Somehow I'd missed this about the crazy that is Ted Cruz, favorite of teabaggers:
Ted Cruz rejected questions Sunday over his eligibility to be president, saying that although he was born in Canada “the facts are clear” that he’s a U.S. citizen. “My mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She’s a U.S. citizen, so I’m a U.S. citizen by birth,” Cruz told ABC. “I’m not going to engage in a legal debate.”
The Texas senator was born in Calgary, where his mother and father were working in the oil business. His father, Rafael Cruz, left Cuba in the 1950s to study at the University of Texas and subsequently became a naturalized citizen.
The Constitution requires the president to be a "natural born Citizen." Legal scholars agree that means a citizen at birth, as opposed to one who was naturalized, which is someone who immigrated to the U.S. and became a citizen later in life.
This opinion is not good enough for the Cruz birthers but it is good enough for many of the birthers who rejected it when it was applied to Obama. King Birther Donald Trump has not decided whether he's a Cruz birther. Trump tells The National Review that he has "not studied his situation." Still, Cruz is "very different" from President Obama, because Cruz "has been very candid and open about his place of birth and his background." This would be a novel criteria to constitutional eligibility. But there's also another way Cruz's background is also very different than Obama's: Obama was born in America.
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