Home » Natural-born citizen: why doesn’t Cruz ask for a resolution from Congress, or for a declaratory judgment from the courts?

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Natural-born citizen: why doesn’t Cruz ask for a resolution from Congress, or for a declaratory judgment from the courts? — 30 Comments

  1. Trump is as low class as they come. Remember the esteemed Dr. Trump expounding on Ben Carson’s “Pathological Anger” as something that can’t be cured? Not only did he get it wrong, but he did it in his “just asking” style, with a wiggle out.

  2. Should Trump’s unethical ploy ultimately be responsible for denying Cruz the Presidency, it will IMO be a tragedy for America. If that occurs and then Trump loses to Hillary, Sanders or Biden it will be a disaster for America.

    There are two issues at play; the best Republican nominee, which is clearly Cruz and, that the next President NOT be a democrat.

    The latter is by far the more crucial of the two. We can, if with difficulty, survive 4-8 years of Trumpian bombast. But 4-8 more years of Obama II will complete America’s destruction.

  3. Trump is as low class as they come.

    Eh. Like Mencken said politics ain’t beanbag. Cruz is Trump’s #1 competition for the nomination, and Cruz WAS born outside of the US. What, Trump is supposed to just ignore that Cruz inconvenience just because Cruz’s supporters want him to? Hey, Trump doesn’t back down from anybody or on any issue, and he isn’t afraid to say what everybody else is afraid to say. That’s what makes him endearing.

  4. G Jourbet:

    What’s Trump to do? Two suggestions:

    Say the truth, which is that Cruz is a natural-born citizen, and that the threats to sue are bogus because no one has standing to sue. That’s the high road—which Trump will not take, of course.

    If he wants to take the lower (not the low) road, he can do exactly what the article said he should: he should himself ask the courts for a declaratory judgment, with Trump as the plaintiff who could be harmed.

    He will not do that, as I said. At least, that’s my prediction. Did you read the post? Because if you had, your question would have been answered.

    Instead, Trump takes the lowest road of all. Typical.

    You may find it “endearing.” I don’t.

  5. Neo,
    The Trumpsters believe that Trump will be able to make pigs fly. Furthermore, he will order squads of pigs to fly over ISIS camps and defecate on all our enemies, which will of course cause all of them to lay down their arms and ask for BLTs. Then Trump will start a chain of take-out food places featuring bacon throughout the Muslim world. After all he has so many great Muslim friends who have been denied good food all their lives.

  6. expat,

    Perhaps some of Trump’s less sophisticated supporters think that he can make pigs fly. But most are just deeply grateful that someone is finally stating the plain unvarnished truth. No ‘nuance’, no carefully calculated PC terminology. No allowing the left to set the terms of debate, so as to make harder accusations of racism, sexism and ‘insensitivity’. Muslim immigration is a threat. Period. Illegal immigration is a cultural threat. Period. The mass media is a threat. Period. And most of all, the American left is a threat. End of story.

  7. Geoffrey Britain:

    But Trump’s not the only saying that plain unvarnished truth, nor even the first.

    And many of the other things Trump is saying are not the truth at all.

  8. Trump’s current attacks on Cruz (and some of his previous commentary about other candidates) put me in mind of Huckabee’s slandering of Romney’s character, through slant-wise questioning of his religious beliefs.
    Harry Reid just flat out lied.
    I’m not sure what’s worse.

  9. neo,

    I agree that plenty of what Trump is saying is untrue or at least duplitiously misleads. And yes, others are speaking the truth, even Rubio 😉 It’s the way Trump speaks the truth that sets him apart. His bombastic, cut to the chase style has done far more to advance discussion of the Muslim threat and illegal immigration than all the others combined. Cruz would never have, on his own, suggested a temporary ban on Muslim immigration. In public speaches he did not and would not talk directly about the thousands of criminals embedded in illegal immigrants as a prima facie threat to America. Much less speak to the majority of today’s illegals utter disinterest and even active resistance to assimilation.

    Far more is needed in discussions of these issues than ‘vague implications’, designed to provide political cover from predictable accusations of racism, accusations that regularly shut down debate. As soon as the euphemism of “undocumented immigrant” is accepted in place of the accurate “criminal illegals” the debate is lost. That’s the critical difference that Trump brings to the table and if Cruz doesn’t learn to embrace it, he will not be half as effective as we all pray that he could be.

