I get riled up by Conservative newspeak. This one from the National Review Online caught my eye, from an article Ed Whelan titled: Ted Cruz, Originalism and the “Natural Born Citizen Requirement.”
Here’s the offending bit:
I hadn’t seen any reason to comment on the left-wing “birther” attacks on Senator Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president. Cruz was born in Canada in 1970 to a mother who was then an American citizen. Under the laws then in place, he was an American citizen by virtue of his birth.
Have you seen any “left-wing” birther attacks on Cruz’ eligibility? I haven’t. All I see is ultra-right nut jobs raising the same issue about Cruz that they raised about Obama. Whelan did find one article at The New Republic that talks about an inconsistency in Cruz’ origanalist way of interpreting the Constitution and his own eligibility, but this is not at all an attack on Cruz’ eligibility, but about his way of interpreting the Constitution. In fact, the New Republic article by Noam Scheiber makes it abundantly clear that Cruz is eligible, saying:
Is someone who was born abroad so obviously a natural born American? The consensus among legal experts appears to be, emphatically, “yes.”
I think it’s pretty clear that natural born is defined in such a way as to include everybody that has citizenship, and who got it other than through naturalization. So the fact that Ted Cruz had citizenship at birth, and he clearly did under the statute that applied at the time, it’s pretty clear that he qualifies as natural born.
The Conservatives would like folks to believe that presidential eligibility nuttery is an equal-opportunity employer with the right attacking Obama and the left attacking Cruz, but it ain’t so. The folks on the right are ones attacking both candidates, and the folks on the left are gleefully watching the folks on the right making fools of themselves.
I do take issue with Scheiber’s article, though. Members of the First Congress, many of whom were those folks who wrote the U. S. Constitution, passed the Naturalization Act of 1790 that explicitly made the children of U.S. Citizen fathers born overseas “natural born citizens.” It is abundantly clear from this Act that those founders understood that being born in the United States is not a Constitutional prerequisite for becoming President.
The National Review Online is not the only conservative news outlet trying to make liberals into birthers. Newsbusters touts an article: WaPo went “birther” on Cruz, But They’re Not Alone. The Washington Post article cited also concludes that Cruz is most likely eligible based on the authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service.
Birthers, at least those at ORYR, like to invent faux reactions for Obots. When one of their ridiculous cases or appeals is going to court, they write about “Obots quaking in their boots.” When Lucas Smith submitted, unasked, his phony Kenyan birth certificate in the Alabama appeal, they were certain that Obots were fretting over it.
All of this is, of course, just more evidence that birtherism, like most other conspiracies, grows out of virulent opposition to any reality that doesn’t reinforce their fear and hated.
National Review’s take on this is correct, at a recent gathering at the old folks home, 3 right wing nut jobs were standing on my left, that certainly qualifies them as leftists.
scheiber in fact refers to cruz’ eligibility as “a no-brainer”.
which of course is precisely every birfer’s fundamental problem.
having no brain, that is.
I have a feeling that in Whelan’s world “left-wing “birther” attacks on Senator Ted Cruz’s eligibility” refer to all the times someone on the left asks a birther if they think Cruz is an NBC given the convoluted rules that birther came up with to declare Obama not an NBC.
I love it when the wingnuts patiently explain why Cruz is a NBC… using exactly the same wording that we used years ago to explain that Obama is. And translating the dog whistle:
“It’s ‘obvious’ Cruz is an NBC, because Republican.”
The Repubs won’t nominate Cruz. Even they are not so dumb as to think that a half-Cuban will really appeal to Hispanics. If they want to actually contest the general election, they will nominate Jersey Fats (whose stomach surgery suggests strongly that he will run). Or, if the RWNJs have their way, it will be Son of Paul. For some reason, the Repubs just love that father-son thing.
I agree with most of what you say here, except the part that Christy’s surgery means he’s going to run. I expect him to run too, but I think his surgery just means that he wants to live long enough to have the chance to run.
This Whelan?
Whelan The Wrecker Sign in Museum Victoria
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v460/Bronteboy/sign-whelan-the-wrecker1.jpg'>Whelan The Wrecker Sign in Bronteboy album
http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/City-Lost-and-Found-Robyn-Annear/9781863953894/?ref=953&utm_source=sc&utm_medium=myshopping&utm_campaign=Books'>Whelan The Wrecker Book
I really have no interest in Ted Cruz or his eligibility. It’s just that the news media is playing it up, making it news. I sincerely hope this dies down quickly.
IIRC, after the asthma episode, Christie said his physician told him to lose 150 lbs. if he wanted to see his children grow up.
Christie does not have national appeal, and he is a social liberal. He signed NJ’s medical marijuana law.
