Quoted Text

Sen. Cruz formally gives up Canadian citizenship
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Canada-born U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has made good on a promise to renounce his birth country's citizenship — doing so amid speculation he could make a run at the White House in 2016.

Spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said Cruz's action became official May 14 and that Texas' junior senator received written confirmation at his home in Houston on Tuesday. She said the tea-party-backed Republican "is pleased to have the process finalized."

"Being a U.S. Senator representing Texas, it makes sense he should be only an American citizen," Frazier said in an email.

Cruz, 43, was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1970, while his parents were working in the oil business there. His mother, Eleanor, is from Delaware, while his father, Rafael, is a Cuban became a U.S. citizen in 2005.

Though he has been in office only about 18 months, Cruz helped lead last year's partial government shutdown and has become a conservative grass-roots champion.

Amid questions last August about his eligibility to be president should he decide to run, Cruz released his birth certificate to the Dallas Morning News — and said then that he was surprised to learn he was a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen.

Upon learning that he'd received it at birth, he promised to formally give it up. Months then passed before Cruz hired an immigration attorney to help him with the process.

Frazier provided a copy of Cruz's Certificate of Renunciation, which certifies that Rafael Edward Cruz "has formally renounced Canadian citizenship and pursuant to the Citizenship Act will cease to be a citizen."

Still, the citizenship issue could still be a thorny one for Cruz. Some conservatives claimed President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus not eligible to be U.S. president. Obama is an American citizen; his father was Kenyan, his mother American.

The U.S. Constitution says only a "natural born Citizen" may be president. Legal scholars, however, generally agree the description covers foreign-born children of U.S. parents.

Previous foreign-born Americans — notably Republicans John McCain and George Romney — have run for president with some mention, but no serious challenges, of their eligibility.

Cruz, who has made frequent trips to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the first three states to hold presidential contests, has refused to say if he plans to run for president.

Asked about his presidential eligibility at the Texas Republican Convention last week, Cruz said, "I've disclosed all the relevant facts. As you know, I was born in Canada. My mother was a U.S. citizen at the time of my birth. She was a U.S. citizen from birth so, under U.S. law, I'm an American citizen by birth."

"Beyond that," he added, "I will leave the legal consequences of those facts to others to worry about."

Well, we've already had a Kenyan or Indonesian president so a Canadian president would be a nice change.  We already had one Canadian born president of the United States -- so it wouldn't be anything new.

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

Well, we've already had a Kenyan or Indonesian president so a Canadian president would be a nice change.  We already had one Canadian born president of the United States -- so it wouldn't be anything new.

And just WHO was the Canadian born president?


By the way, we did not have a Kenyan as president.   We have had a president of Kenyan ancestry on his paternal side.   I have a cousin whose parents are both natural born Americans (several generations) and thus citizens.  Her father was teaching in Japan for two years which is when she was born.  She is considered 100% American citizen by birth.  


We have neighbors, the father came here from what was Czechoslovakia when he was about 10 years old.  His family became naturalizaed.  His wife came to the U.S. to study, happened to be where he was studying.  They met and dated, and married two years later, she obviously was not even eligible for naturalization.  They had children who are natural born American citizens.   The children are NOT Czechoslovakian.  The parents are however.   But the children are Americans of Czechoslovakian ancestry.


So again, WHO is the president who was born in Canada???

Chester A. Arthur? so its historys mystery...vermont or canada...

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

Well, we've already had a Kenyan or Indonesian president so a Canadian president would be a nice change.  We already had one Canadian born president of the United States -- so it wouldn't be anything new.

OK Mr. Political expert...since Cruz was BORN IN CALGARY CANADA, why would he be eligible to run for President of US?

Quoted from sanfordy2

Chester A. Arthur? so its historys mystery...vermont or canada...

Chester A. Arthur is correct.  At least that is what some historians claim.  

Andrew Jackson may have been born at sea to his immigrant parents as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean.  It is too late to actually prove that one way or the other -- and too late to do anything about it, anyway.

As long as one of his parents was an American citizen than he was technically an "natural born citizen of the United States."   Senator John McCain and Governor George Romney (Mitt's dad) were born overseas to American parents and were considered legally qualified to run for and serve as president -- of course, neither man was actually elected president.

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

Chester A. Arthur is correct.  .

ROFLMAO!!!    



Of course, DV again knows NOTHING.   Chester Arthur was born in Vermont



      A DV LIE, just like the LIE about the dems in Schenectady lowered the taxes to less than 10 years ago and the LIE that county taxes are lower than they were 50 years ago.

But NEVER NEVER produces one teen weeny shred of EVIDENCE!

