Bad news for Ted Cruz: his eligibility for president is going to court

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Updated by Dara Lind and Jeff Stein on February 18, 2016, 11:22 p.m. ET

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The Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago has agreed to hear a lawsuit on Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility for president — virtually ensuring that the issue dominates the news in the runup to the South Carolina primary.

Cruz was born in Canada to a US citizen mother and a noncitizen father. The Constitution requires presidents be "natural-born citizens," but what exactly that requires hasn't been settled in court.

Now, perhaps, it will be. The lawsuit in Illinois aims to resolve the question by challenging Cruz's eligibility for the presidency. It was filed by Lawrence Joyce, an attorney who has told local media that he supports Dr. Ben Carson and has had no connection with the Trump campaign.

"Joyce said his concern is that the eligibility issue lie unresolved during Republican primaries, thus letting the Democrats take Pennsylvpotential Cruz nomination, when it’d be too late," reports the Washington Examiner.

When this question initially came up, the conventional wisdom among constitutional lawyers was that it was a nonissue: Cruz was obviously eligible. But as the debate has heated up among candidates (with Donald Trump, in particular, fanning the flames), it's also begun to heat up among constitutional law scholars.

The issue is actually twofold: whether Ted Cruz should be considered a natural-born citizen, and whether Cruz's own preferred school of constitutional interpretation would see it that way.

The problem: the meaning of "natural-born citizen"

Here is what the Constitution says about who can be president:

FROM OUR SPONSOR - ARTICLE CONTINUES BELONo Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

The problem is the Constitution doesn't define "natural born Citizen." Neither does any current law. And no one has ever brought a court case to decisively settle the question as a matter of US law.

There are three ways someone can be a US citizen. He can be born in the US (regardless of who his parents are). He can be born outside the US to at least one US citizen parent, as long as certain criteria are met. (Those criteria are set by federal law and have been changed over time.) Or he can immigrate here and then successfully apply for citizenship, a process called naturalization.

Everyone agrees that the first category of people are natural-born citizens. Everyone agrees that the third category of people are notnatural-born citizens (regardless of how unfair it might be that immigrants can't be president). But Ted Cruz is in the middle category, and this is where the meaning of "natural born" starts to get fuzzy.

The only definition of "natural born" in US history would include Ted Cruz

Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty ImagesLegal scholar and Ted Cruz tormentor Laurence Tribe.

Because there's never been a court case to explicitly test the question of who counts as a natural-born citizen for the purpose of presidential eligibility, the question is by definition "unsettled." It hasn't been resolved yet. And court opinions that have mentioned the term in passing while ruling on other questions have come to very different opinions about what it means.

But it's a stretch to say, as Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe did, that the scholarship on the question is "completely unsettled." That implies that scholars are totally split on the issue, which isn't exactly the case.

The majority of constitutional law scholars who've written about the meaning of "natural-born citizen" have agreed that if a court were to rule on the question, it ought to rule that someone born outside the US but eligible for citizenship through parents counts as "natural born."

One of the key arguments in favor of this point is that while there is no longer any law defining "natural born," there used to be one — way back in 1790. The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly said that "the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens."

That term disappeared from immigration law after 1795. While there's at least one scholar who argues that this was intentional, because Congress didn't want that definition to persist, there's no evidence for that. And since Congress didn't come up with an alternate definition, that remains, to this day, the only definition of "natural born" we have.

This isn't a smoking gun. Scholars have looked at English precedents, US judicial decisions, bills, and congressional debates to figure out what the meaning of "natural born" is supposed to be and how (if at all) it's changed over time. But while some scholars have maintained that the evidence supports a narrow meaning of "natural born" — one that wouldn't include Ted Cruz — more of them agree that the evidence supports a broader one.

What would legal scholar Ted Cruz say about the eligibility of candidate Ted Cruz?

One of the constitutional scholars who used to think that the definition of "natural born" ought to include Ted Cruz is Laurence Tribe, who was Cruz's law professor at Harvard. But Tribe is now the leading scholar raising questions about Cruz's eligibility. Trump has taken to citing Tribe approvingly in rallies; Cruz has fired back that Tribe is a liberal professor who is only interested in taking him down.

