I did want to make one comment in general about the topic. To my knowledge few cases have ever been heard in court about the presidential eligibility of a person born US citizens outside of the United States. The closest we have is the complicated case of John McCain, in which Judge Alsup said in his decision that he thought McCain likely to be eligible.

In the case of US. v. Wong, the court used reasoning that concluded that Mr. Wong was born a citizen under the principles of the common law of England, and pretty much all legal authorities consider the question of persons born US citizens in the US settled as to people like Wong (they are eligible).

The problem with Supreme Court case citations and authorities with regard to the foreign born, is that no case to my knowledge ever needed to distinguish between “born citizen” and “natural born citizen” in order to reach a decision. This is because the only distinction at law in the United States is in regard to eligibility of the President. So when, for example, a court says that there are only two sources of citizenship, birth and naturalization, they are not necessarily analyzing that formula for potential US Presidents. It may well be that someone is, as one commenter here put it, both natural born and naturalized.

Dicta is generally considered less authoritative than the argument that leads to the decision, and the decision itself. These side remarks and observations are not, so it is thought, so carefully reasoned or precisely crafted as the essential parts of the decision. In any discussion of the subject, one should consider how carefully the authority cited might have been speaking in the context in which we cite them.

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Most legal scholars believe that anyone who is born a US Citizen is a natural born citizen, and meets that piece of the eligibility requirement to become President of the United States. I fully agree. Where I fit my own definition of a crank is the way that I arrive that conclusion.

One mark of a crank is making legal arguments out of a dictionary instead of law and precedent. So I start cranking with the dictionary definition of “natural born” which is “having a quality at birth.” The Constitution doesn’t define “natural born citizen" but I have never found any document from our Founders that says “natural born citizen” has a special technical definition. Why does it have to be a “term of art?”

The U.S Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark cited approvingly Mr. Dicey in Digest of the Law of England with reference to the Conflict of Laws, where Dicey explains the difference between a British Subject, and a natural-born British Subject:

“British subject” means any person who owes permanent allegiance to the Crown. … “Natural-born British subject” means a British subject who has become a British subject at the moment of his birth.

He did not say “a subject who was born on the soil of England,” but one who became a subject at birth. And of course as we all know, the Court asserted the convertibility of “subject” and “citizen.”

If you think about it, the lack of a definition in the Constitution makes sense because in 1789, citizenship was defined by the States and not the Federal Government. Congress only had the power of naturalization under the Constitution and therefore they couldn’t define the citizenship of persons already born that way. That is, if natural born citizen means “citizen at birth” then the Constitution couldn’t have defined it because states had different definitions. My theory explains a puzzle: why the Constitution uses this term it doesn’t define, and whose common law derivation is controversial.

Now, the legal experts are going to look to the English Common Law for undefined terms in the Constitution (see Smith v. Alabama and Ex parte Grossman).  That’s what lawyers are trained to do, but I say they are overthinking the problem, and as proof I keep coming back to the Naturalization Act of 1790. In that act, the Congress said explicitly that the children born of US fathers overseas were citizens. In the debate on that act, the argument was made that the United States should make provision for the children of its citizens born overseas, just has had the English centuries before. If it provides for someone, that means that the Act made people citizens at birth who were not citizens at birth before the Act. It means that these persons were not eligible to run for President when the Constitution was ratified. Nevertheless, that act called these new citizens “natural born citizens.” James Madison, principal author of the Constitution, was in that Congress, and George Washington, President of the Convention that produced the Constitution, signed it into law. Surely they understood that they were adding a new class of potential candidates for President.

If one applies the common law concept to the 1790 Act, all sorts of constitutional questions arise. If one applies the dictionary, there is no problem at all.

The plain English meaning of “natural born citizen” is anyone who is a citizen from birth. At different times in our history, the laws on who was a citizen from birth changed. The states originally defined it in various ways, the Congress defined it through various laws, and the Constitution nailed some of it down in the 14th Amendment. Whoever the law, statutory or common, says is born a citizen, that person is a natural born citizen.

One other mark of a crank is that they very stubbornly hold on to their theories, expecting other people to prove them wrong. Well?

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Here’s the offending bit:

I hadn’t seen any reason to comment on the left-wing “birther” attacks on Senator Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president.  Cruz was born in Canada in 1970 to a mother who was then an American citizen. Under the laws then in place, he was an American citizen by virtue of his birth.