From Marquette University Law School:

President Chester A. Arthur and the Birthers, 1880’s Style
Posted by: J. Gordon Hylton
Category: Constitutional Interpretation, Legal History, President & Executive Branch
10 Comments »

arthurThe Obama citizenship “debate” has surprisingly brought former president Chester A. Arthur (1829-1886) back into the pages of American newspapers, which is no small feat.  Unlike President Obama, who is clearly eligible to hold the nation’s highest office, Arthur, the twenty-first president (1881-84), may well have been an “unconstitutional” president.

Although Arthur is frequently seen as Millard Fillmore primary competition for the title of “Most Obscure President in U.S. History,” the circumstances of his birth have raised questions eeriely similar to those asked about President Barack Obama by the birthers.

Before 1880, Chester Arthur was a minor New York City politician who was a protégé of Sen. Roscoe Conkling of the Empire State.  Although he was a prominent lawyer, he had never run for, let alone held, elective office at any level.  Nevertheless, at the 1880 Republican Presidential Convention in Chicago, he was added to the Republican national ticket as the running mate of presidential candidate James Garfield.  Arthur was selected to balance the slate geographically — Garfield was from Ohio, part of the Midwest in an era when regions mattered — and to placate Sen. Conkling, a presidential aspirant himself and the leader of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party.

In 1871, President Grant, with Conkling’s blessings, had appointed Arthur to the lucrative position as Collector of the Port of New York.  However, seven years later, he had been removed from that position by President Rutherford B. Hayes, as part of a presidential effort to crack down on the spoils system.  Although there was no evidence of real corruption at the custom house while Arthur was Collector, it was also clear that Arthur had no objections to padding the Collector’s payroll with loyal Republicans. Once elected, Arthur remained loyal to Conkling and the spoils system, and he and Garfield clashed repeatedly on questions of federal appointments, which led Garfield to ban Arthur from the White House.

However, on July 2, 1881, Garfield was assassinated by Charles Guiteau, a deranged supporter of Conkling, who, after shooting the president, shouted, “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts . . . Arthur is president now!”  Guiteau’s two shots actually did not prove to be fatal, and Garfield lived until September 19, when he was finally done in by a combination of infection and poor medical care.

Although he was a product of, and, at least initially, a supporter of the spoils system, as president Arthur actually turned out to be fairly progressive and a strong supporter of civil service reform.  In 1883, he signed the Pendleton Act, which established the first Civil Service Commission.  Although he sought his party’s presidential nomination for 1885, he was not renominated by the Republican Party.  Even so, he left office widely respected by members of both parties.  Even Mark Twain begrudgingly acknowledged that “it would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration.”

Questions of Arthur’s eligibility for the nation’s highest office surfaced during the 1880 campaign.  Arthur was the son of an Irishman who emigrated first to Canada and the then to the United States, and who finally became a naturalized United States citizen in 1843, fifteen years after his son Arthur’s birth in 1829.  Arthur’s mother was a United States citizen born in Vermont but whose family emigrated to Canada where she met and married her husband.  By the time of Arthur’s birth, his parents had moved back to Vermont.

The controversy over Arthur’s citizenship status centers around the place of Arthur’s actual birth.  By one account he was born in his family’s home in Franklin County, Vermont.  If this was true, then he was clearly a natural born citizen.  On the other hand, the competing account has it that he was born during his pregnant mother’s visit to her family’s home in Canada.

If the latter story is true, then Arthur was technically foreign-born, and in 1829, citizenship in such cases passed to the child only if the father was a United States citizen, and, of course, at this point Arthur’s father was still a citizen of the British Empire.

The principal advocate of the “born in Canada” theory was Arthur’s fellow New York lawyer Arthur P. Hinman who was hired in 1880 by the Democratic Party to investigate Arthur’s ancestry.  Hinman initially undermined his owned credibility by embracing an argument that Arthur was himself born in Ireland and didn’t come to the United States until he was fourteen years old.  That story was patently false and easily disproven.

However, Hinman later discovered acquaintances of the Arthur family in Canada who told him the story of Arthur’s accidental Canadian birth.  Convinced that he now had proof of Arthur’s foreign citizenship, he published his findings in 1884 in a short book entitled How a Subject of the British Empire Became President of the United States.  Hinman’s book appeared near the end of Arthur’s presidency, and no official action was ever taken on the basic of his alleged evidence.

Arthur himself always insisted that he was born in Vermont, but he may not have known the place of his birth. By the time he was six years old, his family had left Vermont for New York, and he never lived in the Green Mountain State again.  It is possible that his parents considered the circumstances of his Canadian birth to be personally embarrassing and never shared the details of the story with him.

