Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, defended his eligibility to be president, saying Donald Trump and other Republicans are raising questions about his birth only because he is becoming a serious threat in early primary states. According to endlessly repeated arguments, though little Barack’s mother had been born in Kansas, her husband’s identity as a foreign student from Kenya would have rendered the baby ineligible, if evidence existed (though none did) that Barack had been born overseas.
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Trump added that “I don’t want to win this way, I want to win fair and square” but that Cruz should nonetheless seek a declaratory statement from a judge to clarify his eligibility.
But when Luntz asked the focus group whether they think Trump is going to win the Iowa caucuses, only two participants raised their hands. He caught attention last week when he announced a “bus tour” called “Out With The Old, In With The New”, but instead made hops between Iowa campaign events in a private plane. “We’ll have a nominee, hopefully, by sometime in the spring”.
Ted Cruz is now leading in Iowa opinion polls heading into the February 1 caucuses, the first primary contest in the nation.
Although legal experts widely believe Cruz is eligible for the Oval Office, the courts have yet to rule on the issue and could theoretically complicate the senator’s plans if a legal challenge were brought before them.
Cruz has refused to engage with Trump on the issue. Almost a quarter of Democrats said they “agree completely” with Mr. Trump’s ads, and another 19 percent agreed “somewhat”, according to the Mercury polls.
Legal scholars have said Cruz would qualify as a natural-born citizen, and therefore is eligible to run, because one parent is a citizen. “I don’t know. Nobody knows”. “Does natural born mean born to the land? In that case, he’s not”.
Cruz says he has 3,360 volunteers, many of them from Texas, working in Iowa. We should have said at the beginning of negotiations we want our prisoners back.
The Constitution says only a “natural-born citizen” may be president.
That feeling is echoed by party officials across the country, who acknowledged they have few tools to stop Cruz or Trump.
“The substance of the issue is clear and straight forward”, Cruz said on CNN’s “State of the Union”.
When I wrote about the overt racism injected into the campaign by Trump, the 2016 front-runner, conservative critics countered by citing the history of race-baiting by the Rev. Al Sharpton, a minor Democratic candidate in the 2004 race. “And that kinda suggests something has changed in the race”.
Several recent polls now show him ahead of Trump in Iowa, albeit narrowly. Trump was among those who questioned Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president because his father was from Kenya and has questioned whether the president actually was born in Hawaii. “Trump just gets things going to get people talking”. “I think I’m going to win”. Florida Senator Marco Rubio remains in striking distance and third place at 15 percent. While many voters who’ve become disillusioned with the Republican establishment would love to see Cruz or Trump elected, traditional Republicans are frightened at the idea.
That may explain why the attacks on Cruz and Trump pale in comparison to the amount spent disparaging other candidates.
We’ll talk about Ted Cruz. Both have attracted overflow crowds: Trump at large halls and stadiums; Cruz in countless coffee shops, convenience stores, churches and diners.
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The former MA governor Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012, tweeted on Friday that Cruz was indeed a “natural-born citizen”. Trump was once one of the most prominent people questioning the birthplace of President Barack Obama, who eventually released his long-form birth certificate in 2011.
