I agree with Ed Morrissey: Even ignoring what a terrible president he would be, I think it showed that he would be a disastrous candidate in the general election as a Republican.
It only took two weeks for Trump to demolish what looked like a lock in Wisconsin. His campaign spent weeks in Wisconsin, and yet did nothing to learn what voters there think or what they want in a nominee. Trump’s fortnight was a disaster of his own making, and a glimpse of the high risk a Trump general election candidacy would provide the GOP.
That risk might be tolerable if Trump gave an indication that he recognized the problem. In his statement after the loss, however, Trump instead railed about having to endure an “onslaught” of negative advertising and hostile media. Just what does Trump expect to find in the general election if he wins the nomination? If Trump folds only because of negative advertising and hostile media, that alone should have unbound delegates thinking twice about a Trump nomination, especially with Hillary Clinton and a mainstream media already hostile to Republicans waiting after the conventions.
He’s worse than ignorant. He’s incapable of learning.
“He’s incapable of learning.”
Don’t know if he’s incapable of learning…….
….but he clearly isn’t interested in learning.
I’ve known some evil people. Cruz fits their mold. He’s the one, not Trump, that will say anything and do anything to get elected. His dirty tricks have been exposed. He’s taken Trumps position on issues we would not be talking about if it weren’t for Trump. Positions he disagreed with only last year. Your’e ok with that?
Trump hasn’t held some positions for decades but that doesn’t stop Cruz from lying about it.
Cruz has demonstrated his cunning in using surrogates so he doesn’t get caught. Trump is not so dishonest.
Maybe you’e right and Trump needs to earn how to lie like Ted?
When Trump wins, what then?
All I’m interested in, ken, is which candidate is better for the cause of liberty–or to put it another way, who’s the bigger statist, Trump or Cruz?
Meanwhile: https://reason.com/blog/2016/04/06/the-alt-right-is-wrong-trump-is-an-enemy
which candidate is better for the cause of liberty
It’s hard to say, but only Trump is talking about eliminating departments. Until Cruz claims it’s his position.
Cruz says he’ll abolish the IRS. I’m not clear on who will collect and enforce his VAT.
Its not a VAT tax, it is a simplified flat tax with no deductions.
Also, a simplified, lower, and corporate tax.
That will eliminate the IRS as we know it.
Could you give some concrete examples of this?
D’ya think “piling on” Mr. Trump at this point is a good strategy? See –http://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/06/wisconsin-exit-poll-more-than-a-third-of-wisconsin-republicans-wont-vote-gop-if-trump-or-cruz-is-the-nominee/
If Cruz is the Man, ya better start making a positive case for him — now — rather than gloating about Wisconsin and insulting the 1/3 of whoever voted in Republican primaries.
Where, in this thread, has anyone insulted the Trump voters?
A case for Cruz has been made and is self-evident: He bucked the GOPe when it was not the latest fad and when it was politically unhealthy to do so. He’s brilliant. He’s a Constitutionalist. I have much more confidence that he will select good Supreme Court Justices than Trump.
Cruz has his faults (no one is perfect), but I can live with them.
I would have preferred Scott Walker but Walker flamed out. Them’s the breaks.
Yes, but Cruz is ineligible to hold the office. He can run, he can win, but he can’t serve. The question is that if the case gets that far, there isn’t anything in the Constitution that says how to rectify things. The Supreme Court might seat Hillary or Bernie, ruling that his candidacy was invalid, or they might go with the Vice President. State laws have used either of those solutions.
But my bet is that the RNC won’t let Cruz be nominated. They’re just using him to get an open convention so they can nominate Kasich, Romney, or Ryan.
As I’ve posted before, most Constitutional scholars disagree with you. That doesn’t seem to matter to you, but I have no idea why. Since when do laymen think that they can make accurate guesses at Constitutional law or at what the Supreme Court would do?
Those would be bad scholars. As Scalia would say, it’s an objective matter of law, not uninformed opinion.
I’ve got a thread going in a George Will column at National Review Online. It’s many pages down now, and still going. I started it by saying:
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I’m left wondering if any conservative pundits have ever read a civics book, or maybe checked Black’s law dictionary (any edition), Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765), Tucker’s Commentaries (1803), James Kent’s Commentaries (1830), any of the many state supreme court and US Supreme Court rulings addressing citizenship, or indeed, even consulted Wikipedia.
Obviously not, or they wouldn’t be pushing a candidate who is manifestly ineligible to assume the office.
Perhaps they think he’ll get the support of the evangelical and protestant members of the Supreme Court to side with him. Oh wait, there aren’t any of those. Antonin Scalia must be rolling over in his grave at the abject ignorance of the supposed “strict constructionists” in the Republican party.
