What does it mean to be a "natural born citizen"?
Most legal experts contend it means someone is a citizen from birth and doesn’t have to go through a naturalization process to become a citizen.
If that’s the definition, then Cruz is a natural born citizen by being born to an American mother and having her citizenship at birth. The Congressional Research Service, the agency tasked with providing authoritative research to all members of Congress,
published a report after the 2008 election supporting the thinking that "natural born" citizenship means citizenship held "at birth."
There are many legal and historical precedents to strongly back up this argument, experts have said.
Those precedents were the subject of a
recent op-ed in the
Harvard Law Review by two former solicitor generals of opposing parties, Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, who worked for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively. They wrote that "natural born" had a longstanding definition dating back to colonial times.
British common law recognized that children born outside of the British Empire remained subjects, and were described by law as "natural born," Katyal and Clement wrote.
"The framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like ‘natural born,’ since the (British) statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War,’" they said.
Additionally, the first Congress of the United States passed the Naturalization Act of 1790, just three years after the Constitution was written, which stated that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were, too, natural born citizens. Many members of the inaugural Congress were also authors of the Constitution.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time the qualifications of a candidate have come into question. George Romney, the father of Mitt Romney who ran for president as a Republican in 1968, was born in Mexico. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, was born in Arizona before it was a state. Neither candidate’s campaign was derailed by citizenship challenges.
More recently, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faced questions about his eligibility because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone while his father was stationed there.
Interestingly, McCain’s potential Democratic opponents — Obama and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton — co-sponsored a Senate measure to settle McCain’s eligibility. The April 2008 resolution said, "John Sidney McCain, III, is a 'natural born Citizen' under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States." It passed unanimously.
The Supreme Court’s silence
The reason a question still remains even after Romney, Goldwater and McCain is because the Supreme Court — the ultimate arbiter of constitutional questions — has never directly ruled on the citizenship provision for presidential office holders. And that means a note of uncertainty remains.
Some have unsuccessfully challenged the qualifications of presidential contenders, but courts have been reluctant to address the issue. Several citizens filed lawsuits asking the court to rule on whether McCain was a natural born citizen
early in 2008, but the legal challenges didn’t go anywhere.
"We know from the McCain lawsuits, courts don’t want to touch this," said Sarah Duggin, a professor of law at Catholic University who has researched this issue extensively. "It very well may be that the courts would refuse to go near this. There are so many issues."
[VIDEO]Is Ted Cruz, born in Canada, eligible to run for president? (Updated)