Have you seen any “left-wing” birther attacks on Cruz’ eligibility? I haven’t. All I see is ultra-right nut jobs raising the same issue about Cruz that they raised about Obama. Whelan did find one article at The New Republic that talks about an inconsistency in Cruz’ origanalist way of interpreting the Constitution and his own eligibility, but this is not at all an attack on Cruz’ eligibility, but about his way of interpreting the Constitution. In fact, the New Republic article by Noam Scheiber makes it abundantly clear that Cruz is eligible, saying:

Is someone who was born abroad so obviously a natural born American?  The consensus among legal experts appears to be, emphatically, “yes.”

I think it’s pretty clear that natural born is defined in such a way as to include everybody that has citizenship, and who got it other than through naturalization. So the fact that Ted Cruz had citizenship at birth, and he clearly did under the statute that applied at the time, it’s pretty clear that he qualifies as natural born.

The Conservatives would like folks to believe that presidential eligibility nuttery is an equal-opportunity employer with the right attacking Obama and the left attacking Cruz, but it ain’t so. The folks on the right are ones attacking both candidates, and the folks on the left are gleefully watching the folks on the right making fools of themselves.

I do take issue with Scheiber’s article, though. Members of the First Congress, many of whom were those folks who wrote the U. S. Constitution, passed the Naturalization Act of 1790 that explicitly made the children of U.S. Citizen fathers born overseas “natural born citizens.” It is abundantly clear from this Act that those founders understood that being born in the United States is not a Constitutional prerequisite for  becoming President.

The National Review Online is not the only conservative news outlet trying to make liberals into birthers. Newsbusters touts an article: WaPo went “birther” on Cruz, But They’re Not Alone. The Washington Post article cited also concludes that Cruz is most likely eligible based  on the authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service.

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There are some interesting items in the reading list Obama gave his students. On the issue of the removal of Indians, he cited Vattel’s The Law of Nations. We don’t have the over 500-page reading packet itself, so we don’t know what the particular reading from Vattel was¹. It is nevertheless instructive that then professor Obama picked such a source, which in modern times is rather obscure. Obama also included a reading about the Dred Scott case and the Slaughterhouse Cases (both having been cited in the Presidential eligibility debate). Of course no discussion of citizenships is complete without the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, both of which appear in the Obama syllabus.

While the Obama reading list is extensive, still it is remarkable that there is as much overlap between it and what we talk about on this site, and I do not think that this is a coincidence, because a discussion about racism is one of the practice of discrimination and exclusion and eligibility criteria are about the same thing.

§ 97 The savages of North America had no right to appropriate all that vast continent to themselves; and since they were unable to inhabit the whole of those regions, other nations might, without injustice, settle in some parts of them, provided they left the natives a sufficiency of land. If the pastoral Arabs would carefully cultivate the soil, a less space might be sufficient for them. Nevertheless, no other nation has a right to narrow their boundaries, unless she be under an absolute want of land. For, in short, they possess their country; they make use of it after their manner; they reap from it an advantage suitable to their manner of life, respecting which they have no laws to receive from any one. In a case of pressing necessity, I think people might, without injustice, settle in a part of that country, on leading the Arabs the means of rendering it, by the cultivation of the earth, sufficient for their own wants, and those of the new inhabitants.

Vattel, of course, had no notion of the vast size of the native population of the Americas before it was decimated by diseases from the European explorers.

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• President Obama’s plan for a socialist America…
• Obama’s forged birth certificate…
• Are we being compromised by Obama’s murky past?
• Obama had Indonesian passport
• Judge Schack A Socialist-Wonder Nutcase
• Obama Identity Document Fraud Case Goes to Court of Special Appeals of Maryland
• Obama Survival Guide
• Analysis of Hawaii Department of Health Loretta Fuddy’s Financial Disclosure Form…fraudulent Long Form

Conspiracy theories I sort of understand: the brain works in particular ways that distort judgment. Trading good for evil, however, is something that is more fundamentally disturbing.

As for the article about the teacher, I did find it. The teacher, according to the article, may have followed a text book that said the qualification for President was a “native-born” citizen. Given that the Oxford English Dictionary gives the same definition for “native born” as “natural-born,” I don’t see what the big deal is—they see it as liberal indoctrination.

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