********
The retort to that was
suzyshopper > George Turner
George Turner > suzyshopper
That trips up most people who don’t think logically. The Naturalization Act of 1790 (note that it’s called a naturalization act, not a natural born citizen act) echoes the wording of many British naturalization acts, granting aliens the same rights as natural born citizens. The act doesn’t say they are natural born citizens, it says they have the same rights as natural born citizens. But as Tucker (1803) noted, those rights did not include holding the office of President.
The British acts similarly did not allow people so considered to hold certain high offices, such as sitting on the Privy Council.
The act is worded just as we might word a law to grant adopted children the same rights as a woman’s natural born children. We would say something like “Adopted children shall be considered as a mother’s natural born children for all legal purposes, including inheritance.” We would never say something absurd like “Adopted children are a mother’s natural born children.” It would be equally absurd to read such a law and conclude that adopted children are a mother’s natural born children, which is what you just did in effect.
But the 1790 Act did create such confusion, so in the 1795 Naturalization Act James Madison dropped the “natural born citizen” phrase entirely, instead just calling them “citizens”. It was noted that such children couldn’t really be like natural born citizens or their citizenship couldn’t come with conditions whereby their citizenship could be voided.
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And on and on it goes. Here’s another of my typical replies, which number over two dozen at this point.
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Sorry, but almost all Supreme Court cases addressing citizenship are very consistent in their use of the term “natural born citizen”, and it’s used as a synonym for “native born citizen”. It does not at all mean the same as “born citizen”, which includes people naturalized at birth.
I suggest you read US v Wong Kim Ark (1898) up through the latest rulings, such as Zivotofsky v Kerry (2015), in which the Supreme Court reiterated that “The power ‘to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization’ is similarly unavailing. At the founding, the word “naturalization” meant “the act of investing aliens with the privileges of native subjects.”
Any law they pass under the express power to write rules of naturalization only applies to aliens, as opposed to native subjects (aka natural born citizens). In that same paragraph they also noted from 1771 a definition of naturalization as “the making a foreigner or alien, a denizen or freeman of any kingdom or city, and so becoming, as it were, both a subject and a native of a king or country, that by nature he did not belong to.”
There’s that word “nature” again. There’s a reason it’s used in the phrase “natural born citizen”.
And that’s a case they heard last year. Obviously, contrary to what Cruz supporters vacuously claim, the meaning has not changed one bit since 1798.
Going back to Schneider v Rusk in 1964, the Supreme Court said “We start from the premise that the rights of citizenship of the native born and of the naturalized person are of the same dignity, and are coextensive. The only difference drawn by the Constitution is that only the ‘natural born’ citizen is eligible to be president. (Article II, Section 1)”
That’s why HR 993 was offered in 1974, to propose an amendment to the Constitution to remove the natural born citizen clause for the Presidency and allow “citizens at birth” to qualify. It failed to go anywhere.
And keep in mind that you are relying entirely on argument from ignorance on a matter of Constitutional law. That never works out.
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At NRO, I’m citing case law, Supreme Court rulings (from the post Revolutionary War era up through 2015), long writings on the meaning of “natural born citizenship” written in the 1700’s and early 1800’s by the country’s top legal scholars, and of course other sources, such as proposals to propose amendments to allow foreign born US citizens at birth to hold the office of President.
They’re mostly just hollering “Birther!!!”
As they say, when the law is on your side argue the law. When the law is not on your side, pound the table.
They have yet to cite a single court case or cite any law other than the 1790 Naturalization Act, which I discussed above. They were told there is a “consensus”, just like we’re told that 97% of scientists agree on global warming, and they believed it.
As I’ve told people, go look at your old civics book on the Constitutional requirements for Presidency. Up until very recently every one of them would have stated those requirements as “Must be at least 35 years old, a resident of the US for 14 years, and born on US soil.”
The thinking behind the requirement is a bit archaic, but also very clear and written down in black and white. In James Kent’s 1830 Commentaries on law, he uses the phrase “natural born citizen” about 80 times in just one chapter.
The only people supporting Cruz’s position say the phrase is an oddity that only appears once in the Constitution and whose meaning is unclear. That’s only because they’ve not read any of the books the Founders were reading. If you look elsewhere, instead of searching for the non-existent glossary in the Constitution’s appendix, you’ll find it was a common legal term in widespread use.
I suggest you start with Blackstone’s Commentaries, chapter 10. It’s quite short. Or, as I told people at NRO, just check the natural born citizen clause’s Wiki entry.
Horribly enough, that was the last place I looked for information, but reading all the original sources was quite fun.
From what I’ve read a “natural born citizen” would be a person who qualifies as a US citizen at birth, ie a citizen as a right from birth, so as an example someone born to a US diplomat would qualify as a naturally born citizen, and so would anyone else born outside the US to US citizen parents.
Natural born citizen = citizen by right of birth.
Oh, and don’t forget that your first 7 presidents were born on British soil.
You would be mistaken, although that’s what some people have started saying in the past 10 years or so, probably just in case Obama couldn’t cough up a birth certificate, or in case McCain really did have a snag on Panama.