Why is Tribe raising questions about Cruz's eligibility, even if Tribe thinks Cruz should ultimately be eligible? There are two answers.

The first answer is that Tribe is making a claim about what Ted Cruz ought to believe the Constitution says.

Cruz is a proud supporter of the conservative legal tradition of constitutional originalism: interpreting the Constitution not by what its words ought to mean today, but by what the Founding Fathers meant as they wrote them in 1787. Cruz is arguably the national politician most closely identified with originalism; he's certainly the presidential candidate with the closest ties to the conservative legal movement.

According to Tribe, constitutional originalism defines "natural born" very narrowly, in a way that would exclude Cruz. By extension, Tribe argued in the Boston Globe, any judges Cruz would appoint to the federal bench as president would invalidate his own presidency.

But Tribe clearly doesn't believe this line of argument himself because he is very much not an originalist. And one of the points of his column is that maybe if originalism is such an inflexible theory that it wouldn't allow one of its own biggest supporters to be president, it is generally a bad idea.He points out that the reason the Founding Fathers didn't want immigrants to be president is totally moot today — but so is the idea of a "well-ordered militia." And if originalists like Cruz still support the Second Amendment, Tribe says, they can't wave away the "natural-born citizen" clause.

Originalists disagree about what originalism is and what it says about "natural born"

Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images

While you wouldn't know it from Tribe's piece, there is no one originalist take on what "natural-born citizen" means. The strongest supporters of a narrow definition that would exclude Cruz are generally originalists, but there's a more even split among originalists than there is among constitutional scholars as a whole.

Since the Founding Fathers never actually debated the meaning of "natural-born citizen" when writing the Constitution, originalist scholars have had to turn to other sources to figure out what the common understanding of the phrase would have been at that time. And the answers scholars come to differ depending on which sources they consult.

Some originalists, like Michael Ramsey of the University of San Diego — who fortuitously just finished a paper on this question when the topic came up in the campaign — argue that the Founding Fathers would have understood "natural-born citizen" to mean the same thing "natural-born subject" did in English law at the time.

Over the century before the Revolution, Parliament had passed several bills clarifying that children born abroad to British subjects counted as "natural-born subjects" (this mattered for inheritance reasons). So by the time the Founding Fathers were writing down the Constitution, the broad definition of the term was fairly well established.

Other originalists, like Mary Brigid McManamon of Widener University's Delaware Law School — who recently published a column in the Washington Post arguing that Cruz is ineligible to be president — think that laws passed by Parliament don't count.

To McManamon, the precedent the Founding Fathers used wasn't British law as of 1787, but the English common law tradition (law made by courts rather than legislation). And in the common law, "natural born" didnot apply to children born outside the bounds of the country. That's why Parliament had to pass bills to include such children.

Each of these arguments is far more complicated, of course. (For one thing, some scholars argue that the common law wasn't as uniformly narrow as McManamon says it was.) But the debate among originalists as to what "natural born" means is really a debate among originalists as to what originalism ought to include. Should it include both common law and legislation, or just common law? Does a law passed in 1790 reflect the intent of the Founding Fathers, since so many of them were in Congress when it passed, or does it show that they needed to add something they thought wasn't in the Constitution already?

The truth is that there isn't nearly as much of a gulf between originalism and "living constitutionalism" as there might seem to be. Originalists look to a number of sources to figure out what the Constitution means, just like anyone else does. And even the living constitutionalists who've written about natural-born citizenship care about what the Founding Fathers meant it to mean at the time — that's just not the be-all and endall of their jurisprudence.

This can only be settled in court. But who would nominate a walking court case?

Ultimately, this is, quite literally, an academic debate. As long as no US court has issued a ruling on the question, it wouldn't matter if every legal scholar in America agreed on the hypothetical meaning of "natural born." It would still be legally unsettled.

Congress could at least stick some kind of bandage on the question by passing a "sense of the Congress" resolution — that's what it did in 2008 to affirm the eligibility of John McCain, who landed in the "natural born" gray zone for different reasons from Cruz. But the Senate has made it clear that it intends to do no such thing for Ted Cruz. This probably is less because they don't think Cruz is natural-born than because Senate Republicans really don't like Ted Cruz, but it's a problem for him nonetheless.

