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  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Is Cruz A 'Natural Born Citizen'? The Real Question Is: Who Decides?

    JAN 15, 2016 @ 01:57 PM 1,227 VIEWS

    Is Cruz A 'Natural Born Citizen'? The Real Question Is: Who Decides?

    Daniel Fisher ,
    FORBES STAFF


    A Houston lawyer has filed the first lawsuit challenging Ted Cruz’s eligibility to run for president. While there’s a serious question as to whether Newton B. Schwartz Sr., an 85-year-old private attorney, is himself eligible to sue, plenty of other people will be in a position to force the matter before a judge as Cruz advances in the polls.

    “All the people in state government who have to put Cruz on the ballot should in theory be asking themselves, `is he eligible?’” said Scott Gant, a partner in the Washington office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner who has written a book on the First Amendment and taught constitutional law at Georgetown Law School. “If he actually became president, there is a 100% chance someone with standing will challenge.”

    Who you calling a foreigner? (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

    The answer hinges, of course on the meaning of “natural born citizen” in Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution. Cruz, who was born in Canada to parents who were U.S. citizens, says it is “settled law” that all children of U.S. citizens are themselves citizens regardless of where they were born. But Mary Brigid McManamon, a constitutional scholar at Widener University’s Delaware Law School,argues in a Washington Post article that the 18th century common-law definition of “natural born” applies, and that means born within the borders of the nation.

    Maybe McManamon is right, but a more fundamental question looms: Who decides? The answer isn’t as simple as might appear.

    Gant, who was in the same constitutional law class as Cruz at Harvard Law School in 1993 under Prof. Laurence Tribe (who has his own opinions on the matter), said it is not at all clear the judiciary branch has sole authority to decide constitutional matters like this. When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Second Amendment right to bear arms extended to private citizens in District of Columbia v. Heller, numerous scholars believed the question was better left to Congress.


    “The Second Amendment has been uninterpreted for 200 years and then you want to decide how it should be interpreted in court?” said Gant, who wrote a brief in favor of letting Congress decide the matter.

    Article III, Section 4 orders the federal government to guarantee each state “a Republican Form of Government.” What does that mean? Nobody knows, but neither has any state experimented with dictatorship to find out.

    The difference with the “natural born citizen” requirement is it is clear and seemingly unambiguous, like the requirement that the president be 35 years of age.


    “If Cruz was 32 and running for president and someone said no, no one would consider that to be political,” Gant said. Yet judges are likely to shy away from deciding whether he is a natural born citizen because of the obvious political overtones.


    One thing is certain: If Cruz continues to be a serious contender for the Republican nomination, more people will sue. A federal judge threw out a similar suit challenging John McCain’s candidacy because he was born in Panama on standing grounds, although he did note Congress has the power to determine who is a citizen and had done so specifically in the case of people born in the Panama Canal Zone. (At least one parent must be a U.S. citizen under that law.) Another judge threw out a case challenging Barack Obama’s presidency on standing grounds.


    Even if judges stick to the idea that nobody has standing to challenge a candidate, they will have to hear lawsuits if Cruz is elected president. Anybody who is affected by an act of legislation signed by the President would have standing to challenge the legitimacy of a law affecting their rights.


    “There would be tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would have standing in the first days of a Cruz presidency, but today there are very few,” Gant said.

    All the more reason, he said, for judges to take seriously the challenge of deciding not just what “natural born citizen” means, but whether they should be the ones who decide at all.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfi...0b8bb12c86bd8b



    Cruz’s citizenship presents a similar dilemma. The exact meaning of “natural born citizen” falls into a category of important constitutional phrases that, surprisingly, have never been fully interpreted by a judge. The president is required to swear to “defend and protect the Constitution” and “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” for example, yet nobody knows exactly how those terms would be defined in court. (Though a pending legal challenge to President Obama’s immigration policy may supply some answers.)

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  2. #2
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    http://www.alipac.us/f9/trump-says-h...sident-327519/

    January 17, 2016

    Donald Trump
    , saying the Florida senator is qualified because although his parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of his birth, he was born in the U.S. -- unlike Cruz . . .
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  3. #3
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


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