As to the meaning, look at Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1768, which the Founders most certainly had. under “Nature” he says:
Natural f 1. A native; An original inhabitant; inhabitant; Raleigh
Naturalization f (from naturalize). The act of investing aliens with the privileges of native subjects. Bacon
So “natural born” means “native born”, which is why the Supreme Court uses the terms synonymously in their opinions. This is entirely consistent the Blackstone, who says, right in the opening of chapter 10 on citizens:
THE first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it.
What you’re talking about is a “born citizen”. That was Alexander Hamilton’s first idea for a Presidential requirement at the Constitutional convention, but upon reading a letter from John Jay the Founders decided that “born citizen” wasn’t restrictive enough against the meddling of foreign nations. So they went with the term from common law, “natural born citizen”.
It may upset some people that in a democracy we can’t elect whoever we want, but those requirements were placed on the office by the Founders to limit who we could elect. We cannot elect someone who isn’t native born (with the exceptions already included in the English common law meaning of “natural born subject”)
As to the meaning, look at Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1768, which the Founders most certainly had. under “Nature” he says:
Natural f 1. A native; An original inhabitant; inhabitant; Raleigh
Naturalization f (from naturalize). The act of investing aliens with the privileges of native subjects. Bacon
Dictionary definitions are irrelevant to legal definitions.
Under current law people born outside the US to US parents are born as much US citizens as people born inside the US to non US citizen parents.
The US legal system has never defined that Natural Born = Native born.
What you’re talking about is a “born citizen”. That was Alexander Hamilton’s first idea for a Presidential requirement at the Constitutional convention, but upon reading a letter from John Jay the Founders decided that “born citizen” wasn’t restrictive enough against the meddling of foreign nations. So they went with the term from common law, “natural born citizen”.
You’re refering to this?:
Article IX, section 1 of Hamilton’s draft constitution provided: “No person shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States unless he be now a Citizen of one of the States, or hereafter be born a Citizen of the United States.”[30]
It’s pretty obvious that the change was intended to block people recently naturalized – that is, not born as US citizens, from becoming the President. I don’t see that it’s intended to block people born as US citizens from becoming the President.
I’ve no doubt that there’s wriggle room to argue either interpretation (but I think the interpretation I’m following is stronger than the interpretation you’re following), if Cruz were elected I’ve no doubt that SCOTUS would rule that given the balance that it wouldn’t be their roll to undermine the democratic process, which would be the case in a ruling against Cruz eligibility. (an opinion that’s also been expressed by legal experts in the discussions I’ve read.
Andrew said:
The Founders didn’t forget that either.
Article II section 1
They covered the problem that they were natural born British subjects with “or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution“. As Justice Joseph Story (who heard the Amistad slave ship case) commented much later, since none of the early Presidents were actually born outside the United States, and that generation was passing away, the US would never have a foreign born President.
Interestingly, Representative and Senators are required to have been a citizen for a set number of years, but the President only has to have been a resident for 14 years. That’s because when the Constitution was adopted nobody had been a US citizen for 14 years.
There are a great many early US citizenship cases involving all the confusion about the change in status of the states, and how people’s nationality got yanked out from under them, and who was a natural born citizen and who wasn’t.
Interestingly, James Madison represented the son of loyalist parents, a man born prior to the Revolution, as a natural born US citizen. But if he was, then so was James Madison, George Washington, and all the rest. But if that were true the exception in Article II wasn’t needed. I guess he was just being a good lawyer for his client. ^_^
Another important point is intent, any court must take into account the intent of legislation in its interpretation, what was the intent of the “natural born” clause in the constitution?
Obviously the intent was to avoid the surprising of high office in the US by foreigners, would that intent be served by a court ruling against Cruz eligibility?
No.
Oops!
“Surprising” was supposed to be “usurping”.
Hamilton’s draft would allow people like Cruz to be President because Cruz was born a citizen of the United States. But the Founders didn’t think that was restrictive enough and went with “natural born citizen”, which comes to us from English common law (see Blackstone) and means “native born”. As I said, the Supreme Court uses the terms interchangeably.
It excludes all people made citizens through any naturalization act of Parliament (or Congress), although most of those acts are granting foreign born citizens a status equivalent to natural born citizens (especially regarding convoluted inheritance rights).
Congress has written numerous laws granting citizenship to children born abroad to US parents, and those laws vary quite a lot over time. For a very long time, a child born to a US citizen mother whose father wasn’t a US citizen wasn’t recognized as a US citizen (unless the father died before he could be naturalized). Winston Churchill, though born to an American mother, was not a US citizen until after WW-II when Congress made him an honorary citizen.