That's the other answer to why Tribe is agitating against Ted Cruz. He doesn't believe any court in the country would actually rule that Cruz was ineligible (though, he claims, that's only because Cruz-style originalism isn't the norm). But, he writes, "it’s worth thinking about the legal cloud" hovering over Cruz in the meantime.

The problem for Ted Cruz here isn't so much that a court is likely to rule against him as it is that Republicans might be afraid to support Cruz for the nomination because they're worried his eligibility will become an issue. A court taking up the issue days before the South Carolina primary is pretty much his worst nightmare.

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Ben Carson Accuses Ted Cruz of Dirty Tricks at Iowa Caucuses

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Tessa BerensonFEBRUARY 1, 2016, 11:54 PM EST

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Republican presidential candidate Ben CarsonBrendan Hoffman—Getty Images

The Carson camp claimed Cruz’s team spread false rumors at caucus sites that Carson had dropped out.

Ben Carson was incensed as the results of Monday night’s Iowa caucuses rolled in, accusing the winner of spreading falsehoods about him at caucus sites.

Carson’s team claimed that Cruz’s campaign deliberately sent emails to supporters to spread false rumors at caucus sites that Carson had dropped out, so his supporters would caucus for other candidates.

“That is really quite a dirty trick,” Carson said speaking to reporters at the end of the evening. “That’s the very kind of thing that irritated me enough to get into this quagmire.”

“To have campaigns come out and send emails to their caucus speakers suggesting that Dr. Carson was doing anything but moving forward after tonight is the lowest of low in American politics,” said Carson campaign manager Ed Brookover.

“This is horseshit,” Rob Taylor, Iowa state representative and Carson’s Iowa co-chair, said simply.

Members of Carson’s team furnished evidence of various precinct captains alleging misconduct by the Cruz campaign.

Ryan Rhodes, Carson’s Iowa state director, showed reporters a text on his phone from Barbara Heki, a Mike Huckabee supporter. “The Cruz speakers at our caucus announced Carson was suspending his campaign for a while after caucus. They did this before the vote. Same thing happened at another caucus. Sounds like slimy Cruzing to me,” the text read.

Jason Osborne, Carson’s deputy senior strategist, read aloud another missive, this one an email from their precinct chair in Muscatine: “The guy speaking for Ted Cruz right before the vote, he was supposed to be done, he announced that there was a story on CNN that Ben Carson was taking a break after Iowa, and then stated, ‘So you might want to rethink wasting your vote on him.’”

Cruz’s team flatly denies the allegations. “That’s absurd,” spokesperson Catherine Frazier said simply.

With additional reporting by Alex Altman

This article was originally published on Time.com.

Ted Cruz’s Iowa Mailers Are More Fraudulent Than Everyone Thinks - The New Yorker

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With the Iowa caucus fast approaching, Senator Ted Cruz is in trouble for sending out letters telling voters in the state that they’re being graded on whether they vote. CreditCredit Photograph by Brendan Hoffman / Getty

Ted Cruz’s Presidential campaign prides itself on being data-centric and on integrating insights from political science into its tactics. In 2008, academics at Yale published an influential paper showing that one of the most effective ways to get voters to the polls was “social pressure.” Researchers found that registered voters in a 2006 primary election in Michigan voted at a higher rate if they received mailers indicating that their participation in the election would be publicized. The mailer that had the biggest impact included information about the two previous elections and whether the recipient and his or her neighbors participated or not. “We intend to mail an updated chart,” the mailer warned. “You and your neighbors will all know who voted and who did not.”

Insights from the Yale study have since been adopted by several campaigns, including MoveOn, which also faced criticism when it used the tactic to turn out voters for Barack Obama’s reëlection, in 2012. Given its obsession with political science, it’s no surprise that the Cruz campaign decided to adopt the “social pressure” techniques to turn out voters in Iowa for Monday night’s caucuses. On Saturday, Twitter came alive withpictures from voters in the state who received mailers from the Cruz campaign. At the top of the mailers, in a bold red box, are the words “VOTING VIOLATION.” Below that warning is an explanation:

You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record. Their scores are published below, and many of them will see your score as well. CAUCUS ON MONDAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE and please encourage your neighbors to caucus as well. A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.

