The way he’s raising “birther” questions about his chief rival for the nomination is worthy of Machiavelli. And what he says is often untrue like Trump. In a three-decade career at The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section. I know it came up in my race because I was born in Panama, but I was born in the Canal Zone, which is a territory.
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First, the details: Cruz was born in Alberta, Canada, to an American mother and a Cuban father. U.S. Representative Alan Grayson of Florida told U.S. News and World Report that he believes Cruz’s mother, Eleanor, may have renounced her U.S. citizenship by taking a Canadian oath of citizenship.
Ah, what goes around comes around. Had Obama been born a year later, it wouldn’t have mattered whether that birth took place in Hawaii, Kenya, Indonesia, or anywhere else. After all, “Trump and Ted” has a nice ring to it, and they appeal to the same segment of the Republican Party with their hard line on immigration and anti-establishment rhetoric. The Fix’s Chris Cillizza explains why the Trump-Cruz dynamic isn’t going away any time soon.
Some Trump supporters seem to understand Trump’s not-so-subtle hint. Hence Trump’s sudden concern over the birthplace of a man who perhaps should be nicknamed Calgary Ted.
Dave Carney, an unaligned GOP strategist in New Hampshire, ran through a list of other GOP contenders who had attacked Trump, including ex-candidates such as former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and South Carolina Sen. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision”. For example, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria, and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who was born in Vancouver, Canada, and grew up in California, were seen as ineligible to run for president because they did not qualify as “natural born citizens”. But the question of precisely what the Constitution means has never been fully explored by the courts.
“The child of a US born citizen born overseas is a natural born citizen”.
Update: Fair point from some Cruz fans on Twitter: The best way for a conservative to endear himself to the base is to be shivved by John McCain. “I want to thank you for coming out, and if you agree with me -” he said, before gasps began to emerge from the audience.
McCain has clashed repeatedly with Cruz in the Senate and early in the Texan’s Senate career derided him as a “whacko bird”.
On Thursday, Cruz also dismissed Donald Trump’s suggestion that he ask a judge for a declaratory judgment to stave off any sort of legal challenge to his candidacy. I’m not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into. It was not an obstacle to John McCain, born in the Canal Zone. The Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nominee, Sen.
Whereas Canada is a whole different country.
Pro-Cruz super PAC Keep the Promise 1 also said in a statement: “As Cruz rises in the polls, his opponents are looking for anything to stop his momentum”.
But maybe Cruz will have to squirm a bit.
“I don’t know the answer to that”, McCain responded.
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Finally, the Cruz birther questions show how provocative and personal issues persist in media political coverage, to the (possible) exclusion of more substantive discussion.