Congress can do pretty much anything it wants regarding the children of US citizens born abroad. 8 USC 1409 even covers the citizenship status of foreign bastards. If Congress wanted, it could even declare that children born to US parents abroad are only citizens if their mother had never been previously divorced. Constitutionally, they are vested with the power for writing uniform rules of naturalization of aliens, and so they do.
They are not empowered to address natural born citizens because, as one early legal scholar put it (I think Kent), Congress makes naturalized citizens, but natural born citizens made Congress. They are the native inhabitants in “We the people”, and they get to decide who gets admitted to their ranks via acts of legislation.
The Founders intent was to never let someone born in Canada assume the office of President. They had all just fought a major war with the world’s preeminent power, a war that was actually a civil war between British peoples. Many of the British loyalists, from the most prominent American families, committed themselves to crushing US independence and when they failed, very large numbers of them removed themselves to Canada. They sat up there with large British armies, waiting for an opening to crush us again.
The Founders were very well aware of that, and many of the early legal citizenship cases involved the status of various British loyalists, and their children, who were born in the various US states. The Founders knew no loyalist could hope to win an election against the patriots who had fought and won US independence, but whether those loyalist children, born in Canada to arguably US parents, could come back and beat the next generation of leaders was a disturbing question.
If the British army rolled south, there would be no time to remove a President whose misdirection of US forces showed his loyalty actually resided with Britain. The British/Canadian forces would be occupying New York, Boston, and Philadelphia before Congress would even have time to consider articles of impeachment.
To keep that fate from happening, they ruled out “born citizen” and went with “natural born citizen”, which means “native born citizen”, meaning “one not born in Canada.”
And indeed, we don’t know what vile Canadian propaganda filled Cruz’s head when he was a child, or what schemes of conquest he may be pursing on behalf of their government, and he did openly remain a loyal subject of Queen Elizabeth II until 2014.
And in all the writings on “natural born subjects” in common law, the fundamental question was primary loyalty. Much of the discussion was on whether a person could even hold lands in two different kingdoms, as this could produce divided loyalty. It was also held that a subject’s primary loyalty would always and eternally rest with the country of his birth (or its sovereign).
Though it seems archaic today, that was the actually reasoning behind it. Under that conception, anyone born in Canada to anyone other than a US diplomat was a natural born Canadian (and still recognized as such by Canada), and would forever be loyal to both Canada and its sovereign in London. Although such a person may form secondary loyalties later in life, the primary loyalty would always remain strongest.
Things like this are why I keep recommending that people go back and read Blackstone and other commentaries from the period. They cut right to the Founder’s intent and outlook.
Very nice. Now convince the real scholars, rather than denying they exist or count. No sense in writing your long posts here, or at George Will’s site. There are plenty of sites with Constitutional scholars on them – try there.
As I said, most scholars disagree with you. Don’t expect that the rest of us need to take your point of view into account. I’m willing to accept it as a possibility, fairly unlikely, but you seem to think that we should treat it as a fact. You don’t get to choose our facts.
There are how many of these scholars supporting Cruz’s position? Six? Twelve?
The nation is full of law professors, so surely one of them could produce a single citation supporting their case. Yet they haven’t. The most any of them has done is opine, without providing any evidence other than mentioning the 1790 Naturalization Act, and misconstruing it in the exact same way that everybody else misconstrued it, so much so that James Madison reworded it in 1795 to correct their mistaken beliefs. I’ve addressed that above, as have legal scholars as far back as 1803.
The problem is that the side arguing that Cruz is ineligible can bring rafts of citations and legal opinions dating from prior to the Constitutional Convention (and stretching back centuries earlier) up through 2015. The side arguing for Cruz’s eligibility can produce – nothing. They just point and say there’s a consensus, but nobody in their consensus can produce any citations, court opinions, or indeed anything to support their case. They just claim their interpretation is accepted.
Would you really walk into a court room with your only argument being that your friends think that Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Jay didn’t know what the heck they were saying when they wrote the Constitution, and that for over 200 years all the Supreme Court justices and law professors were completely wrong?
That is your argument. It’s not going to fly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz#Citizenship
“Several lawsuits and ballot challenges asserting that Cruz is ineligible have been filed. No lawsuit or challenge has been successful, and in February 2016, the Illinois Board of Elections ruled in Cruz’s favor,”
Little hard to ask us to accept that what you are saying is _obvious_, when the track record is just the opposite. Again, you don’t get to decide what the courts think, they do.
The problem is that nobody has standing until Cruz is sworn in. Neither Congress nor the Electoral College has any say on eligibility. Only one judge has allowed a case to go further, and he ruled in Cruz’s favor, primarily relying on Harvard Law Review paper provided by Cruz’s attorney and a few magazine articles. I and others have addressed the horrible flaws in the Harvard Law Review paper, and Judge Pellegrini repeated the paper’s bizarre claim that John Jay’s children wouldn’t be natural born citizens under a definition that excluded children born abroad. The Supreme Court has commented that “natural born citizen” includes the children of diplomats abroad, and always has. Blackstone wrote about it. They also of course never provided any reasoning as to why Jay couldn’t have chosen to exclude his own children from holding the office of President, making the argument at double failure.
