Is Ted Cruz a Citizen?
February 3, 2016 by Richard Michael
A Little Background
This is a follow-up to my October 31, 2014 article Is Ted Cruz Eligible to Serve as President? Not So Fast!. My conclusion in that article was that I didn't know because there were too many missing facts.
As presidential campaigning has heated up over the last few months, more and more people have come down on one side or the other of Cruz' eligibility for the office of President or Vice President.
Ted's buddies at Harvard fired the first shot with their trivial piece that the Harvard Law Review published.
Donald Trump raised the in August, and then as Cruz has gained on Trump in the polls in January, Trump brought the issue front and center, again.
A ballot challenge was made in Vermont.
I had considered writing again about this subject when I read J. B. Williams' (Canada Free Press) article back in December. It was not Williams' argument, so much as the new facts that he brought to light. After all, all legal issues revolve around law to facts. When the facts are vague or spurious, it becomes speculation.
The immediate reason for writing now is yesterday's decision by the Illinois Board of Elections, responding to a challenge to placing Cruz' name on the ballot. The Board rejected that challenge.
What's Changed
What About Vattel?
Emerich de Vattel was a Swiss philospher who wrote the The Law of Nations in 1758 in French.
The legal systems of Switzerland along with all of Europe, except England, were and are based on Roman civil law. The kingdoms that eventually became England had established their own common law. The legal systems of the United States, with the exception of Louisiana because of its French orgins, are based on English common law, not Roman civil law.
Under Roman civil law, citizenship was established by blood (jus sanguinis). Under English common law, citizen was established by the land (jus soli). In the Law of Nations, Vattel describes citizenship as inherited from the father. That's Roman civil law. Vattel also couches his description with the fact that it applies to most countries. England[xx1] was one of the exceptions.
It's rather inconceivable that the framers of the Constitution, which is written entirely in the context of English common law, would adopt Roman civil law for a single term.
Anyone who argues that Vattel's Roman civil law definition of natural born citizen controls the term in the Constitution is smoking something or, more likely, hypnotized by the purveyors of this nonsense. Once these kinds of myths start gaining traction among people, cognitive dissonance sets in. They will never admit to the error in reasoning. They become true believers.
The United States Supreme Court lays out the distinction between jus soli (English common law) and jus sanguinis (Roman civil law) in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 654 (1898). I doubt most of the proponents have ever read the case.
[xx1] "Finally, there are states, as, for instance, England, where the single circumstance of being born in the country naturalizes the children of a foreigner." Law of Nations, §214.
Richard; You must know that the Founding Fathers relied heavily on Vattel's Laws of Nations at least during the time of the creation of the Constitution. It was confirmed by George Washington & Ben Franklin at least. There are several notes taken during the Constitutional Convention that refer to their understanding that their definition of a Natural Born Citizen referred to blood - the Father (and sometimes the Mother) - not geography.
ReplyDeleteAs a sidenote, they were not IN LOVE with English Common Law either, in fact, there are several cases where they said that American Common Law is not always the same as English - there were several places where American Common law deviated - particularly where it referred to, or had something to do with, Royalty, Inheritance, Geography or other things that the American Revolution and culture sought to change or eliminate.
I have done a great deal of research on all this and it can be found, with sources, on my website at:
http://anderson4theconstitution.com/citizens.html