An investigation by the Boston Globe earlier this year — no doubt inspired by the Birther controversy — confirmed that there are no official records regarding Arthur’s birth in either Vermont or in Canada.  See Boston Globe, “Chester Arthur Rumor Still Lingers in Vermont,” August 17, 2009.

We will probably never know if Arthur was really eligible to be president of the United States in 1881.

Where’s the birth certificate, President Jackson?

Now that we have Obama’s long-form birth certificate on hand, maybe we can all get back to the important things in life.  Like wondering whether Andrew Jackson was really born in America, for example.

I didn’t know it was an issue until I read Allan Eckert’s classic book The Frontiersmen.  Eckert has his protagonist, Simon Kenton, and Jackson getting into a brawl near Danville, KY in 1779.  Here, Jackson is a member of a rowdy surveying team led by “Dr. Jonas Walker” running the North Carolina-Virginia line, which at that time would have also passed between the unborn states of Tennessee and Kentucky.  The crew shows up at a tavern where Kenton is eating dinner, and a drunk Jackson suddenly knocks Kenton to the floor, only to have the big frontiersman get up and beat the stuffing out of him.  According to Eckert, both fighters were about the same age, in their early or mid-twenties.  That would put Jackson’s birth in the mid-1750′s.  Conventional wisdom puts Jackson’s birth in the Waxhaws region of northern South Carolina (or maybe in southern North Carolina, but one controversy is enough for this post, thanks) on March 15, 1767.  Eckert thus moves Jackson’s birth date back about twelve years.

In a note at the end of the book, Eckert defends this decision, claiming that “there is good cause to believe…that Jackson was, in fact, born at sea while his parents, Andrew and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, were immigrating to America from County Antrim, Ireland, thus making him legally ineligible for the office of President of the United States, which he later assumed” (597). He presents four pieces of evidence to substantiate this claim.  For the sake of convenience, I’ve separated them out and numbered them here:

Simon Kenton told the story of the fight to Judge John James in 1833, and James transcribed the interview.  Kenton said that he and Jackson were close to the same age.
Henry Lee (not to be confused with Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee of Revolutionary War fame) claimed that he was with Kenton at the time of the fight, and corroborated Kenton’s account.
The same Judge James who wrote down Kenton’s story stated that in 1840 he accompanied a Kentuckian by the name of John Chambers to a political meeting.  On that trip, Chambers told him of an elderly neighbor who claimed that she was on the same ship that Jackson’s parents took to America, that Jackson was born “three days from land,” and that she herself “received him in my own hands.”
Finally, Eckert cites the testimony of Marshall Anderson.  Jackson and James Monroe stopped at the home of Anderson’s father during Monroe’s tour of the West in 1819.  Anderson overheard Jackson and his father chatting privately, and reported that when Anderson asked Jackson where he was born, Jackson replied, “I was born at sea.”
Eckert concludes that all this testimony makes it likely that “Andrew Jackson was not a native American and that his age has been altered by twelve years; that he was not, in fact, born after his father’s death, nor was he born in South Carolina, but instead was born in a ship at sea in 1755, the year his parents were immigrating from Ireland to America” (p. 59.

There are a few problems with this conclusion, aside from the fact that it dismisses all the other evidence we have that Jackson was born in the Carolinas in 1767.  First, Jackson’s parents did not emigrate to America in 1755, but a decade later.  I’m not sure why Eckert moves the date back, unless it’s simply to reconcile the born-at-sea theory with the early birth theory.

Second, while there are four pieces of evidence given in support of the theory that Jackson was born in the 1750′s and/or at sea, what we really have here are only two sources.  According to Eckert, Lee’s corroboration of Kenton’s story is in the manuscript collection assembled by frontier historian Lyman C. Draper. The other three pieces of evidence are recorded in an article written by Judge James and published in a volume of historical materials published in 1859.  In other words, we don’t necessarily have four independent witnesses, but rather four pieces of testimony reported by only two independent sources.

The quality of those sources also seems questionable.  Kenton and Lee got one thing right—there was a survey being run along the VA-NC border in the fall of 1779. Dr. Thomas Walker was one of the party’s leaders, and perhaps he’s the man Eckert refers to as “Dr. Jonas Walker.”  But I can’t find any evidence that Jackson was present.  I’ve been unable to find any reputable biographies of Old Hickory that mention a surveying trip in 1779; they all indicate that in that year he was right where he had always been, growing up in the Carolina backcountry.  We know that he was in the Waxhaws in the early summer of 1780 as the British swept into the area after the fall of Charleston.  I suspect that Kenton and Lee encountered someone else—perhaps someone else named Andrew Jackson?—and conflated this encounter with the name of a famous person, either through the fog of old age or a deliberate desire to magnify their own exploits. After all, in 1833, when Kenton told his story to Judge James, Jackson had just started his second term as president.