In the New York case, which once again probably won’t have standing, a Harvard Law professor provided an amicus brief. Short answer. Ted Cruz is not eligible.
Try reading it. It’s quite interesting.
And remember, if you’re wrong and we nominate and elect Cruz in a landslide, there’s still a very large chance that Hillary or Bernie will be sworn in instead, or sworn in a few months later after the Supreme Court hears a challenge. John Roberts would do that in a heartbeat just to teach the GOP an important lesson about the Constitution. Ginsberg would do it as an homage to Scalia. Thomas would do it because he’s an originalist. Alito because he teaches Constitutional interpretation and this is an open and shut issue as far as the text and precedent is concerned, and the rest would do it because they despise Republicans in general and Cruz in particular.
And of course if the GOP establishment is incompetent or ignorant enough to nominate someone who isn’t actually eligible to hold office, they’ll get what they deserve. But I’m betting they’re not going to do that. They’re getting behind Cruz because they know they’ll replace him at the convention after Trump fails on the first ballot.
Then we get to choose between Kasich, Romney, Ryan, and Jeb, because Cruz has knocked all the American born conservatives out of the race. It’s up to us to enjoy the shit sandwich.
Repeating your opinion many times, at great length, doesn’t change anything. Again, there are many venues where people actually know about this stuff, and those are the places you should be posting.
I am, and they cannot mount any response because what the Supreme Court and other documents say is crystal clear.
It’s this simple: Only a person born on US soil, or born to a US diplomat serving abroad or similar people, can serve as President.
The articles claiming Cruz is eligible got roundly trounced by legal scholars who were vastly more familiar with the subject. The pro-Cruz position can’t be backed up with any primary sources – only uniformed opinions based on the untutored assumption that the children born abroad to US citizens have all the rights of someone born here. Well, they do – except for one. They can never be President. This was well explained in 1803 in the law reference lawyers relied on for the next 50 years.
So, for instance, in an earlier comment I gave the definition of “natural” as “native inhabitant” from Samuel Johnsons 1768 dictionary, and Andrew replied that you can’t apply a dictionary definition for a legal term. Yet I cited that definition because the United States Supreme Court cited it in 2015 as defining for the Constitutional purposes of understanding US citizenship. That was the noted case where Obama refused to allow a person born in Jerusalem to list “Israel” as the country of birth on their passport.
If “natural born” included Cruz then most Supreme Court opinions wouldn’t even make sense, nor would the 14th Amendment, which would have to say “Citizens are those born in the US, or born abroad to US parents, or naturalized in the United States”. It doesn’t say that. You’re either born on US soil (or to a diplomat) or you’re naturalized.
And who else has said Cruz is ineligible, besides lots of Constitutional law professors? Trump, Huckabee, Fiorina, Santorum, Rand Paul, and even Ann Coulter, who supported Cruz. When half the Republican field says someone is ineligible, it’s probably worth looking into, all the way back to primary sources and founding documents.
What we have going on is similar to the way teenagers get together and decide to do something they really want to do, convincing each other that it is completely legal and getting all fired up to do it, while ignoring anyone who is waving his arms and trying to explain what the law actually is. “Spray paint isn’t illegal! You don’t know that!” But they won’t listen to anybody, and will of course end up sitting together in hand cuffs wailing about the injustice of it all.
Of course it shouldn’t have got to this point, and rarely does. George Romney, who was born in Mexico and thus ineligible, ran in 1968 but got less votes than either Rubio or Carson just got in Wisconsin. He came in 12th or 13th, probably because everybody knew he couldn’t actually hold the office.
What Cruz is betting on is the obvious fact that nobody has standing to file a challenge, and that if elected the Supreme Court won’t have the guts to enforce the requirements in the Constitution because it might case a political firestorm. The justices would rightly fear the country would burn and the people’s trust in government would be shaken to its core.
But if they don’t enforce the Constitutional requirements then the document is meaningless, and we have rule by personality instead of law. Cruz seems to be perfectly okay with either outcome, perhaps because he is the fulfillment of Mormon end-times prophesies, at least according to Glenn Beck.
But the failure starts with the GOP establishment, purported to know more about the Constitution than a junior high student, who didn’t nip Cruz’s ambitions in the bud by pointing out the meaning of Article II.
As I’ve said, they were probably intending for Cruz to mop up the strong conservatives and evangelicals, saving everyone else the early, over-the-top pandering that haunts a candidate later in the campaign. The result has left us with a choice between shit and crap – with the possibility that electing crap will actually put a Democrat who lost the election into the White House.
This has already been litigated, what is it that makes him ineligible?
It was litigated very badly, with the judge probably not spending more than 20 minutes on the ruling.