“At a lunch Friday with about a dozen evangelical pastors in a Cedar Rapids hotel, the younger Paul assured the group that he disagrees with libertarians who support legalizing drugs…In a half-hour special, “At Home With Rand Paul,” the couple are seen bird-watching in the woods, going to McDonald’s and, especially, talking about religion — their belief in traditional marriage and the senator’s call for a “spiritual cleansing” in America…Paul said he believes in freedom and wants a “virtuous society” where people practice “self-restraint.” Yet he believes in laws and limits as well…”
“I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.”
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-12/politics/39210844_1_rand-paul-younger-paul-ron-paul
Yeah, Jr. keeps the loonier positions of Sr (eliminate Social Security and Medicare and the Federal Reserve) and junks the positions of Sr that actually made some sense (end the endless wars and foreign interventions, including the War on Drugs). Sort of like how Bush Jr junked the more sensible positions of Bush Sr, like making a real international coalition and stopping the Gulf War after kicking Saddam out of Kuwait.
I’ve seen a few commentators on liberal sites make jokes about Cruz being born in Canada, but no serious remarks…
I’m guessing the Founding Fathers left their copies of Vattel at home when they wrote the Naturalization Act of 1790.
Yes, and those jokes are taken very, very seriously by the wingnuts. More “See!-They-Do-It-To”ism.
I’ll repeat: I twice sent Apuzzo an e-mail, asking when he was going to file a lawsuit against Cruz.
No reply.
> Members of the First Congress, many of whom were those folks who wrote the U. S. Constitution, passed the Naturalization Act of 1790 that explicitly made the children of U.S. Citizen fathers born overseas “natural born citizens.” It is abundantly clear from this Act that those founders understood that being born in the United States is not a Constitutional prerequisite for becoming President.
It’s also abundantly clear that all the birther talk about how statutory law cannot “create” natural born citizens is totally bogus unless you throw the Founders under the bus, too. There goes their “14th amendment citizen” argument.
Birthers would just say that the founders were covered by the grandfather clause. And frankly they have something of a point in saying that, for once.
Anyway this is just like the “Liberals shoot up campaign offices too! The guy crashed his plane int that tax office WAS REALLY A LIBERAL!!” crap that was flowing around a few years ago
I think we need a term other than “birther” to describe the people who think Cruz is not a natural born citizen. Birtherim is about much more than just presidential eligibility. It’s a set of wild conspiracy theories concocted by bigots and sore losers. It’s an unsuccessful, shameful attempt to malign everyone and everything associated with President Obama. When people start impugning the integrity of Ted Cruz’s dead relatives, or calling his mother a slut, or accusing Mr. Cruz of being an “affirmative action” Harvard Law School graduate, I’ll call them birthers. But it’s a false equivalency to call people who question Cruz’s eligibility based on the definition of natural born citizen “birthers.” Birtherism is much, much bigger and more shameful than that.
“Birther” has such a negative connotation that it is used for the purpose of smearing the target. In the past, I have used the term “twofer” (2 citizen parents), but it never caught on.
I don’t think we can neglect the strong likelihood that Cruz is part of the nefarious Canadian plot to take over the US and use it as trans-shipment station for their dirty tar sands oil.
Don’t forget Cruz’ attempts to monopolize hockey and curling. Also, ice boxes and beer.
I use ‘Denialist.’
You are correct – that explains what that was all aboot, eh?
Obama is destined to implement Sharia Law. Cruz – the Metric system. Imagine the horror.
Cruz’ father was Cuban. Cuba is a communist country. The metric system is a communist plot. Cruz is a communist.
Nick Chase over at the American Stinker magazine online attempt to pull birtherism and the current alleged Obama scandals into one neat little bow….The epic fail is strong with this one….I will excerpt part of the article below….
The Still-Forgotten Obama Lie
Benghazi-gate,” “IRS-gate,” “AP-gate” — it would seem the intrepid investigators in the dinosaur media, in an effort to repair their shredded reputations, are finally catching up to the truths known months or years ago to those of us who get our news from the internet.
IRS targeting “patriots”? Not a problem for the dinosaurs; those racist lovers of the Constitution deserved it. Hillary, Susan, and crew covering up the Benghazi terrorist attack with a bald-faced lie about a video trailer? The dinosaurs had no problem swallowing this lie until the whistleblowers made it apparent what fools they were for doing so. Then they had to quickly regroup. But the Obama administration sucking their vitals from the Obama-friendly Associated Press? Well, that hurts them directly. They’re under attack! Unforgivable!
Hey, dinosaurs, now that we have your attention, we have a hot tip for you: there’s one big Obama lie that’s two years old that you completely missed. In fact, you suppressed the truth. And you don’t have to dig very hard to find this lie; it can still be downloaded at any time from whitehouse.gov for your own inspection and analysis. It’s the Obama long-form “birth certificate” forgery.
