A) Barack Obama Jr. was born in Honolulu, Hawai’i, which is in the United States.
A) Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, which is not in the United States.
B) Barack Obama’s mother was born in Kansas, which is in the United States.
B) Ted Cruz’s mother was born in Delaware, which is in the United States.
C) Barack Obama’s father was born in Kenya.
C) Ted Cruz’s father was born in Cuba.
D) Barack Obama is eligible to be president because he was born in the United States, and because his mother was born in the United States.
D) Ted Cruz is eligible to be president because his mother was born in the United States.
Both men are allowed by the Constitution and convention to be president. However, if there is any question on the matter of what natural-born means in the Constitution, Obama clearly has a stronger case then Cruz. And if Cruz is qualified to be president because his mother was born in Delaware, then Obama must be qualified because his mother was born in Kansas, and this would be true even if Obama was really born in Kenya.
But, Orly Taitz says “boogabooga,” so, totally not anti-black.
Orly Taitz? She still exists? I’d forgotten.
Oh hell yeah, she still exists.
She runs The World’s Leading Obama Eligibility Challenge Web Site.
Not like those other, fly-by-night Obama Eligibility Challenge Web Sites.
Some of those are run by cranks and charlatans.
Whew. Good to know the adults are still in charge.
When I read this, I thought “why pick on yesterday’s crackpot?” But her rant is absolutely hysterical (in both senses of the word).
My favorite part? The “stolen CT Social Security number.” Get your state government hands off my Social Security!!!!
Does that link go through a registered galactic wormhole?
The website is registered. Not so sure about the galactic wormhole though.
Well, if it’s a galactic wormhole, a galactic wormhole looks like a website run by sub-literates.
Dr. Orly Taitz, Esquire (really!) is FIVE pieces of work. I love that she dispenses with the Cruz eligibility question by saying “Fuck it, we’re a lawless country anyway.” Then she thoughtfully screens the potential 2016 GOP candidates for POTUS, and places the Taitz fickle finger of approval on a small group of them (Rand Paul is now in Orly’s doghouse- good to know).
She seems a little sad here. That makes me happy.
That hurt my hair to even begin to read…
So am I to understand that the complaint now is that his documentation was faked to evade a law he didn’t need to evade and Cruz is smart enough to know he doesn’t need to evade?
That about it?
The complaint is either than Obama isn’t a Republican or that he isn’t a Republican and is also black. Pick one of the two.
Logic. How does it work?
I remember birther arguments first being launched against John McCain, so my guess is that the fundamental argument is that “someone I hate” is ineligible for the Presidency.
On the other hand, McCain actually was born outside the country and few people remember that it was ever applied to him. Being a Democrat is probably enough to put it over the top, and being black is the icing on the cake.
But since baby Cruz was delivered by SOCIALIST HEALTH CARE in Canuckistan, the birthers should be aware that part of the procedure is to put The Mark Of The Beast on the newborn, consecrating them to be a Minion of Satan.
Which, if you see what Cruz has been up to lately, explains a lot.
Normal Canadians are able to keep the eruptions of Satanic Evil under control, because of a secret ingredient contained in snacks from Tim Horton’s.
Hey, it makes just as much sense as Orly’s conspiracy theories, and more entertaining.
I’m dumber for having read that. Total tinfoil hat territory, particularly in the comments. But it was good to see those comments because it became clear that the very fabric of the birther movement is being rent over whether Cruz should be called out for being ineligible to run. I love it.
Oh my God, the comments!! Comedy gold. This guy…
“Given the lawlessness in the nation that you acknowledged (and uncovered in your Herculean efforts!), nor the economy, nor even the military matters. No business as usual in this nation is possible any more. The only goal must be to INCREASE the noise and to make more and more exposure of this entire horror and shame! More exposure! Not less exposure. All those who were guilty must be exposed! GOP and Dems must be dismissed and punished, and their top brass – executed. On ruins of these two, a new patriotic party must be established and lead the recovery process:
http://www.resonoelusono.com/Platform.htm
http://www.resonoelusono.com/HarshLetterToMembers.htm
If anything at all, ONLY THE ENTIRE TRIUMPH OF JUSTICE CAN SAVE THIS NATION.
NO COMPROMISES! JUSTICE IS NON-NEGOTIABLE!”
He explains in his Harsh Letter that he’s incapable of presenting his arguments in a reasonable manner because he’s a mathematician.
What is a CT social security number? not that it bothers me at all. After I read over at the Orange Place a speech by Santorum about people not being allowed to take showers in the Y M C A [cue Village ppl] something something something I have no idea what it was, I’m not being too demanding zonehttp://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/07/1229592/-Shower-time-with-Rick-Santorum
The first 3 numbers of the SSN are assigned by region, with the numbers increasing roughly West to East. If you get a SSN while you reside in Connecticut it should start with a number between 040-049.
thanks
The only problem with your logical exercise is that it credits conservatives with actually believing the things that they are saying.
I’ve never taken the birther argument seriously, because I thought it was obvious that most birthers didn’t believe the argument themselves. I thought that Orly Taitz was a rare exception to that rule, but apparently even she knows that it’s a con.
Logic, as well as all other means of rational analysis, does not compute for most members of the “conservative” movement, and hasn’t for quite some time.
