The amount of information circulating on the Internet and in legal circles regarding presidential eligibility is enough to make one\u2019s head spin.\u00a0 However, as in everything else, there are pearls of wisdom and there are meaningless pebbles of misconception. \u00a0Unfortunately, the number of contrived arguments supporting the presidential eligibility of Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio are as numerous as pebbles on a beach, and just as useful, while the well-reasoned arguments to the contrary are like rare pearls among the pebbles.<\/p>\n
To cite just two examples: in the category of \u201cpebbles\u201d we have a March 11, 2015, Harvard Law Review <\/em>article by two former U.S. Solicitors General, Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, titled, \u201cOn the Meaning of \u2018Natural Born Citizen,\u2019 \u201d<\/em> while in the category of \u201cpearls\u201d we have a March 26, 2015, article by JB Williams, titled, \u201cThe End of the American Presidency.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n In their Harvard Law Review<\/em> article, Katyal and Clement conclude, correctly, that \u201ca person born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent<\/em> is generally a U.S. citizen from birth\u2026\u201d\u00a0 However, they go on to assert, wrongly, that \u201cthe phrase \u2018natural born Citizen\u2019 in the Constitution encompasses all such citizens from birth.\u201d\u00a0 As former Solicitors General, both men should know better.<\/p>\n Katyal and Clement write that, \u201cAll the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase \u2018natural born Citizen\u2019 has a specific meaning, namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth\u2026\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 To the contrary, the phrase \u201cnatural born Citizen\u201d does not<\/em> in all cases describe someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth\u2026 far from it.\u00a0 To conclude that it does so is to accept the terms \u201ccitizen\u201d and \u201cnatural born citizen\u201d as synonymous.\u00a0 They are not.\u00a0 Simply put, all \u201cnatural born\u201d citizens are \u201ccitizens at birth,\u201d but not all \u201ccitizens at birth\u201d are \u201cnatural born.\u201d<\/p>\n To accept Katyal and Clements\u2019 definition of \u201cnatural born\u201d it is necessary to accept that so-called \u201canchor babies,\u201d or \u201c14th<\/sup> Amendment babies,\u201d\u2026\u00a0 children born to foreign mothers who make their way to America for no other reason than to have their children born on American soil\u2026 are \u201cnatural born\u201d citizens and eligible to serve as president of the United States.\u00a0 It is a preposterous notion on its face and the American people will never accept that definition.<\/p>\n In arguing their case for the contemporary definition of the term, Katyal and Clement cite an analysis prepared jointly by two of the nation\u2019s most prominent attorneys:\u00a0 Theodore Olson, a conservative Republican, and Lawrence Tribe, of Harvard Law School, a liberal Democrat.\u00a0 In 2008, at the behest of the U.S. Senate, Olson and Tribe prepared a legal opinion regarding John McCain\u2019s status as a \u201cnatural born\u201d citizen.\u00a0 Olsen and Tribe concluded as follows: \u201cBased on original meaning of the Constitution, the Framers\u2019 intentions, and subsequent legal and historical precedent, Sen. McCain\u2019s birth, to parents<\/em> who were U.S. citizens<\/em> serving on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, makes him a \u2018natural born Citizen\u2019 within the meaning of the Constitution (italics added).\u201d<\/p>\n This was followed by an April 30, 2008 Senate resolution, approved by a vote of 99-0 (Senator John McCain abstaining).\u00a0 The resolution declared: \u201cWhereas John Sidney McCain, III, was born to American citizens on an American military base in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That John Sidney McCain, III, is a \u2018natural born citizen\u2019 under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n It is important to note that both references\u2026 the Olson-Tribe Memorandum and the U.S. Senate Resolution\u2026 utilize the plural terms \u201cparents\u201d <\/em>and \u201ccitizens,\u201d <\/em>suggesting beyond a reasonable doubt that the \u201cnatural born\u201d question rests principally on the necessity of both<\/em> parents being U.S. citizens.\u00a0 Katyal and Clement conveniently ignore that critical determining factor.<\/p>\n To further undermine their own argument, Katyal and Clement quote Justice Joseph Story\u2019s Commentaries on the Constitution<\/em> (1833) in which he declared that the purpose of the natural born clause was to \u201ccut off all chances for ambitious foreigners, who might otherwise be intriguing for the office, and interpose a barrier against those corrupt interferences of foreign governments in executive elections.\u201d<\/p>\n This is merely another way of saying that the most influential factor in a child’s upbringing is the parenting he\/she receives as a child, and that the fundamental cultural, philosophical, political, and religious influence of a child\u2019s parents establishes the direction of his\/her future conduct.\u00a0 Accordingly, what the Founders feared most was the danger that a future president\u2026 during his formative years and during the years in which he was developing intellectually\u2026 would be exposed to an environment in which he would come to reject the values and the principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n There could be no better example of the poisonous impact of exposing a child to un-American influences during his formative years than Barack Obama.\u00a0 Obama\u2019s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a radical left \u201cflower child\u201d of the \u201850s and\u201960s.