  10. Here’s Mark Steyn’s view of the matter:

    After the debate, the analysts and experts all agreed that Cruz had won the exchange with Trump on whether he meets the qualifications to run for president. I think he “won” in the same sense that Carly Fiorina “won” the exchange with Trump about her face – when emasculation fetishist Rich Lowry asserted that she’d “cut off his balls”. She hadn’t – which is why yesterday she was back on the kiddie table eating crow balls. Pundits, who make their living by saying clever things, assume that debaters’ points translate into victory in the real world. Trump, by contrast, keeps his eye on the larger issue – which in this case is that Cruz can’t win as long as we’re talking about this subject:

    The poll [taken in January] finds that the ‘birther issue’ has the potential to really hurt Ted Cruz. Only 32% of Iowa Republicans think someone born in another country should be allowed to serve as President, to 47% who think such a person shouldn’t be allowed to serve as President. Among that segment of the Republican electorate who don’t think someone foreign born should be able to be President, Trump is crushing Cruz 40/14.

    Despite all the attention to this issue in the last week, still only 46% of Iowa Republicans are aware that Cruz was not born in the United States. In fact, there are more GOP voters in the state who think Cruz (34%) was born in the United States than think Barack Obama (28%) was. Donald Trump knows what he’s doing when he repeatedly brings up this issue- 36% of Cruz voters aren’t aware yet that he wasn’t born in the United States, and 24% of Cruz voters say someone born outside the country shouldn’t be allowed to be President.

    Let me say at the outset that I like Ted Cruz personally, I agree with him on most of the issues, I side with him on his differences with his fellow Republican senators, and I think he would make a fine president. In addition, unlike most of my fellow pundits, I know where he’s coming from – literally: I too was born in Canada to a non-Canadian mother. So it pains me to have to say that I don’t agree that the eligibility question is the thoroughly “settled law” that he thinks it is: Were he to be the nominee, it’s entirely likely that Democrats, not to mention the GOP establishment that loathes him with a pathological intensity, would file suit somewhere, and, unlike the Obama cases, not have much difficulty finding some leftie judge willing to entertain the issue. [UPDATE: First lawsuit filed.] Perhaps at the Supreme Court some brilliant Ivy League constitutional lawyer will win the day for him.

    But that’s not the point. As that poll lays out, most Iowans are not aware that Cruz was born in Canada and, when it’s pointed out to them, most Republicans think it’s a disqualifier.

  11. Note: Cruz’s refusal to apologize and back down from his New York ‘values’ imbroglio is encouraging and hopefully, an indication that Cruz has begun to embrace a plainspoken, take no prisoners approach to the issues.

  12. Geoffrey Britain:

    Cruz has “begun” to embrace? Hasn’t that been his hallmark during his public/political life? Why do you write “begun to”?

  13. Neo, in my opinion you are flailing with these recent posts about Cruz and the citizenship/delcaratory relief brouhaha. Like me you may believe that Cruz is all that is standing in the way of a Trump nomination. And he’s blowing it.

    The sad fact is that Ted Cruz knew his foreign birth and dual
    citizenship would be a problem. That is why he renounced his Canadian citizenship in preparing to run. Long before Trump was asked about it, way back in August of 2013, The Atlantic ran an article all about this called Ask a Birther: Are You Convinced by Ted Cruz’s Birth Certificate? This is not something that Trump invented.

    We’ve gone back and forth on who has standing to sue, whether the issue is ripe, etc. That is all beside the point. Ted Cruz as a Harvard Law graduate, at the top of his class, Supreme Court Clerk, and United States Senator, knew damn well that this would come up. Knowing it would, or at the least probably could become a major distraction, he should have put it to rest. You say he didn’t have standing? Fine, then he should have asked someone who did like a friendly state attorney general to bring suit as soon as he filed to run. The fact is Ted Cruz is a brilliant, over-the-top legal mind who lacks any sense of political strategy or leadership. That is born out by his utter failure in the Senate. As we used to say about the nerds who got beat up out on the school yard, he doesn’t know how to play with the big boys.

  14. neo,

    It’s Cruz’s long-windedness that dilutes his message.

    Cruz has spoken out strongly, on the floor of the Senate. CSPAN’s viewership is… limited. More importantly, using many words when but a few will do, guarantees inattention.

  15. “. . . his Canadian roots,” says the NYT article quoting someone named Spiro.

    This appears as a particle of political rhetoric. And as such, as is so often the case, a merest little lie.

    But Sen. Cruz has not now and has never had any such thing as “Canadian roots” in any relevant political sense. For Sen. Cruz was a newborn infant when birthed and even when removed by his parents from Canada. When in his life did he even learn and understand the meaning of his accidental birth in Canada? Certainly that would have been long after he had already come to the conclusion that he is an American, together with everyone else in his life. Tell a two year old he was born in Canada and he will not have the foggiest clue what that means . . . so also just as likely for a five year old, and so on.

