.
It’s the hypocrisy of these creeps that irritates me.
“Why doesn’t the president just produce his long-form birth certificate and put these doubts to rest?” -Fox News
“Ted Cruz’s mother was born in Delaware, so he’s eligible to be president.” -Fox News
Do you remember the proposed amendment introduced by the Gullible Old Party in 2003 or 2004 to allow naturalized citizens to be President if they had lived in the US for 14 consecutive years?
That movement lost traction but there was a time when it seemed almost inevitable.
Of course, after Ahnold terminated California the GOP dropped the amendment idea.
Hypocrisy is their MO…nothing new there…
You blew my mind! I’m sure you’re right, but I never thought of it before.
In return, here’s a thought on the “born on US soil” thing. In the 1788 elections, and for a good while thereafter (1811 to be exact?), there were no presidential candidates available who had been born US citizens, since there was no such country until 1776. Under the Articles of Confederation, it seems, citizenship was of the individual state and different states had diffrent laws. But birthplace was the easy part of the law, and also apparently the most important part according to Madison. Maybe that’s why they were fixated on it. Or maybe it was really keeping Hamilton from running.
It’s so exhausting explaining the obvious to the crazies on the right that parrot whatever insane claim is promulgated by the GOP, Rush, and/or fundie operation. Obama was always a “natural born citizen” through his mother. It’s truly pathetic that news organizations couldn’t state that and refuse ever to waste a second of airtime or print space covering the nuts that can’t understand that simple fact.
True, but if you look at the birther movement closely (and I try not to, but somehow I learned this) there is a second-level birther movement that argues that even if Obama had been born as claimed he still isn’t eligible because citizenship descends through the father. This sexist interpretation has never been used in the US but does have some roots in the distant past.
Of course, the same people arguing that had no problem with Dick Cheney accepting the VP nomination while a resident of Texas then switching to Wyoming – a clear violation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution (which clearly states that Pres and VP must be from different states) but of course the SCOTUS looked the other way.
Then there is the third level which states that if your father was a Muslim then you are a Muslim, too, even if your father was actually an atheist and you’ve adopted Christianity as your belief system.
Then there is the thing where (in many states anyway) if you are the descendent of slaves or someone who looks like a slave you are not likely able to vote let alone be elected dog catcher.
A couple of things…
First, I don’t think the (Republican) House has introduced articles of impeachment against Obama over anything including the birther thing. Given their behavior, one would think they would have by now. But, no. They don’t do it, perhaps on the assumption that Fox and the echo chamber would take care of it. That didn’t exactly work out for them in November 2012 election, but I wonder if their operating assumption has been government by right mass media? Have they been assuming a secret Fox government in plain sight would overthrow Obama?
Second, is there any statement by Ted Cruz or minions relating to (Obama)birtherism? There’s got to be something. Can you find it?
Off topic has anyone read anything about using bots to drive internet memes? I see certain glibertarian/gun patriot style comments so frequently that I sometimes wonder if Exxon and Smith and Wesson and the Koch family have invested in programming infrastructure to systematically push comments on major sites or major stories.
I don’t think they are bots in the sense you mean. They are bots in that they parrot the talking points.
Semi-bot might be the best term.
There were some articles out in the excitement of the Iraq invasion that discussed this. It was one of those things that usually doesn’t get into the press but in the hoopla, where everyone who was anyone in the media was ultra pro-war, they often bypassed their normal filters and published stuff you didn’t expect they would.
You may remember that from about the 3rd or 4th day of the invasion until the Baghdad occupation was media-staged a few weeks later there really wasn’t much actual news (one of the reasons the Jessica Lynch myth got so much traction). I remember having fun (in a gallows humor kind of way) pointing out headlines saying “US troops now 50 miles from Baghdad” again and again over those weeks – ditto with “WMD Cache Found!” headlines.
So, to fill the space a lot of the press corpse assigned to the Pentagon did stories on the Pentagon itself, and most easily, on the Pentagon PR apparatus that they interfaced with. The Pentagon PR people, apparently high on the fawning, uncritical press coverage they were getting, probably said a lot more than they normally would have.
This was how we learned that over 27k people are employed by the Pentagon just for PR (how many school teachers could get their job backs if we cut that in half?) . Or that they had large departments that went on internet comment boards to give the Pentagon point of view. Or that they had software that made the internet team more productive by providing them with pseudo-personalities that would generate the same talking points over and over.