\u00a0 His father was a black African socialist from Kenya, and he spent most of his childhood as a citizen of Indonesia, where his name was changed to Barry Soetoro and his religious preference, shown on existing school records, was \u201cIslamic.\u201d\u00a0 Then, after being shipped back to Hawaii at age 10, he was mentored by a dedicated black communist, Frank Marshall Davis, a man with an extensive FBI dossier<\/em>.<\/p>\n It is for that very reason that the Founders limited access to the presidency only to those whose parents<\/em> were totally free of foreign allegiance or influence.\u00a0 As John A. Bingham, chief framer of the 14th<\/sup> Amendment, wrote in 1866, \u201cEvery human being born within the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty<\/em> (italics added) is, in the language of the Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.\u201d<\/p>\n The misconception created by the Katyal-Clement piece, based primarily on a disregard for the difference between the singular and the plural form of the words \u201cparent\u201d and \u201ccitizen,\u201d is in sharp contrast to the thoughtful and well-researched analysis of Senator Ted Cruz\u2019s eligibility, titled, \u201cThe End of the American Presidency,\u201d<\/em> by writer JB Williams.<\/p>\n Ted Cruz was born in Calgary<\/a>, Alberta<\/a>, Canada<\/a> on December 22, 1970.\u00a0 His parents were Rafael Bienvenido Cruz<\/a>, a citizen of Cuba, and Eleanor Elizabeth Darragh Wilson, a native of the State of Delaware.\u00a0 As Williams points out, Cruz was born a Canadian citizen and remained a citizen of Canada until May 14, 2014, when, amidst pressure from his Tea Party supporters, he began to entertain an ambition to run for president of the United States.\u00a0 Cruz first disclosed his Canadian citizenship to the people of Texas in 2013 after<\/em> being elected to the U.S. Senate, an office that requires U.S. citizenship, but not \u201cnatural born\u201d citizenship.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0However, we must assume that, as his presidential ambitions blossomed, he was reminded that his Canadian citizenship prohibited him from meeting the \u201cnatural born\u201d standard of the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n Accordingly, on May 14, 2014, in a fruitless attempted to satisfy that deficiency, he renounced his Canadian citizenship.\u00a0 In spite of being a Harvard-trained lawyer he apparently failed to consider that, while it is possible to exchange one\u2019s Canadian citizenship for American citizenship through the naturalization process, it is no more possible to convert from Canadian citizenship to \u201cnatural born\u201d American citizenship than it is to change the color of one\u2019s eyes from blue to brown by merely signing a legal document.\u00a0 If one has natural born citizenship at birth, it is impossible to lose it.\u00a0 Conversely, if one is not a natural born citizen at birth, it is impossible to acquire it at a later date, by any means.<\/p>\n In response, Cruz\u2019s supporters insisted that he was a \u201cdual citizen\u201d of the U.S. and Canada.\u00a0 This led them to conclude, mistakenly, that he was also a \u201cnatural born\u201d citizen.\u00a0 Unfortunately, as Williams notes, there are no documents to show that, during his years in Canada, Cruz\u2019s parents registered him with U.S. immigration authorities as a dual US-Canadian citizen.\u00a0 If Cruz cannot show that such documentation exists, it means that he lived his entire life as a Canadian citizen with no formal ties to the United States.\u00a0 If such is the case, the renunciation of his Canadian citizenship has inadvertently made him a man without a country.\u00a0 Not only is he not a \u201cnatural born\u201d citizen, \u00a0eligible to serve as president of the United States, he is not even a citizen<\/em> and his seat in the U.S. Senate would have been won through fraud and deception..<\/p>\n If Cruz is unable to show that his parents did, in fact, register him as a dual US-Canadian citizen at birth, so that he can rightly claim U.S. citizenship by descent from his mother, all is not lost.\u00a0 Cruz can yet redeem himself by publicly announcing, \u201cI have discovered that, because I was born in Canada, the son of a Cuban-Canadian father, I am, like Barack Obama, constitutionally ineligible to serve as president of the United States.\u00a0 However, since Obama has established the precedent of illegally occupying the Oval Office, I feel that I must run because someone must reverse the damage of the Obama era and restore this once great nation to its former greatness.\u201d<\/p>\n It is interesting to note that, of the six men mentioned above, five are graduates of Ivy League schools.\u00a0 Obama, a Harvard Law graduate, claims to have been a \u201cprofessor\u201d of constitutional law at the University of Chicago; Ted Cruz, a Harvard Law graduate, is a former Solicitor General of the State of Texas; Bobby Jindal, a Rhodes Scholar, is a graduate of Brown and Oxford Universities; Neal Katyal, a graduate of Yale Law School, is a former Solicitor General of the United States in the Obama administration; and Paul Clement, a Harvard Law graduate, is a former Solicitor General in the George W. Bush administration.<\/p>\n All are men who should have a firm grasp of Constitutional principles.\u00a0 Yet, their inability to accept the most elementary concepts of presidential eligibility makes a correspondence school law degree a viable alternative to an Ivy League education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The amount of information circulating on the Internet and in legal circles regarding presidential eligibility is enough to make one\u2019s head spin.\u00a0 However, as in everything else, there are pearls of wisdom and there are meaningless pebbles of misconception. \u00a0Unfortunately, … Continue reading