Ted Cruz Raises Millions in First 72 Hours

“TODAY, PEOPLE TAKE THE EASY ROAD”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Mar. 31, 2015) — In an interview with Dana Loesch on Tuesday afternoon, Texas Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz said that his newly-launched campaign raised “$2 million within 72 hours,” surpassing his goal and expectations.

Cruz said that “courageous conservatives” should band together to provide him the “resources” he needs to walk “the path to victory.”

Cruz, who was born in Canada to a non–US-citizen father, maintained he is eligible to seek the presidency as a “natural born citizen” as required by Article II of the Constitution when he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that he meets the eligibility requirement because his mother was a U.S. citizen.

Two years ago, however, Carl Cameron of Fox News reported unequivocally that Cruz was not eligible to seek the presidency (3:00).

A week before Cruz announced his candidacy, two former solicitors general wrote in an opinion article published in the Harvard Law Review that Cruz is eligible by virtue of having been born to one U.S-citizen parent.  In their curiously-timed piece, Paul Clement and Neal Katyal stated that “a U.S. citizen at birth” equates to the standard of “natural born Citizen” stated in Article II, Section 1, clause 5.

Constitutional and “common law” attorney Herb Titus disagrees on the meaning of the term of art.  “If you’re a natural born Citizen, you are a citizen according to the law of nature, not according to any positive statement in a constitutional statute, but because of the very nature of your birth and the very nature of nations and your relationship to the nation as a citizen,” he said in an interview.

Titus advises “looking at what the law of nature would be” to determine “natural born” status and invokes the citizenship of both parents.  He differentiates between “natural born Citizen” and a “citizen by birth.”

In an interview recorded during Obama’s first term, Titus told (9:31) radio host Cynthia Davis that the “natural born Citizen” clause was included in the Constitution because the president “is the chief constitutional officer of the nation.  He is the only one whose oath of office is written in the Constitution itself in Article II…”

“You’re looking for is someone who has no divided loyalty, has a single loyalty to the nation…,” he said, adding that a “natural born Citizen” could be born overseas as long as the parents were U.S. citizens at the time.

Titus invoked Deut. 17, where Moses “natural born citizens of Israel,” which is a paraphrase of “be sure to appoint over you a king the Lord your God chooses. He must be from among your fellow Israelites. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not an Israelite.”

Directly afterward, Davis asked Titus if Cruz would qualify for the presidency given his foreign-citizen father, to which Titus replied (13:00):

Sen. Cruz is a good example, and I think Sen. Rubio is also a good example…People don’t understand why “natural born Citizen” is a requirement because they don’t see that spirit of patriotism and commitment to the nation that arises out of birth.

Titus said that the Constitution was written on “principles” which were “specifically designed to endure.  They don’t change with changing times.”

Davis then posited that “the Democrats” bear “blame” for having placed an ineligible candidate in Obama on the 2008 ballot, to which Titus said that neither Democrats nor Republicans comprise “constitutional parties.”  “If someone wants to be president of the United States but isn’t a natural born Citizen, or if some people want to get someone like Sen. Cruz to be president of the United States, then all they have to do is amend the Constitution.  But today, people don’t want to take the hard road; they take the easy road.”

The Republican Party has failed to answer The Post & Email’s questions about the natural born Citizen issue, and Cruz’s office has not responded to questions about his alleged U.S. citizenship at birth.

By Titus’s examples, Obama is not eligible to hold the office of president.

An article published in the Michigan Law Review stated that “anyone born on American soil whose parents are citizens of the United States is a ‘natural born citizen.’  Anyone whose citizenship is acquired after birth as a result of naturalization is not a natural born citizen” has been removed.

Atty. Mario Apuzzo, who brought a case challenging Barack Hussein Obama’s eligibility to the U.S. Supreme Court, also argues against Katyal and Clement’s points.  “Katyal and Clement maintain that any child who becomes a citizen at birth, regardless of where born or by what means, is a natural born citizen.  They add that since Mr. Cruz became a citizen from the moment of birth and did not need any naturalization after birth he is a natural born citizen.  But there is no historical and legal evidence which demonstrates that this is how the Framers defined a natural born citizen and the authors surely have not presented that evidence even if it did exist,” Apuzzo wrote on March 13.

In attempting to convince readers that Cruz is eligible, Katyal and Clement referenced the 1790 Naturalization Act, which states that “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.”  The writers then explain that through the Act, Congress “expanded the class of citizens at birth to include children born abroad of citizen mothers as long as the father had at least been resident in the United States at some point. But Congress eliminated that differential treatment of citizen mothers and fathers before any of the potential candidates in the current presidential election were born. Thus, in the relevant time period, and subject to certain residency requirements, children born abroad of a citizen parent were citizens from the moment of birth, and thus are ‘natural born Citizens.’”

Their statements appear to cast doubt on whether or not Obama would have qualified for the presidency under the same standard given his foreign-born father, who never became a U.S. citizen.

Before the Constitution was ratified, Founding Father John Jay wrote a letter to George Washington in which he said:

Permit me to hint, whether it would not be wise & seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expresly that the Command in chief of the american army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.

The citizenship requirement for Representatives and U.S. Senators was expressed as simply “a Citizen” for a given number of years:  seven for representatives and nine for senators.  There are also age requirements, as there is for the presidency, the latter of which is 35.

Jay’s letter is also quoted by Katyal and Clement.

In June 2013, writer JB Williams reported that “Cruz was born in Calgary Canada, to a mother who held dual citizenship in the USA and Canada, and a father who held dual citizenship in Cuba and Canada. On what basis does Cruz think he is a Natural Born Citizen of the United States?”

Williams continued:

Similar to Rubio, Cruz may have inherited US citizenship from his mother at birth, but if he did, it was only due to 14th Amendment naturalization statutes. He is not a Natural Born Citizen of the United States.

After living under the constitutional crisis of Obama fraud for five years, we apparently have to address this issue once again.

Quoting from Section 212 of Vattel’s “The Law of Nations,” Williams wrote:

The operative definition of Natural Born Citizen is as follows —

1. “As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights.”
2. “The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent.”
3. “I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.”

The Founders were known to have used Vattel’s work as a reference.  In 2010, It was discovered that George Washington had checked out the treatise from the New York Society Library in October 1789 and never returned it.  The last of the 13 colonies, Rhode Island, ratified the U.S. Constitution on May 29, 1790.

In 1795, the 1790 Naturalization Act was repealed and replaced with a new law which increased the necessary time for non-citizens to have resided in the U.S. before they could become naturalized citizens.

Katyal and Clement concluded their piece with:

There are plenty of serious issues to debate in the upcoming presidential election cycle. The less time spent dealing with specious objections to candidate eligibility, the better. Fortunately, the Constitution is refreshingly clear on these eligibility issues. To serve, an individual must be at least thirty-five years old and a “natural born Citizen.” Thirty-four and a half is not enough and, for better or worse, a naturalized citizen cannot serve. But as Congress has recognized since the Founding, a person born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent is generally a U.S. citizen from birth with no need for naturalization. And the phrase “natural born Citizen” in the Constitution encompasses all such citizens from birth. Thus, an individual born to a U.S. citizen parent — whether in California or Canada or the Canal Zone — is a U.S. citizen from birth and is fully eligible to serve as President if the people so choose.

———————–

This story was updated March 31, 2015 at 10:36 p.m. EDT.