The problem is that there’s no way Cruz is a natural born citizen under any legal writings, the common law (which the Supreme Court said is required for understanding the phrase), or any Supreme Court decision. In Zivotofsky v Kerry (2015), Justice Thomas made an offhand remark that Zivotofsky was a natural born citizen, but then spent most of the remainder of his argument referencing Congress’s power of naturalization, under which Zivotofsky was granted citizenship. If Zivotofsky was really a natural born citizen Congress would have no say over his citizenship status, as the Constitution doesn’t grant them such power.
Additionally, none of the period writings would even make sense under such an interpretation. Tucker (1803) discusses the various state rules (such as Virginia and Kentucky) that were used to naturalize citizens from other states who weren’t, of course, natural born citizens of Kentucky or Virginia. And embedded in it is the plain idea that a person can only be a natural born citizen of one state, the one where he was born. All others are naturalized – or aliens or denizens.
Interestingly, Tucker also maintains that states retain the sole power of denization under the 10th Amendment, which would be an interesting legal argument for stopping Obama’s various amnesty programs, which amount to denization in fact if not in name.
A denizen, btw, is a person in between an alien and a citizen, pretty much like a Mexican with a US drivers license. In England only the king could make denizens, while only the parliament could make naturalized citizens. Neither could make natural born citizens because those come from mom’s having babies under the sole sovereignty and protection of the English crown.
Anyway, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, and Donald Trump all said that Cruz is ineligible. The establishment has to know that, too, which is probably why they’re backing him. He’s like a generic or CGI candidate that’s being only used to stop someone else.
Agreed wholeheartedly. I would have preferred Walker. I would have preferred Rubio. But I vastly prefer Cruz over Trump. Since at least as many people hate Trump as those who love him and hate everyone else, I don’t think that this is a bad calculation. We need to hope that in the end whichever candidate can cobble up enough votes to defeat Clinton, who hopefully will be struggling with a negative FBI report by then. Or whatever; we need to do the best we can and it isn’t at all clear that choosing Trump works better at all.
Why is that hard?
Where, in this thread, has anyone insulted the Trump voters?
For his voters, any criticism of Trump is an implicit criticism of them.
Paul, see my comment above. I ask you the same question I ask ken .
I ask you the same question I ask you.
If putting forward Ted Cruz advances the cause of liberty, are people willing to patiently advance the affirmative case rather than assume that the people who are not on board are dummies who “don’t get it.”
Are people willing to make that affirmative case rather than take a victory lap slagging a guy whom many among the Republican electorate have tied their hopes and aspirations?
Are people willing to accept any difference of opinion within the Liberty Faction regarding, say, holding the line on the gas tax when the roads are crumbling (in the Libertarian Eden, roads will be privatized and tolls will be collected by RFID, but in the mean time, for all its warts, cross-subsidization, raiding for pet causes, the Highway Trust Fund model of fuel taxes as a use fee is a remarkably good system, or is this kind of heretical belief?)
Is the Liberty Faction willing to accept public education as a legitimate function of government — on the local and state level in our Federal system and consistent with the Constitution? Or do we declare war on it?
Does anyone else around here read Jerry Pournelle, or is he a heretic? Anyone follow Victor Davis Hanson or is he a frustrated Fascist?
So, Paul going back to the Bilwick Statist Scale, with 0 representing pacifist-libertarian-anarchism and 10 representing people like Hitler and Stalin and Mao, you’d put Cruz closer to 10 than Trump is? Well, okay . . . I’m still open to convincing. Any Cruz fans out there willing to argue that Trump is closer to 10 than Cruz?
And yes I would be willing to declare war on public education, because I don’t believe A has the right to force B to pay for the education of C’s children.
Maybe a better question for me to ask would be: granted that Baghdad Jim will be voting for either the Alinskyite Witch or the Crazy Old Trotskyite Loon, which Republican candidate would BJ prefer, Trump or Cruz? That would almost be a guarantee of which one is better for the caause of liberty. Interestingly, Robert Reich–who’s usually tied for with Thomas Frank for the Linda Lovelance Award for State fellation–prefers Trump, calling Cruz an “ideologue” (“liberal” BS for “too pro-freedom for me.”
” would BJ prefer, Trump or Cruz? That would almost be a guarantee of which one is better for the caause of liberty”
No, I don’t think it guarantees that, not at all! I can’t speak for Jim, but I’ve agreed with everything Jim’s written about domestic issues.
I vastly prefer to Cruz to Trump as an elected president (as opposed to an easily beaten candidate), but I’m sure that Cruz is more conservative and less-statist than Trump.
Cruz believes in small government, Trump believes in using the power of government for whatever ill-thought out plan happened occur to him moments before.
With Cruz, my disagreements are familiar, reflecting basic differences between Republicans and Democrats, and hey, that’s America, a land that I love. With Trump, my primary concern isn’t about ideology, it is about temperament. I don’t think someone with his temperament should ever have the power of the Presidency, even if that person believed in exactly the policies that I believe.
