In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Trump said Cruz’s birthplace-Canada-could be a “precarious” issue for the Republican Party.
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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?”
“I’d hate to see something like that get in his way”, Trump told the Post.
Business mogul Donald Trump, who bolstered birthers’ claims that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, suggested Monday that Cruz might not be eligible to be commander-in-chief.
However, legal scholars have long interpreted natural born citizen to refer to whether someone acquired their citizenship at birth, not the geographic location where they were born.
Mr Cruz was born in Calgary to an American mother and a Cuban father.
It’s an awkward issue for Cruz, who found out about his Canadian citizenship in recent years and renounced it in 2014.
“I do like Ted Cruz, but not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba”, he said of the country where Cruz’s father, an evangelical preacher, was born.
Cruz responded with a tweet of the notorious “Happy Days” scene of Fonzie water skiing over a shark. “Who cares?”, said Cruz late Tuesday in Sioux Center, Iowa, quoted by The Washington Post.
The courts have never directly addressed the definition of being a natural-born citizen, and the Constitution does not fully explain the requirements.
Despite Trump’s decision to raise questions about Cruz’s eligibility, the senator has steadfastly refused to engage with Trump on the issue, arguing the primary should hinge on more pressing concerns. After all, Arizona senator John McCain ran for president on the Republican ticket in 2008, despite the fact that he was born in the Panama Canal Zone (to USA citizens).
What it seems to come down to is that Cruz will order deportations, with no option to return, and Trump will order mass deportations, with options to return for an unknown number after an unknown period of time.
Back on December 7, when a poll dropped showing Trump suddenly trailing Cruz in Iowa, I wondered how long it would be before Trump started idly wondering aloud whether Cruz is eligible to be president.
Trump had questioned Cruz’s legal qualifications before though.
“You’re putting the presidency in play in some way in a world in which the American president is the anchor”, Neuborne said.
It appears that, at least constitutionally, Cruz has no roadblocks on his journey to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“I hear it was checked out by every attorney and every which way and I understand Ted is in fine shape”, Trump told ABC News last September of his rival’s constitutional eligibility because of his birthplace.
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Meanwhile, Trump’s remarks about Muslims were featured in a propaganda film recently released by the Africa-based al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabab, which compared Trump’s rhetoric to slavery, white supremacism and the disproportionate incarceration of African-American males.
