Constitutional law prof says Cruz is ineligible for the presidency.
I will say that I very much stick to my argument that I believe ‘natural born’ simply means you were born a US citizen, as opposed to becoming one at some later point in life. But even Larry Tribe says the issue is “unsettled.” The argument is that by 18th century standards, place of birth was key to determining citizenship, which – to be clear – really wasn’t citizenship by ‘subjectship’, being a subject of the British Crown.
Under the irony tab, what is notable is that even though Barack Obama is the only one there’s even been a serious controversy over, there’s no question under any theory that he’s natural born. He was born to a US mother on US soil. Sign, sealed, delivered. He’s yours, America. But it seems like Republicans have a hard time coming up with candidates who were actually born here. Like there’s so many of us. They need these imports?
I should point out that there’s no ‘right’ answer to this question in the sense that we normally think about it. Because no Court has ever addressed it. Since that’s the case, history is really our only guide to answering the question. Still, since Cruz considers himself 1000% American, case law allows everyone to experience a degree of glee at seeing what amounts to the gollum ring of his life – the presidency – even conceivably be off-limits to him because he’s not quite as American as he thinks.
