Meet the Law Professor Who's Running for President to Get Ted Cruz Disqualified

[Algernon Moncrieff]

MOTHER JONES

Around the country, individual voters have filed complaints with state election officials and lawsuits in federal and state courts to keep Cruz off the presidential ballot. Most of these challenges have gone nowhere. One major obstacle to challenging Cruz's eligibility is that ordinary citizens don't have standing to bring suit over the issue. To have standing to sue, the party bringing the case must have a particular injury that can be remedied by the outcome of the case. Many courts, particularly federal courts, have found that citizens are not sufficiently injured by Cruz appearing on the ballot.

Enter Williams. Though ordinary citizens generally do not have standing, rival candidates might. In two previous cases from 2008, federal courts recognized the theory of "competitive standing," the idea that a competitor could be injured by an ineligible candidate siphoning off votes that could come to the plaintiff. So Williams decided to become a competitor. To do so, he has notified nine states of his intention to run as a write-in candidate.

This won't automatically give him standing. Federal and state courts could decide that a write-in challenger running solely to get standing is more like a citizen than an actual competitor. But Williams has researched the issue and found a smattering of state court cases that treat write-in candidates as genuine opposition. Moreover, he says, some states require write-in candidates to jump through a number of hoops in order to run—signaling, he believes, that they are considered serious candidates. "So that's what I'm hanging my hat on," he says.

The Constitution states that only a "natural born citizen" can be president. Cruz and his lawyers argue that anyone who is a citizen at birth, who does not have to go through a naturalization process in order to become a citizen, is natural born. Under this definition, Cruz, who was a citizen at birth because his mother was a citizen, is natural born. But a handful of scholars believe that natural born status applies only to citizens who are born on US soil, and the Supreme Court has never ruled definitively on the issue.

...back in 2013

In April, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), spoke to the tea party of Hood County, which is southwest of Fort Worth, and made a bold declaration: The United States is a "Christian nation." The septuagenarian businessman turned evangelical pastor did not choose to use the more inclusive formulation "Judeo-Christian nation." Insisting that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution "were signed on the knees of the framers" and were a "divine revelation from God," he went on to say, "yet our president has the gall to tell us that this is not a Christian nation…The United States of America was formed to honor the word of God." Seven months earlier, Rafael Cruz, speaking to the North Texas Tea Party on behalf of his son, who was then running for Senate, called President Barack Obama an "outright Marxist" who "seeks to destroy all concept of God," and he urged the crowd to send Obama "back to Kenya."

[Agnosticsherbet]

1. The Supreme Court has never ruled on this.

I can not imagine them doing it on an election year.

[Major Nikon]

2. Seems like the best time to do it

Taking the chance on invalidating a sworn president seems problematic.