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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMSNBC projects Cruz as the winner in Iowa.
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MSNBC projects Cruz as the winner in Iowa. (Original Post)
Ken Burch
Feb 2016
OP
TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)1. Ugh.
MADem
(135,425 posts)2. Cruz, Trump and Rubio are all in "good shape" (ugh) tonight.
They can all spin it that they did "well."
Cruz gets bragging rights, but he's probably going to have problems with regard to his Natural Born status, being a Canadian, and all (and no, that shit ain't going away).
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/01/11/through-ted-cruz-constitutional-looking-glass/zvKE6qpF31q2RsvPO9nGoK/story.html
Theres more than meets the eye in the ongoing dustup over whether Ted Cruz is eligible to serve as president, which under the Constitution comes down to whether hes a natural born citizen despite his 1970 Canadian birth. Senator Cruz contends his eligibility is settled by naturalization laws Congress enacted long ago. But those laws didnt address, much less resolve, the matter of presidential eligibility, and no Supreme Court decision in the past two centuries has ever done so. In truth, the constitutional definition of a natural born citizen is completely unsettled, as the most careful scholarship on the question has concluded. Needless to say, Cruz would never take Donald Trumps advice to ask a court whether the Cruz definition is correct, because that would in effect confess doubt where Cruz claims there is certainty.
People are entitled to their own opinions about what the definition ought to be. But the kind of judge Cruz says he admires and would appoint to the Supreme Court is an originalist, one who claims to be bound by the narrowly historical meaning of the Constitutions terms at the time of their adoption. To his kind of judge, Cruz ironically wouldnt 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. Even having two US parents wouldnt suffice. And having just an American mother, as Cruz did, would have been insufficient at a time that made patrilineal descent decisive.
This narrow definition reflected 18th-century fears of a tyrannical takeover of our nation by someone loyal to a foreign power fears that no longer make sense. But the same could be said of fears that a tyrannical federal army might overrun our state militias. Yet that doesnt lead Cruz or, more importantly, the conservative jurists he admires to discard the Second Amendments right to bear arms as a historical relic, or to limit that right to arms-bearing by members of todays state militias, the national guard.
On the other hand, the kind of judge I admire and Cruz abhors is a living constitutionalist, one who believes that the Constitutions meaning evolves with the perceived needs of the time and longstanding practice. To that kind of judge, Cruz would be eligible to serve because it no longer makes sense to be bound by the narrow historical definition that would disqualify him.
When Cruz was my constitutional law student at Harvard, he aced the course after making a big point of opposing my views in class arguing stridently for sticking with the original meaning against the idea of a more elastic living Constitution whenever such ideas came up. I enjoyed jousting with him, but Ted never convinced me nor did I convince him.
At least he was consistent in those days. Now, he seems to be a fair weather originalist, abandoning that methods narrow constraints when it suits his ambition.
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