The Disturbing Legal Consequences Of Ted Cruz Birtherism
There is good evidence that the founding fathers would have understood the words “natural born citizen” to mean only people born within a nation’s borders, but there’s also strong evidence on the other side of the debate, according to an article published by ThinkProgress.
Harvard University Law Professor Laurence Tribe, for example, wrote in a newspaper op-ed piece that “the constitutional definition of a ‘natural born citizen’ is completely unsettled,” and then he claims that, under the method of constitutional interpretation Cruz preferred when he was Tribe’s student, Cruz “wouldn’t be eligible, because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and ’90s required that someone actually be born on US soil to be a ‘natural born” citizen.’”
But two former United States Solicitors cite the Naturalization Act of 1790, which states that children born outside of the country, but with parents who are U.S. citizens, are natural born citizens themselves.