  16. The Other Chuck:

    You don’t get it: NO ONE has standing, and wouldn’t until a set of circumstances happened that have not happened and will not happen at this point, so Cruz cannot put it to rest in that way.

    You write: “Fine, then he should have asked someone who did like a friendly state attorney general to bring suit as soon as he filed to run.” But that “friendly state attorney general” would not have standing, either. No one is injured. A state AG could not be a plaintiff. That’s the point of all these posts and all these quotes.

    And did you really expect that Cruz could have rallied other senators to agree with him during his Senate term? Dream on. The most he ever could do, being a very conservative outlier, was act as a spokesperson for conservatives. It’s interesting—conservatives very often rail against those who compromise. Apparently, when a person doesn’t compromise, some of them rail at them for that. Which is it? Is it a miracle worker you want?

  17. What I want to know is when did the donald stop beating his wives and stop having sex with his illegal alien maids and his smooth skinned 20 year old transvestite Guatemalan chauffeur? Anyone can play this game. Time to play it on the donald. Lots of skeletons in the closet, rattle them bones.

  18. Is it a miracle worker you want?
    No, it’s a leader. Reagan was, and to a certain extent JW Bush was. At one of the debates in December you called attention to Cruz when in a rare moment of true leadership he called out the MSM for loaded questions and was able to briefly rally support from the other nominees. That is what we expect, someone who can bring along the others and actually accomplish something. Instead we got a loner who in frustration alienated everyone. What did he think he could achieve by calling McConnell a liar? Others here have mentioned his wordiness which is another way of saying he can’t give a speech worth a damn. It is not his stated positions with which we all agree. It is not his integrity, nor his courage in confronting liberals. It is certainly not his intelligence. It is simply his inability to convince. If you look at real leaders you will also see a salesman. Believe me, I know a lot about THAT subject. And Cruz is no salesman.

    Unfortunately, and probably to our downfall, and disgrace, Trump is.

  19. I believe you are wrong about a State Attorney General not being able to disqualify on the basis of natural born citizenship. That would then allow Cruz to seek clarification through Declaratory Relief. Ask your attorney. I asked mine and he said yes.

  20. The Other Chuck:

    I didn’t realize you thought “leader” and “salesman” were synonymous. But let’s say they are (I don’t agree, but I think being a good salesman makes it easier to convince people you’re a leader, although you have to ALSO be an actual leader).

    Cruz is not a great salesman. I think he gives pretty good speeches as speeches go, but I may not be a typical consumer of speeches because I don’t like speeches in general. I find Trump to be an awful speaker in terms of “leader”—I’ve watched a speech or two of his, and to me he’s like an entertaining rambler, a humorous uncle who likes to hear the sound of his own voice, and who’s good for a chuckle and sometimes says things that are true and sometimes says things that make him sound like a flatulent windbag.

    Leader? No. Not to me, he’s not.

    As far as calling McConnell a liar goes, Cruz wanted to achieve truth, I suppose. He knew he was never going to get the support of McConnell, and he (Cruz) was sent to the Senate to represent a certain political point of view, and he did so. Read about what actually was happening to cause him to say what he said. He was representing a group of conservatives in the Senate who McConnell had betrayed, and he was also representing those conservative voters who had been betrayed again and again by the “establishment.”

    It’s so interesting to see this sort of criticism of Cruz. As I said before, most conservatives criticize those who compromise and make deals with the Republican establishment. When someone doesn’t make such deals, then some of them criticize him for his failure to make deals with the establishment and just go along with it. That’s what I mean about a miracle worker. You can’t do both; it’s one or the other.

  21. The Other Chuck:

    Every writer/lawyer I have read on this topic says there is no way force a declaratory judgment because there is no one who can claim injury, except perhaps someone like Trump who is running against Cruz, or Cruz if some state leaves him off the ballot because they think he’s not a natural-born citizen. Other than that, no lawsuit and no declaratory judgment.

    If you’re talking about a state leaving him off the ballot—yes, that would be a cause of action, as I already wrote in my post (the quote is “the most realistic situation that would bring legal clarity would be for Mr. Cruz to file a lawsuit in the event that a state elections commissioner decided to take him off the ballot because of his Canadian roots”). But are you suggesting that Cruz should ASK to be left off a ballot in order to bring it to court? That is an extremely bizarre suggestion, and I don’t even think a state AG would do it. I’m not even sure a state election commissioner could do it, actually, or that any court would issue a ruling. It is a very complex question.

