Topic category:  Constitution/Constitutional Crises

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's list of eleven potential Supreme Court nominees includes eleven highly qualified sitting judges.

Trump has said that he will be adding to the list and that's good. provided that any addition is equally well qualified.

In any case, Paul Clement doesn't belong on the Trump list.

Clement is a former Solicitor General and a Georgetown law professor who argued many times before the Supreme Court.

Clement was a likely SCOTUS nominee if Mitt Romney had won in 2012.

See David Ingram's "Analysis: A Romney pick for top U.S. court? Frontrunners emerge" (www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-campaign-court-romney-idUSBRE83I18U20120419):

"CLEMENT A FAVORITE

"Paul Clement...is the favorite of many conservatives. Clement argued last month for the Supreme Court to strike down Obama's 2010 healthcare law, and he is defending laws that ban same-sex marriage and that target illegal immigrants.

"Clement, 45, would be 'at the top of any short list right now,' said Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, a group that advocates for conservative nominees.

"Asked about Clement, Mary Ann Glendon, a co-chairwoman of Romney's Justice Advisory Committee, voiced 'unbounded admiration' for him."

Clement was on the right side of critically important legal issues, but he has no judicial experience and he made a huge mistake in co-authoring a permission slip for Canadian-born Ted Cruz to become President of the United States.

Clement belongs on a Cruz SCOTUS list, not a Trump SCOTUS list, and any Cruz list is unimportant until 2021, if ever.

Clement & another former Solicitor General. Neal Katyal, in "On the Meaning of 'Natural Born Citizen,'" 128 HARV. L. REV. F. 161 (2015), proclaimed Cruz constitutionally eligible to be President of the United States, insisting that "the relevant materials clearly indicate ... that the original meaning of the phrase 'natural born Citizen' includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent."

Clement and Katyal called the argument that Cruz is ineligible "spurious," insisting that because Cruz had been born to a United States citizen mother, "there is no question that Senator Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus a 'natural born Citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution."

It's hard to believe that Clement and Katyal didn't know better,

Trump, who is not a lawyer, did, and shouldn't appoint the favorite of Romney and/or Cruz.

Naturalized citizenship from birth is not the same as natural born citizenship.

It was not until 1934 that a federal statute was enacted to enable mothers to transmit United States citizen and Congress is not empowered to amend the Constitution.

When the Constitution was drafted and enacted, it was understood that Cruz, whose father was not a United States citizen when he was born, had no United States citizenship to transmit to his son.

Since Cruz was born in Canada, he has no birthright citizenship claim.

For further discussion, see "Donald Trump's running mate should be indisputably a 'natural born' citizen and that disqualifies Ted Cruz (www.renewamerica.com/columns/gaynor/ 160212).

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.