Texas Senator Ted Cruz is expected to enter the republican presidential primary for the 2016 election cycle and much speculation revolves around the fact that he was born in Canada. Most armchair constitutional enthusiast, both liberal as well as some conservative, argue that the eligibility of Ted Cruz is flawed because he was born outside of the U.S. and hence is ineligible to run for or become U.S. president. They base this assumption on the phrase found in the constitution which states that a U.S. president must be a "natural born citizen." Many conservatives who have spent the past 5+ years attempting to prove that current U.S. President Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen also applaud Cruz's actions as a jr senator and would most likely embrace his candidacy otherwise - but they must now look into the mirror and choose whether to support a candidate which seems to have similar dubious citizenship circumstances as Obama or support another, less conservative - "safer" candidate. At the time of birth both Obama and Cruz had mothers who were U.S. citizens but fathers who were not - although Rafael Cruz has since become one - recently in 2005 which will conveniently, for Ted, afford his father 10 year citizenship status at the time of Ted's bid for the presidency. This is a crucial milestone for the senior Cruz to accomplish prior to his son's running for president. It's well known that Cruz was born in Canada and to many who have claimed ineligibility on behalf of Barack Obama it's widely believed that he was born in Kenya - a contradiction to the widely held legal concept that he was born in Hawaii. Legally speaking, it's accepted by those who make and enforce the rules - that Obama is indeed a native of Hawaii and not Kenya but his birth credentials have been challenged in numerous courts on numerous occasions and the end result has always been the same: crickets. No judge in the land will even agree to rule on the matter and that fact should give conservatives who support Cruz much optimism that he can and will run - so perhaps that in some small way is vindication and consolation for the hard work which 'birthers' have underwent; they may not have removed Barack Obama from office as they intended - but their legal plight has created an entire arsenal of legal cases to reference when defending Cruz's eligibility status. A judge and/or court would be hard pressed to take seriously the demands of democrat 'birthers' charging that Cruz is ineligible in light of the past 5 years of yawning and dismissing of similar cases lodged against Barack Obama. Natural Born Citizen Defined The phrase natural born citizen comes from the English common law and in particular came from Calvin's Case, a 1608 decision which defined the term as including anyone who, by natural law, owed duties to and was protected by the monarchy. The English common law afforded anyone born on English soil, regardless of the citizenship statuses of their parents, to be granted full citizenship. The term natural born citizen is found in the U.S. constitution once but is not accompanied by a definition: Article II Section 1 Clause 5: No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States. Amendment XIV Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. The only other legal U.S. statute to attempt to define the term was The Naturalization Act of 1790. That Act established the United States citizenship status of children of U.S. citizens born abroad, without the need for naturalization: "the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens." Those words refute modern day opinions that natural born citizen refers only to those physically born here. Those who insist on "U.S. soil births" only - also typically insist that their reasoning is based on the wishes of the framers of the constitution but they fail to base their opinions on the only legally binding document which has ever defined the phrase natural born citizen which is in fact the Naturalization Act of 1790 - brought into existence just 14 years after the ratification of the U.S. constitution. In 1790, when that naturalization act was written and legalized, the framers of the constitution were still very much alive and very much involved in the drafting and legalizing of such documents as the above mentioned statute. Had they fundamentally disagreed with the wording or concept it would most likely not have become law. Our first President, George Washington, had been in office for barely a year when that Naturalization Act was drafted and signed into law. You'd better believe had Washington objected to it's wording or fundamental meaning I wouldn't be writing about it right now. This fact sheds the brightest light of our entire history on what the founding fathers themselves meant by natural born citizen and who they wished to be included into that esteemed group. It didn't, as many theorists demand, mean that a person must be ....



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The Presidential Eligibility of Ted Cruz from a Historical Perspective

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