    See this for a lot more on the subject. Excerpt:

    But, what about the courts? It turns out that states have no independent obligation to keep unqualified candidates off the ballot, and there is no right for a court to do so (absent, perhaps, some state law to the contrary).

    Recall how our presidential election works. It is actually fifty-one separate elections for slates of presidential electors. Each state administers an election for presidential electors. And states are given great control–the Constitution provides, “Each State shall point, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” presidential electors.

    States, then, decide who appears on the ballot. And it decides how it will scrutinize those candidates seeking ballot access. But historically, most states did not independently examine whether a candidate was eligible or not–the matter was apparently left to the voters, the electors, and Congress…

    States, then, are not obligated to evaluate whether someone is ineligible to be president. And, so far, there has not been much that challengers can do. (Consider the massive failure that “birthers” challenging Mr. Obama’s eligibility experienced–the vast majority of outcomes turning upon procedural hurdles to litigation and deference to the political process.)

    But some states do scrutinize qualifications. In 2012, states excluded candidates like Abdul Hassan and Peta Lindsay from the ballot because they concluded these candidates were ineligible. These are the cases ripe for litigation: when candidates have been excluded and seek to be placed on the ballot, they sue.

    But, is any state actually going to exclude Mr. Cruz? It seems unlikely. New Hampshire, for instance, is one of the states that does scrutinize candidate’s qualifications. Its Ballot Law Commission recently heard a challenge regarding Mr. Cruz’s eligibility and decided to permit Mr. Cruz on the ballot because there was “no obvious defect” in the filing and it was “not answered with certainty” that he was ineligible.

    This more deferential approach from election administrators or adjudicative bodies is sensible. After all, if voters, electors, and Congress each have the opportunity to scrutinize qualifications, why exert another layer of scrutiny, particularly in close questions? And, would we really prefer election officials, or courts, to strip ballot access from candidates? And, technically, voters are electing slates of presidential electors, anyway, not a candidate.

    Accordingly, questions surrounding Mr. Cruz’s eligibility go far deeper than simply asking whether he is a “natural born citizen.” It implicates the very decision-making process in elections. And there are very good reasons that such a case should not arrive in a court unless and until some state, of its own processes, decides to exclude him from the ballot. In the unlikely event that happens… well, then the justiciability and merits challenges would begin in earnest.

  22. Ann,

    I am beginning to suspect you are a dnc mole. Your alleged support for Rubio rings hollow. That is my conclusion based on your vendetta against Cruz. Why? Because hrc/the dnc fear Cruz far more than she/it fears Rubio. Or you can set the record straight and explain why zero in on Cruz? Why the apparent hatred? What exactly about Cruz, beyond your dead in street references, is your real problem with Cruz?

    I can understand differences of opinion. I can understand rallying around your choosen candidate. What I can not accept, devoid of suspicion, is what appears to be a vendetta against the most conservative gop candidate still in the running.

  23. Neo, the electionlawblog article above states exactly what I was referring to. Yes, I was suggesting that Cruz should have forced the issue early on by getting his name disqualified. If he somehow gets the nomination you can bet on it there will be a challenge with the intent to tie it up in court through the general election.

    You may not see Trump as a leader or a particularly good salesman. The reason I suspect is because you see through the con. But I think Trump is a fantastic salesman. His whole life has been spent making deals and selling his vision of the future. He is a supreme salesman, a billionaire salesman. What you and I both know is that he hasn’t a clue about running a nation. Should he get elected he thinks he can make a deal, a better deal, with religious fanatics in Iran. Or somehow cajole Mexico into building a wall to keep their desperate poor confined. Or work out an arrangement with the killer in Moscow that goes against his self-interest. Or magically restore manufacturing while threatening a trade war with China.

    The man suffers from megalomania and is what one of my favorite author’s, Tom Clancy, called a clear and present danger. I don’t have an answer as to what to do about it nor do the Republican candidates apparently.

  24. The Other Chuck:

    I don’t mean this in a nasty way, but you don’t seem to understand the article and what it’s saying if you think Cruz could have accomplished that. And you don’t understand what I wrote—I have discussed that possibility, both in the original post and in my comments. And it wouldn’t be “tied up in the courts” any more than Obama has been tied up by the challenges to his birth.

    As far as Trump as a salesman, I agree that it’s clear that many people are buying what he’s selling. And if you read my comment carefully, I never said he wasn’t a salesman. I said that he is not a leader, and that there is a difference.