On the merits of the eligibility of Cruz v Obama, I think when an American citizen marries a non-citizen and moves to reside in another sovereign nation outside the jurisdiction of America, there is a real question whether children born to the couple in said sovereign nation are “natural born citizens” under Art II, even if they may indeed be “citizens” under citizenship statutes. One would likely need to examine English common law in the 1700s to determine what the Founders meant. Were all children born to a British mother/non-British father outside the dominions of the crown “natural born” Englishmen?
The courts should make the determination, especially after the amount of noise and thinly disguised racism that the “conservative” and Tea Party movement vomited out about Obama. Cruz is, after all, a tea party creature.
George III — third House of Hanover British monarch and the first to be born in England. His father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all born in Germany and none married English women including George III.
perhaps the first Hanoverians were British monarchs, but not citizens, ha-ha.
Believe they were naturalized. Guess the Brits figured that imported royals couldn’t be worse than what they’d had in the past. Although they too had some trouble producing legitimate heirs until Victoria came along and restocked royal houses all over the continent.
Like so much of the Constitution and the early amendments the term “Natural Born Citizen” was something that the signers probably all thought was obvious and understood but unfortunately they never actually wrote down the definition, leading to vagueness and confusion later on.
But a couple of things are clear.
First, there are two different types of citizenship: Natural Born (NBC) and naturalized. The first is inherited at birth, the second requires a legal process. The NBC clause in the Constitution almost certainly means that the President must have been a citizen as a birthright. Because the Constitution does not proscribe the terms for citizenship (NBC or naturalized), the assumption has to be that this has been left for Congress to determine through laws – and consistent with that citizenship laws were among the first passed by the first Congress. I know that some parts of the birther movement have argued that the NBC clause refers to various ancient English laws, but there is nothing written anywhere to support that and it is basically impossible that this was the intent given that the country had just fought and won a war for the expressed intent of getting rid of English law.
So, if a person was a citizen at time of birth as determined by current law then that citizen is eligible for President. Both Cruz and Obama are eligible – Obama even if he’d been born abroad.
Second, although I’m sure of (1) this was NOT the general published interpretation we’ve read in news and opinion articles over the past 5 years. Generally most write-ups on the birther issue assumed that if Obama had been born elsewhere he wasn’t eligible for President. This view was so prevalent that I even posted here that I was sad it had become prevalent because I knew it was wrong. I figured that we’d be stuck with the “Born in the USA” interpretation of NBC for generations because of this.
As it turned out I was wrong. All we needed to get rid of the “Born in the USA” interpretation of the NBC was to have a born-outside-the-USA tea partier as a Presidential candidate. Now suddenly all US news media articles have forgotten the born-in-the-USA interpretation.
Weird.
thanks for this, GC. I mentioned English common law because most of our “conservative” male activists masquerading as justices claim to follow originalism in constitutional interpretation, and I can’t see how this wouldn’t mean examining the only source of common law that existed in the colonies as of 1789—i.e. English common law.
I suppose it makes sense to look at the first citizenship statutes enacted in the US; of course that means that a later-passed Congressional statute is effectively deciding or determining the meaning of a constitutional term.
If there are only two choices under the constitutional phrase—either citizen by birth or naturalized—then I guess Calgary Cruz must be a “natural born” American. But why not make the (Repub-controlled) courts formally decide the issue, since our noble “conservatives” and TPers were so hot and bothered about it and the media loved the birther story so much and never shot it down on these grounds?
Even examining English common law it’s not clear how to apply the NBC term to the US because there were no direct comparisons. Much of this was due to the hereditary vs. elected nature of leadership positions in the two countries, which meant that NBC as a standard was applied very infrequently in England. Those who have done detailed research for the term have found only a few isolated uses. Of course, if you have an axe to grind you can interpret one of those uses to fit your argument, but what you can’t do is find documented support for the idea that the Constitution signers had that as the basis for their definition of NBC.
Therefore, resorting to English law doesn’t provide an answer to the definition of NBC, and we don’t have a source for a contemporary definition by the Constitution signers, so at some level we have to rely on logic. One of the reasons why the born-in-the-usa interpretation gained a following was that when the Constitution passed no one, technically speaking, was an NBC of the US since the US hadn’t existed for the 35 year minimum age requirement of the President. Realistically then for the first several decades the NBC clause meant “born in the colonies or nearby territories” of what would later become the US, as that was the only viable standard. Another reason is that US citizenship law has varied over time as to whether children of citizens born abroad were themselves citizens at birth. In both cases the born-in-the-usa interpretation was effectively the same as the citizen-at-birth interpretation so the distinction was moot.
However, over time the citizenship laws changed to adapt to modern practices. In 1789 the idea of a woman, born a US citizen, giving birth abroad then moving back would have been extremely rare. Travel to other countries was quite a hardship and except for male diplomats and tradesmen it was extremely rare for women in the colonies to travel back to Europe except as a permanent relocation, let alone during a period of pregnancy. By 1900 expatriate families were less rare – especially among the political classes – and through the 20th century this became a more-and-more common occurrence. At some point expediency required that such children be given citizenship-at-birth rather than a special naturalization process upon return to the US.
An MRI of madame’s brain would most surely reveal a patch of shrooms comfortably nested and feeding off the fertilizer that is her brain.
But Obama’s blah so he only counts as 3/5ths of a person. Or something.
Now’s there’s some constitutional analyzin’ that would make Tex-ass Solicitor General R. T. Cruz proud!
Excellent point of view 🙂 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokoolapps.lizardspuzzles