Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who was born in Kenya Calgary, is visiting New Hampshire to do a fundraiser for the state’s Republican Party. He is also scheduled to visit Iowa and Florida, and has already been to South Carolina. In other words, this lunatic is planning on running for president. Do you hear anyone on the right asking whether or not someone born in Kenya Calgary can be a natural born citizen?
Unlike Honolulu, the city of Calgary is not in the United States of America. Unlike the Panama Canal, at the time of John McCain’s birth, Calgary is not administered by the U.S. Government or occupied by U.S. Armed Forces. The only argument Senator Cruz can make for being a natural born citizen is that his mom was born in Delaware. That’s sufficient, but it was exactly the same situation Obama would have been in if it had been true that he was born in Kenya. If Obama needed to show his birth certificate to prove his eligibility to be president, then Ted Cruz is ineligible. The Tea Party and Donald Trump should be saying that Ted Cruz cannot be president because he isn’t a natural born citizen. But they aren’t saying it.
Why is that?
Rather than address your clearly rhetorical question, I’ll just say that I’ve long considered a Cruz nomination the logical end point of where the Republican party has been heading. I think his nomination is likely (unless he really blows it like another all-but-inevitable nominee from Texas) and God-help-us I hope he doesn’t somehow manage to get himself elected. Far more likely, however, we’ll see the crackup of the national ambitions of the GOP that will begin to turn back the tide of lunacy. After Cruz runs and flames, the teabaggers will no longer be able to blame the GOP’s tendency to pick moderate, impure RINO candidates.
Hey, I’m an optimist.
Actually I looked into the issue of natural-born citizenship some years ago, and it turns out that while it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that being the child of one native-born citizen has generally been good enough, the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say that, and the Court has never ruled on it.
If Cruz runs, someone should file a lawsuit, and the current SCOTUS will certainly rule in his favor, and that’ll be the end of this issue. And then one day my stepdaughter and my son will be able to run for president without all this Kenya BS.
McCain was a trickier case, because when he was born (back in the Pleistocene, I think), the law said that a kid born to american parents in a foreign country would be a citizen.
But the canal zone wasn’t a foreign country, or a “US territory”, or any of the other categories in the law at the time.
It was fixed, retroactively, a few years later, but presumably McCain wasn’t a citizen at birth.
Not that it matters. McCain may not have been a citizen for a few days between being born and being registered, but he was a cranky asshole for the past twenty years.
And the bill that fixed it for McCain was authored by Obama and Hillary Clinton, while both were senators. A class and civil move. I cannot imagine any Repukeliscum senator doing that today.
I cannot imagine any Repukeliscum senator doing that today.
I can’t imagine any GOPer of the last 50 years, at least, doing it.
This is one of several important Constitutional issues where we’ll just have to wait until the Supreme Court tells us what the Constitution means, and SCOTUS can’t do that until a case actually arises.
Here’s another, and potentially much more dangerous one:
Suppose the President dies, resigns or is impeached and the Vice Presidency is vacant. Think a terrorist attack or a huge scandal that leads to the simultaneous resignation of the President and VP. The Speaker of the House takes over, then, right? But it’s not so clear cut. While the Congress does determine the order of Presidential succession, there are Constitutional scholars who say that the order of succession has to be limited to the Executive branch. In other words, it was unconstitutional for the Congress to designate the Speaker as third in line.
But the Supreme Court can’t decide this issue until someone actually has standing to bring a case, which would likely not happen until we were in a state of national crisis, and then we’d have to wait around while SCOTUS heard arguments and ruled on whether the Speaker or Secretary of State (next Executive Branch office in line of succession) is to take the oath of office.
Interesting point. My first reaction is that if this scenario did happen the Speaker would simply take the President’s oath of office, which everyone has been taught is what would happen since 1945, the Constitutional Scholars who disagreed would simply not be listened to, and the precedent would be set. Kind of like what happened when Taylor asserted that the VP became the President and set the first precedent (originally the Constitution was vague on the topic, and it may have been the intent that the VP would merely act as President until an election was held).
But my second reaction, given the ability of the Scalia 5 to rule in whatever way helps the GOP regardless of the actual law in question, is that if this were a GOP Presidency and a Democratic house it’s a virtual certainty that they’d step in and make such a ruling to prevent a Democrat from becoming President.
Because they have to fill their quota of crazy-ass Republicans running for POTUS to appeal to the same contingents of religious freaks, racists, and the plain arrogantly stupid that have led them to control most state legislatures and the US House.
A combination of presidenting while black, crossed with IOKIYAR.
Simple answers to simple questions, Booman
It’s rare to be offered such a perfect test case for a hypothesis.
Ted Cruz is ineligible because there is nothing “natural” about him.
Well, since Cruz was born into the welcoming arms of the Canuckistan Commie Cradle to Grave System, we can all be sure that he received the Mark of The Beast at birth.
The technology was more primitive back then, so when they implanted the Mind Control device, it took so much room that first they had to remove about 1/3 of his brain. And then the damn thing blew out a tube and didn’t work.
Come to think of it, that explains a lot about Cruz.
I have to admit to being shocked that Cruz is openly being touted as a presidential candidate after all the Kenyan crap. I thought if there ever was an issue so prominent that it could avoid a wingnut double standard that would be it.