A rare occasion in which I completely agree with Bob.
Bob, is not just about the President, it’s about who we want to represent this country, the greatest nation on Earth.
Reagan was probably the pinnacle, with a glamorous actress as First Lady. Then we had a nice mom who wrote Molly’s Book (she claims her dog wrote it), followed by the Wicked Witch of the East (currently running again), then a librarian, and now a Wookie – whose primary accomplishment is starving our school children.
Why shouldn’t the US be represented by a European super model? Do we deserve less than that? I’ve seen the other wives (and Bill) and they just don’t compare. They’re not even in the same league.
Trump will win, bringing with him a large part of the minority vote, and black mothers will name their daughters “Melania”. We’ll be snickering about the name for the next forty years.
George, wouldn’t you feel safer with a native-born first lady? What would the Founding Fathers have thought about the Commander in Chief possibly having no secrets from a European?
Any Cruz fans out there willing to argue that Trump is closer to 10 than Cruz?
Cruz has argued the Constitution before the Supreme Court and won. He restored the individual right to bear arms as black-letter law. Reich doesn’t like Cruz because Reich hates the free market.
There is no evidence that Trump has even read the Constitution.
Bob-1 said:
Nah. Chicks don’t matter, and the Constitution doesn’t even mention the First Lady.
Plus, in European tradition, having the king marrying foreign princesses was considered a diplomatic plus, as long as they weren’t ugly, but if they were the king could just stick a Union Jack over their face and do it for the nation.
But the English did have some bad experiences with kings born abroad, who were sometimes called usurpers. The people felt the king should be someone born in England, while the kings of course were like Cruz, thinking they have the right to rule no matter where they happened to be born.
So often the common law was at odds with statutory law (all that French stuff involving nobles). The US stuck with common law, since it was already known and understood by the colonists. Very few noble gentlemen dared make the long sea voyage to move to a primitive frontier backwater with muddy streets.
So after US independence, we stuck with common law, and the Supreme Court has said that the meaning of “natural born” is to be found in English common law. The quickest source for that is Blackstone, chapter 10 on citizenship, which is only 3,300 words long.
It’s not a hard read.
The department of Education spends almost $80 billion a year on education. We have gone from first to almost worse since its inception. Clearly expenditures alone do not better education.
I’m still planning to vote for Trump in the Pennsylvania primary on April 26. He still may turn out to be a terrible President and I’m not all that confident he can win the general election. I have never believed that Cruz can. The political establishment seems genuinely terrified of Trump, and that’s a good thing.
At Diana West’s blog, she has an ongoing series entitled “The Post-Constitutional Election”. Here is Part 15, and I encourage you to go read the earlier installments.
It appears that a number of Bush associates have joined the Cruz campaign, including Neil Bush. I consider this much more alarming than rumors of extramarital affairs.
The more I learn about Cruz, the less I like him. He is not the outsider that he pretends to be. I don’t trust him for a minute on immigration. A Cruz administration would be Bush 43’s third term, and that is not what we need now.
That’s crazy talk. Cruz has a history of sticking it to the establishment in the name of conservative principles, while Trump doesn’t have any principles. The Bush people are now lining up behind Cruz because they know what an absolute disaster Trump will be – as Rand said, there’s no evidence he’s even ever read the constitution.
Trump is a populist who just sticks his finger in the wind, figures out what sounds good, and will implement it regardless of whether it’s a sound idea rooted in the Constitution or not. He’s a statist, believes in the power of government to effect the change he wants, and his only allegiance is to himself and whatever increases his own stature. In that way, he’s more like the third Obama term far more than Cruz would be the third Bush term.
Looking solely at prospects for November, the exit poll results concern me; some Cruz or some Trump supporters vowing to stay home if their guy isn’t the nominee.
On the bright side, I have hope this would change over time; I remember the PUMA movement of Hillary Clinton supporters refusing to support Obama, but come election day, most did.
On the other hand, I suspect that though the percentages will decrease, they may still be enough to have a detrimental effect. The usual way around this is a combined ticket, but given the bad blood and namecalling, I’m not seeing Trump/Cruz (or vice versa) 2016 as likely at this juncture.
Far worse, though, will be the result if the nominee is not Trump or Cruz. Then, you’d have not 1/3, but 2/3, of the party outraged. And even worse would be an establishment type who hasn’t even run being the nominee; far too many (and count me amongst them) would never vote for them.
“Far worse, though, will be the result if the nominee is not Trump or Cruz. Then, you’d have not 1/3, but 2/3, of the party outraged.”
This is an extremely important point for those GOPe elites to remember.
One or the other of the two guys has to lose. His people will be unhappy.
But to purposefully enrage the OTHER 1/3 is just…….
just…..