Below that, a chart appears with the names of the recipient of the mailing as well as his neighbors and their voting “grade” and “score.”

A further explanation appears below the chart:

Voter registration and voter history records are public records distributed by the Iowa Secretary of State and/or county election clerks. This data is not available for use for commercial purposes – use is limited by law.Scores reflect participation in recent elections. [Emphasis added.]

After seeing the mailers, Iowa’s secretary of state, Paul Pate, issued astatement condemning Cruz’s tactic:

“Today I was shown a piece of literature from the Cruz for President campaign that misrepresents the role of my office, and worse, misrepresents Iowa election law. Accusing citizens of Iowa of a “voting violation” based on Iowa Caucus participation, or lack thereof, is false representation of an official act. There is no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting. Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.

Additionally, the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office never “grades” voters. Nor does the Secretary of State maintain records related to Iowa Caucus participation. Caucuses are organized and directed by the state political parties, not the Secretary of State, nor local elections officials. Also, the Iowa Secretary of State does not “distribute” voter records. They are available for purchase for political purposes only, under Iowa Code.”

On Saturday night, Cruz responded. “I will apologize to no one for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote,” he toldreporters during a campaign stop in Sioux City.

A voter mailing used by the Cruz campaign employs “social pressure” tactics that have been criticized by Iowa’s secretary of state.

The secretary of state was mostly concerned that Cruz’s campaign mailers appeared partially disguised to look like an official communication from the state government. Direct mailers always push these boundaries, and Iowans are bombarded with mail, and one way to get them to open something is to make it look more official. And, in Cruz’s defense, the mailer does clearly indicate that it’s “Paid for by Cruz for President.”

After looking at several mailers posted online, I was more curious about how the Cruz campaign came up with its scores. On all the mailers I saw, every voter listed had only one of three possible scores: fifty-five per cent, sixty-five per cent, or seventy-five per cent, which translate to F, D, and C grades, respectively. Iowans take voting pretty seriously. Why was it that nobody had a higher grade?

In Iowa, although voter-registration information is free and available to the public, voter history is not. That information is maintained by the secretary of state, who licenses it to campaigns, super PACs, polling firms, and any other entity that might want it. So was the Cruz campaign accurately portraying the voter histories of Iowans? Or did it simply make up the numbers?

It seems to have made them up. Dave Peterson, a political scientist at Iowa State University who is well-acquainted with the research on “social pressure” turnout techniques, received a mailer last week. The Cruz campaign pegged his voting percentage at fifty-five per cent, which seems to be the most common score that the campaign gives out. (All of the neighbors listed on Peterson’s mailer also received a score of fifty-five per cent.)

Peterson, who is actually a Hillary Clinton supporter, moved to Iowa in 2009. He told me that he has voted in three out of the last three general elections and in two out of the last three primaries.

“There are other people listed on my mailer who live in my neighborhood that are all different ages, but everyone on this sheet has the same score of fifty-five per cent,” he said. “Some are significantly younger and would have not been eligible to vote in these elections, and others are older and have voted consistently, going back years. There is no way to get to us all having the same score.” (Peterson also spoke with Mother Jones.)

If the Cruz campaign based its score on local elections, Peterson said, the number also wouldn’t make sense, based on his participation in those elections as well. A source with access to the Iowa voter file told me that he checked several other names on Cruz mailers and that the voting histories of those individuals did not match the scores that the Cruz campaign assigned them in the mailer.

A mailer template used by the Rubio campaign also seeks to mobilize voters via “social pressure.”

I e-mailed Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for the Cruz campaign, and asked her what the campaign’s methodology was for arriving at its voting scores and whether the scores were fraudulent. “This was a mailer designed from public information and modeled on past successful mailers used by the Iowa GOP to turn out voters, so that we can have as high of a turnout as possible on caucus day,” she said. “I’ll leave it at that.” She did not explain the methodology used, nor did she answer my question about whether the numbers were made up.