That this digital document is a forgery has been proved beyond question. Various experts have proved its fakery on different levels:
• Photoshop author and instructor Mara Zebest (along with other researchers) has shown how this digital fake was constructed in Photoshop from digital snippets of images. (My favorite: Photoshop reveals that the Alvin T. Onaka rubber-stamp image was scaled 24% and rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise before being added to the fake.)
• Typographer Paul Irey has demonstrated that typefaces from at least three different typewriters were used in constructing this fraud.
• The only official government investigation of this fake, by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigators, concluded that the digital Obama “birth certificate” is definitely a forgery (along with Obama’s draft card).
• I have shown how the supposedly typed letters in the forgery fail to line up vertically, as they must in a genuine typed document, and how the mother’s signature, “Stanley Ann Dunham Obama,” was composed of three different handwritten images, each made with a different pen. (To see my research, look for “Nick Chase” in the archives by author on the American Thinker website, and the articles will pop up.)
So the conclusions of the experts are definitive: it’s a forgery. If you have not yet recognized this truth, then you are waiting for acceptance — for a lot of people to agree with you — so you won’t be attacked as a raving lunatic should you dare to bring up the subject.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/the_still-forgotten_obama_lie.html#ixzz2TYZl11VV
This Nick Chase seems to be an interesting fellow….back in 2012 he wrote the following….
“Barack Obama was undoubtedly born in Hawaii in 1961 – verified not just by his own word (for whatever that’s worth), but by the automatic triggering of the registration of his birth in the public State of Hawaii birth index, and by the contemporaneous printing of his birth announcement in the local newspaper, and by eyewitnesses, and by his father’s student-visa INS records.”
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=227735;article=418426;
Yet he believes that the birth certificate is a forgery….Interesting….
I wonder why we don’t see the “North American Union” meme pop up more often in relation to Cruz. Canadian-born, US citizen, Mexican name – it’s all too obvious! 😉
Fascinating! Perhaps you and Lord Monckton can get someone without standing to file a moot ballot challenge in a state that Romney won.
Good one…These people are so confused that they write articles which contradict earlier articles they wrote…And then they wonder why no one takes them seriously….
Ed Whelan’s article is surprising. And that is not because he says that Cruz is eligible, which the Congressional Research Service seems to agree with, but that he holds that that was the original view of the writers of the US Constitution. He claims that he bases Cruz’s eligibility on what he claims was the view of the writers of the US Constitution that a person could be a Natural Born Citizen regardless of his place of birth so long as one parent is a US citizen.
Well, that is precisely what other conservative scholars had said was in doubt. This is what the Heritage Foundation book on the Constitution said:
“Under the longstanding English common-law principle of jus soli, persons born within the territory of the sovereign (other than children of enemy aliens or foreign diplomats) are citizens from birth. Thus, those persons born within the United States are “natural born citizens” and eligible to be President. Much less certain, however, is whether children born abroad of United States citizens are “natural born citizens” eligible to serve as President …”—- Edwin Meese, et al, THE HERITAGE GUIDE TO THE CONSTITUTION (2005) [Edwin Meese was Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, and the Heritage Foundation is a well-known Conservative organization.]
So, Meese says that while there is no question about the National Born status of children born on the soil, there IS a question about children born in foreign countries. The fact that there is a question does not make Cruz not eligible, of course, but it certainly seems to indicate that there is nothing in the writings of the framers that shows that they went beyond the jus soli interpretation. And the quotations from Tucker and Rawle at the time indicate that they focused on the jus soli interpretation as well.
Which is not to say that Cruz is not a NBC—just that it is hard to prove it under ORIGINALIST interpretation.
Magic M: Here is the text from the Naturalization Act of 1790 that applies to children born abroad to US citizens:
“SEC. 3. … and the children of citizens of the United States, born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, shall be considered as citizens of the United States: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons, whose fathers have never been resident of the United States…”
Note that it merely says “citizens”, not “natural-born citizens,” but if natural-born citizen means citizen by the nature of one’s birth, then it’s obvious that this law conferred natural-born citizenship on this class of people.
You’re certainly right about what it says about the authority of Congress to legislatively create classes of natural-born citzens.
Here’s what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (Justice Miller’s opinion) in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony – 111 U.S. 53 (1884):
“The construction placed upon the Constitution by the first [copyright] act of 1790 and the act of 1802, by the men who were contemporary with its formation, many of whom were members of the convention which framed it, is of itself entitled to very great weight, and when it is remembered that the rights thus established have not been disputed during a period of nearly a century, it is almost conclusive.”
Note that the copyright act referenced here and the naturalization law at issue were both enacted in the same year, 1790.
That’s from the succeeding Naturalization Act of 1795. The 1790 Act said:
“And 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: Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States.”