Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is facing a federal lawsuit challenging his eligibility to run for president, based on a theory that he may not be a natural-born citizen.
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Cruz, a U.S. Senator from Texas who was born to a U.S. citizen mother and Cuban father in Calgary, Alberta, has brushed aside the attacks about his eligibility as pure politics. Cruz gained momentum in the debate by referring to Trump as a “birther” for questioning his qualifications to be president because he was born in Canada.
The claim cites legal theorists, including Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who say while Cruz is generally accepted to be a natural-born citizen, no court has definitively ruled on the question. And in an era when worldwide travel is easier and far more common than it was when “natural born citizen” may have meant something, it makes no sense to preserve even the hint of a distinction between Americans born here and Americans who happen to have be born elsewhere.
“Because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and “90s required that someone actually be born on US soil to be a ‘natural born” citizen”.
Republicans have split on the Cruz controversy. Cruz was born in Canada.
The State Department appealed and the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the lower court ruling holding that the citizenship clause of U.S. Constitutional Amendment XIV did not apply to citizenship by birth overseas to an American parent.
“Back in September, my friend Donald said that he had his lawyers look at this from every which way and there was nothing to do this”, Cruz said.
“I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made”, Trump concluded.
His mother was born here, she is an American citizen, she lived here for more than a year. As with Cruz, Obama’s mother was an American citizen. Was he a citizen because of his birth, because of where and how and to whom he was born? “I’ve spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court”.
The debate came just two weeks before the first real test of the campaign, when voters in Lowa picked their Republican and Democratic choices for President.
Among the 48 GOP senators who didn’t respond or haven’t declared Cruz eligible, however, were fellow Texan John Cornyn, the No. 2 senate Republican; John Thune of South Dakota, who is the Republican Conference chairman; Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, an immigration hardliner who’s backed Cruz on that issue; and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who also sought the GOP nod before dropping out last month.
“But I was born here”, Trump shot back.
The most noteworthy bit is Paul floating the idea that “natural-born” must mean something distinct from hereditary citizenship or else the Constitution wouldn’t specifically mention it. Right, there is a distinction – with naturalized citizenship, but Rand’s got an agenda here so he’s going to read the clause in the most crabbed way possible.
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Lee says it’s “absurd” for an originalist to argue that Congress would have the power to change the meaning of words in the Constitution.
