Here in the Boston Globe:
'To his kind of judge, [Ted] Cruz ironically wouldn’t be eligible, because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and ’90s required that someone actually be born on US soil to be a “natural born” citizen. Even having two US parents wouldn’t suffice. And having just an American mother, as Cruz did, would have been insufficient at a time that made patrilineal descent decisive. ... This narrow definition reflected 18th-century fears of a tyrannical takeover of our nation by someone loyal to a foreign power — fears that no longer make sense.'
Oh really? They make more sense now than ever with the diffidently un-American Obama in the Oval, whom the originalist position should also have prevented but didn't precisely because liberal interpreters like Tribe have prevailed by burying truths.
Such as: Children born abroad to US diplomats and soldiers were considered at the time of the American founding "reputed born in the country". For example, Emer de Vattel, paragraphs 216ff.,
whom the founders used like a textbook:
"... it is not naturally the place of birth that gives rights, but extraction. ... the children born out of the country in the armies of the state, or in the house of its minister at a foreign court, are reputed born in the country."
So it's not just a simple matter of being born on US soil, otherwise every slave child ever born here would have been a natural born citizen, making that whole 14th Amendment thingy kind of beside the point. Tribe is taking only half of the originalist position and using it against Cruz, when there is another half, which should have made Obama ineligible.
Ted Cruz is not a natural born citizen only in part because he was born in Canada without military, diplomatic or some other "official" American cover, but Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen because he was born without citizen cover from both parents. Tribe wants to ignore the latter in the case of Cruz to obscure Obama's ineligibility and argue for the priority of soil against Cruz. It's the way liberals argue, by not telling the whole truth.
But blood was equally important with soil at the founding, and you might say that in the matter of presidential eligibility, the genius of the constitution was singularly expressed in the fusing of jus soli and jus sanguinis in the person elected to embody the executive power in order to protect it, and us.
Presidents should be born in the country, to (married heterosexual) citizens.
But good luck getting that through after what Obama and the Democrats have done to this country. Next stop, a test-tube president whose parents are a Chinese lesbian from Vancouver married to her kitty cat from a pet shelter in Seattle.