    I agree about Trump. He is the quintessential salesman. It might even get him elected, but it won’t do much for him in the sense of governing. It is very worrisome.

  25. I thought I understood the article. Perhaps not.
    You say:
    And it wouldn’t be “tied up in the courts” any more than Obama has been tied up by the challenges to his birth.
    If only.

    Here is the latest from Alan Grayson in Florida on his upcoming lawsuit in the event Cruz is nominated:

    Grayson told MSNBC that he’ll sue over Canadian-born Cruz’s natural-born citizen status if the senator is the GOP nominee.

    “Because the Constitution means what it says and says what it means. That’s why. I don’t agree with you that there’s any sort of consensus about this at all. Larry Tribe seems to be on my side of the argument,” he explained.

    Tribe was one of Cruz’s professors at Harvard Law. Donald Trump has been citing Tribe’s skepticism over Cruz’s eligibility, saying it’s not a settled matter in case law.

    “Look, there’s a legal argument which you just addressed and a factual argument. Let’s start with the legal argument. You seem to think that natural-born citizen means somebody born to an American parent, right?” said Grayson, who also graduated from Harvard Law and clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

    “There is not much legal authority to support that and the Supreme Court has, in fact, never addressed that. A better argument can be made that it means you’re simply born in the United States. One of the words connote natural-born citizen, may be somebody born in the United States. Certainly, no reason to think it for sure means anything other than that,” the congressman continued…

    …Grayson denied his lawsuit would be like birthers claiming President Obama was born in Kenya.
    “That case is about someone who was born in the United States. This is about someone who was born in Canada.
    I’m not going to get into legal strategies here. I’m pretty confident that the standing is not a problem,” he said. “And, by the way, the whole standing document comes from our friend Justice Scalia, who I worked with for a year. So I know a thing or two about standing.”
    https://pjmedia.com/election/2016/01/15/alan-grayson-explains-why-hell-sue-ted-cruz-over-presidential-eligibility/1/

  26. Tribe was one of Cruz’s professors at Harvard Law.

    Using Harvard Law as an authority, and thus those who have an axe to grind or favors to buy from Hussein, just means you fell for the Left’s con.

    Next will be falling for the Grayson false flag.

  27. “Say the truth, which is that Cruz is a natural-born citizen, and that the threats to sue are bogus because no one has standing to sue.”

    You believe Cruz is a natural-born citizen. So do I. That does not necessarily make it the truth.

    What really concerns me is the second part of that sentence – no one has standing to sue. What if the Dems nominated someone, say George Soros, clearly not eligible to serve? Would you still argue no one has standing to sue?

  28. Glen H:

    The sentence I wrote reads like this: “the threats of Democrats to sue are bogus because no one has standing to sue.” In the post, I already wrote that Trump has standing to sue, so the sentence actually means the following, if read in context: “the threats of Democrats to sue are bogus because no DEMOCRAT has standing to sue.”

    In addition, my assertion that Cruz is a natural-born citizen is not based on belief. It’s based on facts and the legal opinion of every single legal authority there is—except Ann Coulter, who is not a legal authority in this area, and who is a major supporter of Trump and not the least bit objective. The most doubt about Cruz’s citizenship that any other authorities have expressed (and there are very few) is that the question is not “settled”—meaning, it hasn’t been ruled on in a court of law. That’s not because the answer is not clear; it’s not due to any ambiguity in Cruz’s status as a natural born citizen. It’s because almost no one has had standing to sue in the past in any similar case, and because in the only case where anyone ever did have standing (Alan Keyes, who was a presidential candidate on the ballot on 2008, and who subsequently sued the California Secretary of State and others over whether Obama was a natural born citizen), the court refused to rule on the merits . Read at the link if you want to know the details.

  29. So I looked it up. McCain’s citizenship was an issue as early as February 2008…well before he was the declared candidate. The Congressional resolution happened in April 2008. At that time, the RNC convention had not yet happened, so he was not the ‘official’ candidates of the Republican Party. He may have been a ‘presumptive’ winner at that point, I don’t remember, but he was not the official Republican candidate for president: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/sres511/text

  30. K-E:

    I was using information I got from a link rather than looking it up myself. That’ll teach me to be lazy 🙂 .

    The point is the same, however. McCain was indeed the presumptive nominee by mid-February of 2008. And by early March, he wasn’t just the “presumptive” nominee. All he really lacked for the nomination was for the convention to actually occur:

    Contests held on March 4, 2008 in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island effectively ended the 2008 Republican Primaries by forcing Mike Huckabee to withdraw after poor showings and giving John McCain the needed delegates to win the Republican nomination.

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