What Are The Rules of Evidence?
The Market Ticker
Feb. 20, 2016
Hmmmm...
Lawrence Joyce, an Illinois voter who has objected to Cruz's placement on the Illinois primary ballot next month, will have his case heard in the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago. Joyce's previous objection, made to the state's Board of Elections, was dismissed on February 1.
The question before the bar ought to proceed in stages, with the first hurdle for Cruz to jump being whether or not he has facially-acceptable evidence that he's a citizen at all.
Specifically, does Cruz have (and can he produce) his CRBA? Ted Cruz admits he was born abroad to a citizen mother. That makes him a citizen unless his citizenship was renounced. The CRBA is his evidence that (1) he had citizenship from birth and (2) it was not renounced. If he does not have this document then the plaintiff should win right there, right now.
The only reason this comes up is that Teddy hasn't produced that for anyone to my knowledge as of yet. When challenged on his citizenship he produced his mother's birth certificate and his, which is Canadian, has also shown up.
The problem is that the law at the time in Canada prohibited, with few exceptions, dual nationality. Further, there is evidence that his mother was registered to vote in Canada. To be registered to vote one must of course be a citizen. If she took Canadian citizenship her birth certificate is immaterial because at the time she gave birth to Ted she was Canadian, not American.
The US State Department would have checked this to at least some degree before handing over a CRBA. That's the entire point of a CRBA -- to document that a person holding it is in fact a citizen because they were born to a citizen parent who held citizenship at the time the birth occurred even though they were not in the United States.
Cruz knows all this as he's an attorney, and from his own claims a pretty good and accomplished one. He could have put the question to rest immediately by releasing his CRBA, but instead he released his mother's birth certificate, which proves nothing at all regarding his citizenship status.
This will be interesting to watch, but the real fun only comes in if the court demands that Cruz pony up his CRBA -- which it damn well should, and if he refuses or is unable to do so said court should issue a summary judgment for the plaintiff.
Unfortunately for Cruz he has a further problem as regards natural born status, but we'll get to that once we dispose of the first question: Where is your documentation that you're a citizen AT ALL.
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