…well, they aren’t called the Stupid Party for nothing.
In retrospect, that huge slate of early candidates should have included Clint Eastwood, Tom Cotton, Chuck Norris, Tom Selleck, Ted Nugent, John Bolton, and Nikki Haley.
The Democrat side should’ve gone with a bunch of people like Tom Hanks, and maybe some young tech executives.
Instead we have a buffoonish reality star, a Canadian, and a delusional governor on one side, and on the other side the world’s most corrupt politician versus the world’s most out of touch 1960’s communist.
I’d take Eastwood versus Hanks in a heartbeat, even if neither one could find Russia on a map.
Eastwood stole the firefox, so he must know where Russia is.
–No need to go third party. A simple walkout with perhaps a thousand followers behind will doom the party in November. In a country where only 25 percent feel we’re on the right track and where the leading Democrat cannot shake the challenge of a once-obscure dairy-state socialist, you’d think the Republicans cannot lose.
You’d be underestimating how hard they are trying.–
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433806/donald-trump-wisconsin-primary-solid-core-support
So Charles Krauthammer is a nevertrump though not as rude as most.
But point of Trump walking away and “succeeding” is interesting.
Also one has something like the Southpark 3rd grade trying to lose the ballgame so the don’t to play more baseball- and all the teams doing the same thing.
I have thought experiment for the nevertrump. What happens if Trump wins 95 delegate of New York, and then announces he is suspending his campaign?
Or in sense, he shoots himself “in the middle of Fifth Avenue”.
Now since he is suspending his campaign rather than ending his campaign, it could be a fake suicide. One does end one’s campaign by suspending because that’s what politicians do [because they are politicians].
So not saying trump ends his campaign, but it’s possible that is what he does.
So what happens.
Like for example do Trump supporter vote for Trump even if Trump suspends his campaign. Do they actually vote for him despite Trump shooting someone [himself] “in the middle of Fifth Avenue”?
Or do the nevertrump say, here is proof that all Trump was doing was wreaking the republican primary?
Or what kinds of crazy does this cause?
Perhaps after two days, Trumps starts his campaign and says something like “I had to take a couple days off, to think about it”.
Now it might make more political sense, to do this after the next Tuesday- so win NY, then wins the 5 primaries on east coast, then suspends his campaign and gains about 200 delegates. But that could also miss the point- or that would be somewhat “more” expected.
Now part of why Trump could suspend his campaign after NY is that “the establishment” happens to do something especially stupid and/or offensive- it’s not as though that is unlikely. So shoot himself “in the middle of Fifth Avenue” AND something else.
One of things about this, is Trump could suspend his campaign after NY and he *still* could win the primary. Or he has as much chance as Cruz does [certainly more chance than Kasich].
And one could say trump testing Cruz’s idea, if there was only two in the race, that Cruz would win “theory”. Could he actually beat the pathetic Kasich? Or would the voter “come to their senses” and vote for Kasich? And what would the turnout, be? Maybe Rubio, Bush or whoever would get back in the race.
So not suggesting as a plan- but rather merely as a thought experiment.
George, wouldn’t you feel safer with a native-born first lady?
Strange how people keep saying Trump is an anti-semite who hates immigrants and yet his wife is an immigrant and his daughter is Jewish. All of Trump’s supporters know this and still support him yet they are all supposed to hate immigrants and Jews.
Trump is supposed to be functionally retarded and totally incompetent but has a ton of money, nice houses, and landed a wife who speaks like 7 languages.
Trump certainly wouldn’t be a conservative reformer. I have no idea how he would govern other than that he would do “deals” with congress. No one else really has a clue either and imagination can lead to wildly bad or good delusions. To me, the delusions in either direction, but especially to the evil racist fascist direction, seem to be wildly off base.
I think we all really know what Trump is going to do based on his track record and interests. He’s going to devote this country to building Trump hotels, Trump casinos, and Trump getaways – in low Earth orbit.
And they’re going to be so nice, so very nice.
*ducks*
Trump says he going to focus on America’s infrastructure, first.
Bad idea. He should do the trump Hotel in LEO, rather than getting involved in each of the State’s responsibility of infrastructure.
But anyhow, Trump should first focus on the wall, and removing all of Obama’s executive orders. Major projects should be reducing all regulations, and simplifying tax code. And then see if he manage a peace treaty with West bank and Israel. Tell Sunni arabs that before US can focus on destroying Iran and Syria alliance, that the focus of middle east policy is getting to point of having peaceful settlement with only democracy in the region.
In terms of space policy, return to Bush plan of Moon and then Mars
in which Congress has already agreed to, which Obama nullified.
No, I don’t think it guarantees that, not at all! I can’t speak for Jim, but I’ve agreed with everything Jim’s written about domestic issues.
So you’ve paid absolutely no attention to any arguments you’ve heard on this blog. I conclude your passions are emotional and not rational.