Good Memorandum re Cruz's Eligibility [View all]

[TeddyR]

Bryan Garner at the Atlantic wrote a legal piece about Cruz's eligibility that I found informative. Goes into the legalese and explains why it is "highly likely" the Supreme Court would determine Cruz is eligible. I don't really care one way or the other about whether Cruz is actually eligible, but I do find the history and the question interesting. Here's the conclusion from the piece:

We have seen that the law in 1789 treated mother-citizens less favorably than father-citizens in conferring citizen rights when a child is born abroad. We have seen that in 1961, the Supreme Court upheld just this type of differential treatment. Was there a rational basis for the distinction? Not in the modern era of the equal-protection analysis: The only basis for the differential treatment was that we lived in a patriarchal society in which paternal lines of succession were considered more important than maternal ones. Judged by current standards of equal protection, no such discriminatory difference would be upheld by the Supreme Court today. But an originalist interpretation would almost certainly be to the contrary.

All in all, it seems highly likely that the Supreme Court would today hold that the foreign-born child of a mother-citizen is eligible for the Presidency under Article II of the Constitution.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/ted-cruz-eligibility-memo/424206/