I therefore see little reason to believe the Kenton story, and even less reason to think Jackson was a grown man in 1779.  It is much simpler to believe that Kenton was either mistaken or fabricated the story than it is to believe that all the other evidence we have about Jackson’s age is wrong, or that a public figure like Jackson was able to knock ten years off his age without anyone who knew him as a younger man calling his hand on it. After all, this was an age of intensely personalized politics, and Jackson’s critics weren’t reluctant when it came to digging up dirt on his past.

The testimony regarding the birth at sea also seems dubious to me.  The remark attributed to Jackson by Marshall Anderson contradicts other public statements (at least as early as 1824) in which Jackson claimed South Carolina as his birthplace.  If Jackson lied about his place of birth just so he could take a shot at the presidency, why was he telling people that he was born at sea as late as 1819, when he was already a public figure?

The other piece of evidence for the birth at sea is a bit of hearsay attributed to an elderly woman for whom we don’t even have a name.  And the story dates from 1840, by which time Jackson had achieved the pinnacle of his fame and power.  It seems more reasonable to assume that the old lady was muddling things up, as older folks sometimes do, by placing herself at the birth of someone who had become a celebrity and a beloved hero.

Here’s something else to consider.  Even if the story about a birth at sea were true, would it necessarily have made Jackson ineligible for office?  Most people assume that the Constitution restricts the office to natural-born citizens. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that: “No 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 bit about being a citizen at the time of adoption was necessary, because technically none of the first presidents were “natural-born citizens.” Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were all born in British colonies. No man who had attained the required thirty-five years of age necessary to become president had, at the time the Constitution was written, been born in an independent United States of America.

I suspect that even if Jackson was born at sea, he would have fallen under the “citizen at the time of adoption” clause.  After all, he had essentially lived his entire life in America, and had participated as a teenager in the Revolution.

Since politics of the 1820′s and 1830′s were even nastier than those of today, I’d imagine that if any of Jackson’s opponents had evidence that he was constitutionally ineligible for office, they would’ve used it.  The fact that Old Hickory’s detractors didn’t become the first birthers is itself pretty good evidence that Jackson was born where and when most people think he was.

I don’t intend this to be a criticism either of Eckert or of his book.  I enjoy his work, and I think The Frontiersmen is an absorbing read.  In fact, the entire “Winning of America” series is worthwhile for anyone interested in the early American frontier, even if Eckert’s free use of reconstructed dialogue and other novelistic techniques makes me hesitant to lump them together with standard non-fiction works of history.  I just thought the issue of Jackson’s birth was a neat little historical controversy that ties into recent political debates, and therefore the kind of thing that makes for good blog fodder.

Gee, DV, you seem to find something that might question Chester Arthur's birth in Vermont, you seem to find evidence to dispute what others say.


You keep claiming that the Schenectady Co taxes are lower today than 50 years ago.    Where did you get that information from?  How come you have not found one teen weeny shred of evidence to support what you say?   Hmmm?

You keep claiming Schenectady is improving, it's in this wonderful renaissance.   But where do you get your information from?   How come you have NOT produced any evidence to dispute the FACT that under your dem buddies the tax base is massive free fall and property values are falling, and people are fleeing the city in droves, and bight is spreading like wildfire.   And of course, the city (outside of downtown) is becoming a ghost town under your dem buddies---have you found any writings somewhere to produce evidence to support what you say about the city?

Quoted from mikechristine1

Gee, DV, you seem to find something that might question Chester Arthur's birth in Vermont, you seem to find evidence to dispute what others say.


You keep claiming that the Schenectady Co taxes are lower today than 50 years ago.    Where did you get that information from?  How come you have not found one teen weeny shred of evidence to support what you say?   Hmmm?

You keep claiming Schenectady is improving, it's in this wonderful renaissance.   But where do you get your information from?   How come you have NOT produced any evidence to dispute the FACT that under your dem buddies the tax base is massive free fall and property values are falling, and people are fleeing the city in droves, and bight is spreading like wildfire.   And of course, the city (outside of downtown) is becoming a ghost town under your dem buddies---have you found any writings somewhere to produce evidence to support what you say about the city?

DVOR doesn't get the 'relative to....'...........it's only relative to DVOR's mind.......

I am hoping that Ted Cruz runs for president.  I would very seriously consider voting for him in the primaries.