Claims that Senator Cruz is not “Natural Born” Need to be Taken Seriously

From the Tenth Amendment Center

By Rob Natelson

Some commentators are dismissing as merely frivolous the claim that Senator Ted Cruz is not a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution uses that term, and therefore ineligible for the presidency.

This dismissive attitude is a serious mistake. Although Senator Cruz’s belief that he is natural born may ultimately be vindicated, the case against him is very respectable.

At the outset, we should note that the requirement that a president be a “natural born citizen” is not an arbitrary rule. The Framers added it to the Constitution because history had taught them some hard lessons about the inadvisability of allowing a foreign-born person to become a country’s chief executive. In other words, the constitutional requirement is there for good reasons, and should be respected.

Senator Cruz was born in Canada of an American mother and a Cuban father. By congressional statute, he was a citizen at birth. His citizenship is not at issue. What is at issue is whether he is “natural born” as the Constitution uses the term.

When the Constitution was written, the default rule of international law was that, although for many purposes a person’s status followed the condition of the mother (according to the maxim partus sequitur ventrem), for citizenship or “allegiance” purposes status followed that of the father. Individual countries altered the default rule, and the Anglo-American statutory and common law altered it more than most. In Anglo-American countries, nearly all children born within a country were granted “natural born” status, even if their parents were both aliens. Although for several years Parliament may have allowed foreign-born children to claim citizenship through their mothers, well before the American revolution it has been firmly established that to be “natural born” such a child had to have a citizen father.

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