The political scientist Lynn Vavreck, the co-author of “The Gamble,” a book the Cruz campaign has publicly stated it has studied for its strategic insights, said there was a major difference between the 2008 study in Michigan and what Cruz is doing in Iowa. “In the political-science work published in the American Political Science Review,” she said, “the mailing listed the elections (three of them) in which voters’ histories were being observed—and listed whether the secretary of state recorded that the voter participated that year. So it was more transparent than the Cruz mailer, which implied that it used public records but delivered voters letter grades, which are not part of the official file.”

It’s unclear how many Iowans received the Cruz mailers. Ideally, the mailers would go to potential caucus-goers who are leaning toward the Texas senator and just need some additional incentive to participate. In at least one case, that backfired. Independent Journal Review reportedthat one Iowan who received the Cruz mailer will now caucus for Marco Rubio.

Rubio’s campaign also sent out a mailer that employs social pressure to induce participation in the caucuses, but, notably, the Rubio campaign did not mention the names of the target voter’s neighbors.

The Cruz mailers have been widely condemned by Iowans. “I just wonder how many of these went out to people who might seriously believe they committed a violation or were embarrassed that their neighbors might know about their alleged voting record,” Braddock Massey, a Rubio supporter who lives in West Des Moines and received one of the mailers, said.

Donna Holstein, who was listed on one of them, was upset to learn that she had been given a failing grade and that her neighbors might be told whether she participates in the caucus. She told me that she has voted consistently but that she can’t this time because of a disability.

“I’m crippled, so I can’t go to the caucus,” Holstein said. She was not happy about being shamed in front of her neighbors. “That’s what you call a bully,” she said about Cruz’s tactics. “I wish he would quit.”

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School Kids Exposed Personal Issues for Bullies by School Workshop Lawsuit Pending

West Allegheny Middle School Parents Pursuing Possible Lawsuit Over Anti-Bullying Program

pittsburgh.cbslocal.com

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — According to parents, legal action is in the works after a controversial anti-bullying program at West Allegheny Middle School.

At a special parent meeting Tuesday night, parents and taxpayers told KDKA’s Kym Gable that they’ve retained the services of a Pittsburgh attorney to pursue a possible class action lawsuit, claiming administrators infringed on students’ rights.

KDKA tried to gain access to the meeting, but was told it was a private, closed-door session with no media allowed.

During an exercise at the Jan. 15 workshop, students were asked questions amongst their peers and then “grouped” based on their answers.

There were more than two dozen questions. The statements included:

“Please move to the middle of the circle if:”

You have been impacted by drugs or alcoholYou have been called fat or made fun ofYou or someone close to you identifies as gay, lesbian, or transgenderedYou have been impacted by mental challenges or learning disabilitiesYou or your family has ever worried about not having enough moneyYou or someone close to you has been imprisonedYou have been raised by a single parent

The district says students were told they did not have to share if they did not feel comfortable, but parents say they wish they would have seen the questions prior to the workshop.

“There is now so much damage done to these children and there is no way to go back and make this better for them,” said Diane Kolesar.

Pam Brosovic added, “I asked them [administrators] to do the same thing they asked the kids to do: Stand in a circle, put a mask on and step in the circle and say all your problems.”

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Brosovic believes the exercise “gave the bullies ammunition.”

No one from the school district administration would comment on camera.

The designated spokesperson after the meeting was school board president Debbie Mirich, who read a written statement.

“We do stand behind the intentions of our workshop and we look forward (to) continuing our work with parents to address this very serious issue of bullying and the unintentional acts that continue to marginalize different groups of students.”

Mirich acknowledged that the school board did not have any direct involvement in facilitating the workshop.

Parent Marie-Noelle Briggs said, “I would never expect a middle school to ask kids if their parents have been in school, if they’re [the] same sex, if they’re having financial issues. How is that going to affect them?”

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Citizens, Comrades, Hand Over Your Guns

Obama says, Citizens and Comrades, "Hand Over Your Guns."  VIDEO

Sick Bias Obama goes to Mexico and thanks them for their illegal votes then blames American guns for the killings in Mexico. WTF ?? Dude weren't you responsible for Fast and Furious ? LIKE if you know more than an American president.

Crime

Guns and Crime: What the Statistics Really Say and How They’re Interpreted in the Debate

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