Nearly everyone I know responds to this question: “Of course he’s a natural-born citizen!”
But some time ago I read a couple of op-ed columns in the Chicago Tribune (sorry, can’t cite) that said the question was not as simple as it might seem and there is a possibility that he is not a natural-born citizen. At least one of the columns was written by a law professor who is in a position to know.
Whether Trump sues over the issue IMO depends on where he stands delegate-wise as the convention approaches. If he has it locked up, I doubt he’d bother. If it looks like the convention might be brokered, he may try to rush through something – if Cruz is declared ineligible then I suspect his delegates would be up for grabs and Trump may snag enough of them to win the nomination.
Precedent has the definition even looser than that. John McCain was not a citizen at the time of his birth, due to a loophole in the relevant laws*, but that loophole was closed when he was a child, and all children born under those circumstances were retroactively made citizens. Nearly everyone accepts that McCain should count as a natural-born citizen, and so the criterion must be “citizen by virtue of the circumstances of one’s birth”.
*Specifically, the law at the time granted citizenship to any child born on US soil, and also granted citizenship to a child of citizen parents born outside of the jurisdiction of the US… but McCain was born within the jurisdiction of the US, but not on its soil.
I recall that McCain got a Congressional resolution confirming his natural-born citizen status. Of course, this is not really an option available to Cruz, whose colleagues wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.
In any case, there’s even more entertainment value in the hypocrisy of the Republican Party generally, which indulged if not outright encouraged the fever dreams of Obama birtherism but now reluctantly looks to Cruz as their last best hope of warding off The 4Chan Thread Made Flesh.
Agree. As much as I despise Cruz, I still recognize him as a natural-born citizen by dint of his mother. People tried to say the same of John McCain since he was born in the Panama Canal Zone.
I think anyone that wants to say that Cruz is not a natural-born citizen would have to produce evidence both that he was naturalized and his mother did not meet the residency requirements to pass citizenship onto her offspring at birth. The latter is effectively impossible to prove, but it’s also effectively impossible to disprove. The former, however, should be simply a matter of public record. As Cruz is clearly a citizen now, he was either born one or naturalized. If there is no evidence of the latter, the former must be true.
On a side note, I’d like to see someone sustain an argument that someone born via caesarean section is not eligible to be President because they were not “naturally born”.
Not because he was born there, because (1) people born there were not U.S. citizens by virtue of jus soli, and yet (2) he was not a citizen by jus sanguinis, because he wasn’t born outside of US jurisdiction.
It was an overlooked loophole that was rectified as soon as it was noticed, but McCain was not a natural-born citizen at the time of his birth. He wasn’t naturalized, either, though, so once he became an American citizen, he was, effectively, natural-born by fiat.
The reason most everybody says this without having any definitive rulings to back it up is that the alternative is chaos.
There are two types of citizens: natural-born and naturalized. Everybody agrees that Cruz is a citizen. Therefore he must be one or the other. The alternative is that a third type of citizenship exists that no legislature or court has ever recognized. Or that Cruz and all the others like him are not citizens at all.
Neither alternative is reasonable. The Supreme Court is unlikely to declare that, what, milllions? of Americans are not citizens. It is equally unlikely to step in and do a legislative job of defining a third type of citizenship.
So while threads like these are fun, and it is incumbent upon law professors to point out undefined aspects in the boggling complexity that is 227 years of American law, no action will be taken against Cruz.
While there are precedents both ways, I find it hard to believe that the SC would return to the earlier one when it has specifically been reversed by the SC. Maybe with an issue like abortion, but I really don’t think even conservative Justices want to be seen monkeying with an election.
You put the emphasis on “natural born” - taken to mean Conceived the traditional PIV sex way without the aid of any fertility drugs / IVF etc etc (i.e “naturally”) and then the birth was “natural” - no drugs, no surgery no nothing.
In other words - “natural born” is not about being born to citizens or on American soil but rather the conception / birth process itself.
(yes it’s a stupid idea and argument - but no less stupid than that Cruz is eligible)
If it ever came to it, the court would likely say, “Let the voters decide”. When Robert Kennedy ran for senator from NY and someone challenged him on the grounds that his actual residence was MA, that is what the court said. I suppose congress could pass a law defining “natural born citizen” but they haven’t and doubtless won’t. Arguably, McCain had less of a claim than Cruz because he was not a citizen at the moment of his birth. Was the same true of someone born on a US military base, but outside the US?
Incidentally, I have voted in both US and Canadian elections and no has claimed that that effects my citizenships. Up to a certain point, just getting naturalized Canadian would have resulted in losing my US citizenship, but by the time (2008I did that, the rule had long since passed.
I thought I had read somewhere that John McCain was actually born in a hospital NOT in the Panama Canal Zone? Any dopers ever see anything on this? Would THAT have made him ineligible to be president(absent the nihil obstat provided him by the Senate?
Quite the opposite. See posts 31 & 22. If he had been born outside the Canal Zone he would not have been in the citizenship loophole described in those posts.