A few years later there was another leaked story about how advanced this software had become and how the private firm that developed it was now making it available to other Pentagon-approved private firms for their own PR efforts.
I’m not sure how much of this actually goes on but it could be a very large amount. For example, I have noticed on newspaper comment boards that are based on Facebook that there is a large number of women generating pro-NRA talking points – at least their Facebook picture is that of a 20-something cute female. I’ve gone to a few of these pages to see if they are for real – funnily enough the vast majority of what these personas post on is gun rights, almost nothing about family, friends, pets, etc. And most seem to be medical students. It does make you wonder ….
Thanks for the info. If the pentagon was doing it 10 years ago, I think there is every reason to believe that pseudo-commenting or whatever you want to call it is by now a large concern.
Does Donald Trump think? You couldn’t prove it by me.
Trump thinks about:
So I had wondered and wondered about this too. Since President Obama’s mother was an American citizen, why did it matter where he was born? It matters, say the wingnuts because his mother was not 18 years old. This is extremely convoluted reasoning but here goes: If a female who was born in another country becomes a naturalized citizen before she turns 18 (This would be because her parents became naturalized citizens before she turned 10, I think) and leaves the country and gives birth in another country, her child is not automatically a citizen. Since Barack Obama’s mother was 17 when he was born, they feel that he would not be a citizen if he were born in Kenya.
This is really nonsense. I am pretty sure the statutes they were discussing related to someone who became a naturalized citizen as a child and then returned to her country of origin, or another country, to live permanently; in other words someone who was no longer a citizen; not someone who happened to be in another country when she gave birth. In any case, it obviously does not relate to Ann Dunham because she was a natural born citizen. This “reasoning” has a made up quality to it as though some of the birthers realized that his birthplace didn’t really matter and had to come up with an alternate reason why he couldn’t really be president.
Ann Dunham was eighteen when Barack was born. Could have been a few days shy of eighteen when the future Barack was a zygote, but definitely eighteen when she learned that she was pregnant.
I thought she was 18, too but that’s what I read at Free Republic. Then I don’t know. It’s hard to believe that these folks could be worried about her age at conception but I don’t know. Honestly, I went to a right wing blog and the blogger had this poster up claiming that all the shooters recently, have been Democrats. It was all lies, of course but sometimes I forget that people just lie. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but I assume they will just claim that Barack Obama opened the door for this.
Guess they haven’t figured out how to do the Google.
Only takes a few liars over there to spread the lies amongst people too stupid to figure out they’re being duped.
the problem is that they only trust sources “within the bubble”.
I tried to debunk the myth with one of my with one of my “libertarian” friends (he’s just a racist and former Bush lover turned anti-government tea bagger who can’t stand that a black guy is in the white house and giving all of our money to other black people) about the UN treaty to take Americans’ guns by referencing Snopes but he wouldn’t accept my source because it was “liberal” and something about the Annenberg Foundation and George Soros.
But when they reference Glen Beck you have to take it as Gospel.
It’s a shame, because he’s a smart guy and we have really good intellectual conversations on the Constitution and Rights…until we get into the RWNJ conspiracies.
Hand him a copy of Fox News Makes You Stupid from the “Business Insider.”
There’s no question why rock&roll evolved in North America is there?
Born in Canada is just alright with me, but Texas is a real problem sometimes.
The tea partiers don’t know or care about what is actually written in our Constitution. I don’t think they actually like America, only their distorted version of it.
‘For whatever reason the idea that “natural born citizen” means “born on US soil” took hold and, especially with the birther movement, is firmly embedded in the US psyche.’
It is firmly embedded in the psyche of the birthers, I don’t think it took hold with anybody else. And it certainly doesn’t have a foundation in US law, whatever convoluted reason they may have come up with.
He’s fired.
My favorite quote from a Politico article:
“Anyone who thinks he’s constitutionally ineligible,” he said, “can simply not vote for him.”
That’s all there is to it, folks. If you don’t think he’s eligible, then just don’t vote for him. What’s the big deal? We don’t need to make a Federal case out of this.
And if he is ineligible and gets elected? Well, then you can take pride in knowing that you exercised your democratic right to vote.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/cruz-draws-presidential-buzz-but-is-he-eligible-85873_Page2.ht
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that was bizarre, the quote was from a law consultant ?????