Now, a few clarifications are in order here. First, there is a commonly-held belief that you have to be born in the US to be eligible to be President. We hear it all the time – I heard it in my HS civics class. But that’s probably not what the Natural Born Citizen clause means. Probably it means citizen-at-birth-per-laws-at-the-time, regardless of location at birth. But I say “probably” because there has never been a clear ruling on this by the SCOTUS. I’m glad to read in the WIki article Boo linked to that the Congressional Research Service in 2011 came to the same conclusion – if you’d read the same Wiki article back in 2010 or so it would have read differently – with more of a suggestion of needing to be born in the US.
So, as Boo says, per the probably correct interpretation of the NBC clause both Cruz and Obama are eligible for the Presidency, even if Obama had been born abroad.
However, that completely contradicts the underlying assumption of the entire birther movement (or about 99% of it – I’ll address the other 1% later in this comment). The search for the birth certificate, all the text written analyzing it for “proof” it was forged, the text in all those lawsuits arguing Obama isn’t a legal president, the questions asked by GOP politicians, the arguments made by Donald Trump – ALL of these assume that birth location is an essential requirement of the NBC. And the vast majority of TV and written stories on the birther movement also have that assumption built in.
So now the birther’s are going to say “it doesn’t matter where you were born after all”???? REALLY?????
Now, I’m sure a lot of them will hide behind the “other” birther arguments – the 1% of the birther movement – those that assert Obama didn’t meet the NBC clause because his father was foreign (many different legal theories here – generally each one worse that the one before). Or perhaps they’ll restate it as foreign father + born abroad or some other revisionism.
But it really is amazing how the wingnut mind works. Their only standard is the double standard.
I would venture to say that “natural-born citizen” is the opposite kind of citizen from a “naturalized citizen”. Not really so complicated.
In answer to your silly question:
It’s OKIYAAR!
This ends today’s segment of “IOKIAAR!!!
OY!
That last line was supposed to be, “This ends today’s edition of SATSQ!!!”
Were both of Cruz’s parents American citizens instead of only one? That might make a difference.
Father born in Cuba. don’t know if he had USA citizenship at the time T.R. was born. mother born in Delaware USA
Cruz’s dad didn’t become an American citizen until something like 2006 or thereabouts.
Then he’s got the Hispanic vote. LOL
Legally it doesn’t. In the minds of wingnuts, though, it might.
There are arguments that have been made that Obama wasn’t eligible because his father wasn’t American. The version of this that has the barest thread of plausibility says that because he was also a UK citizen under UK law at the time (Kenya being a colony) he wasn’t an American citizen at birth. This is pretty ridiculous – it might have had some validity if Obama had ever used his father’s nationality to get a passport, but he didn’t. US law at the time acknowledged that children could have dual nationalities at birth and expected decisions either at passport time or at age 18. As Obama got a US passport as a child that decision was clear.
Other forms of the argument are beyond ridiculous. Some go back to old English law to drag out the idea that citizenship can only be inherited from the father, never the mother. Others go even farther back and cite the old testament. None of these forms of the argument have any support in current or historical US law.
So, legally and technically there is no difference whether the child’s parents are both American – as long as one is the child is an American at birth even if born outside the country. (This wasn’t always the case – there used to be a variety of exceptions – but that was the case when Obama was born.)
But, speaking emotionally, for wingnuts it probably does make a big difference. I mean, if a hypothetical presidential candidate named John Smith had born in Toronto to an American mother no wingnut would have any trouble thinking of him as American. And while the name Ted Cruz isn’t quite as traditional as John Smith, well we’ve been watching Spanish-surnamed athletes in our most popular sports for over half a century and even the GOP is mostly comfortable with the Cuban ex-pats, so it still doesn’t feel that foreign. But a guy with a strange name like Barak Obama feels foreign even if he had clearly been born to 5th generation American citizens in Des Moines, Iowa. The fact that his middle name, Hussein, is the same as our Hitler-of-the-moment for many years during the 90s and early 2000s doesn’t help. Nor does the fact that he doesn’t even look like an American black (American slaves were almost exclusively from West Africa – Kenya is in East Africa and the racial differences are huge). To your average wingnut everything about Obama is as non-American as it gets – so of course the fact that his father was from Kenya makes a huge difference to them, even if it has no legal bearing.
Let’s be honest – Canada and Kenya, while technically both foreign countries have different connotations to a wingnut. And Cuba is complicated because on the one hand it’s strange and foreign on the other hand Cuban ex-pats have been reliable GOP voters.
Similarly, the i
Just curious. I was taught rules that I don’t remember in High School, but surely what I was taught isn’t valid fifty years later.
In general candidates aren’t attacked until they start to gain traction in the polls.
So nobody cared about Herman Cain or Newt making a spectacle of themselves, but the moment they emerged in the polls as the leader, their opponents dropped a ton of bricks on them.
The second Rafael “Ted” Cruz gets close in the polls (oh yeah, he real name isn’t Ted), all his opponents, especially the conspiracy-theory driven Paultards, will start pounding him.
Does this mean the Klown Kars are starting their engines?