Harvard Law, Ted Cruz, and “natural born Citizen”

HALLOWED INSTITUTION REFUSES TO PUBLISH REBUTTAL

by Montgomery Blair Sibley, ©2015, blogging at Amo Probos

(May 4, 2015) — In March, the Harvard Law Review stepped into the political arena with an article by two former Solicitor Generals, Paul Clement and Neal Katyal. They wrote a Note seeking to establish that the Republican Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz was eligible to be President under Article II of the Constitution.  Article II requires, among other conditions precedent, that the President be a “natural born Citizen”.  In their Note — “On the Meaning of Natural Born Citizen” — Clement and Katyal argue that “natural born Citizen” means all those who were: “U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time.”

This legally-indefensible argument deserves refutation given that it comes ex cathedra from the prestigious Harvard Law Review. Grotesquely, six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices graduated from Harvard Law School:  Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Stephen G. Breyer, John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice, and Elena Kagan.

Hence, the distinctive intellectual bias of graduates of that law school has a disproportionate impact on the direction of law in the United States. The Harvard Law Review has refused to publish my Response to the Note of Paul Clement and Neal Katyal: “On the Meaning of Natural Born Citizen”.  I post it here for what it is worth. I guess the powers-that-be believe that there is no sense in muddying the intellectual waters with the apparently pre-ordained Harvard Law School coronation of Senator Cruz as “eligible” to be President by allowing my Response to be published.

In sum, in my Response, I refute the arguments of Messrs. Clement and Katyal, and conclude as follows:

Thus, I must maintain that the manipulation of the framingera sources and law by Messrs. Clement and Katyal to conclude that Senator Ted Cruz is eligible to be President cannot stand.  They conclude: “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.”  The British statutes, Blackstone,  de Vattel, The Naturalization Act of 1790 and the holding in Minor v. Happersett are all consistent: “natural born Citizen” is a privilege bestowed upon a special class of U.S. Citizen, to wit, a child born of two U.S. Citizen parents.

Thus, insomuch as  Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal were born in the United States to parents none of whom were United States citizens at the time of these gentlemen’s respective births and Ted Cruz was born in Canada to parents only one of whom (his mother) was a United States citizen, none of these fine gentlemen are eligible to be President of the United States.