McCain himself was born outside the US mainland, in the Panama Canal Zone – a military base where his father was then stationed.
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“How do you run against the Democrat, whoever it may be, and you have this hanging over your head if they bring a lawsuit?”
“How can a “natural born citizen” have to give up his citizenship from some other country?” said Harry Trattenero, 61, a pipefitter from Golden Valley, Ariz., at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on the eve of last month’s GOP debate.
Trump said Cruz should to ask a judge for a “declaratory judgment” that Trump said would protect Cruz against any future questions about his eligibility that could come in a general election.
But that didn’t stop Trump from raising the issue Tuesday.
“This was not my suggestion”. He also repeated his assertion that Cruz has a Canadian passport, which Cruz denied during a separate interview Wednesday with CNN’s Dana Bash. Once the president did release the long-form version of his birth certificate, Trump boasted that he was “proud of myself because I’ve accomplished something nobody has been able to accomplish”. “I like him. He likes me”.
“Of course not”, Cruz told Bash, as his campaign bus traveled from Sibley to Spirit Lake close to the Iowa-Minnesota border. “And I’m certainly not going to engage in that and I hope Donald won’t either”.
“It would be really nice if somebody would get this issue of law decided who has authority to decide constitutional issues, so every four years we don’t have this come up again”, Manchester attorney Brad Cook, a Republican, said at the time. (His father was Cuban-born.) He held dual citizenship with the United States and Canada until he renounced his Canadian citizenship in May 2014.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are fighting for the favor of numerous same undecided voters across Iowa, where even some of the most attentive Republicans say they can’t make up their minds less than four weeks before voting begins.
At one point in mid-December, Trump called Cruz unqualified to be president but he didn’t elaborate.
In an interview on Phoenix CBS affiliate KFYI, McCain said the questions raised by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump over Cruz’s eligibility are legitimate.
“I’d hate to see something like that get in his way”, Trump told the Post.
In an interview Tuesday with The Washington Post, Trump said Cruz’s Canadian birthplace and previously holding a double passport was “very precarious”.
Trump insisted that he wasn’t attacking Cruz, merely pointing out an issue Cruz needs to address. That’s why Cruz, a man who would attack the president for eating lunch, never hopped on the birther train-there are some levels of hypocrisy even American politics won’t abide.
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In 2011, the billionaire businessman made headlines when he questioned President Obama’s citizenship, suggesting that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States.
