McCain says concerns over Cruz citizenship legitimate

Cruz’s comments came as he tries to close the deal with Iowans on his most ambitious trip yet in the Hawkeye State. I didn’t bring this up.

The former presidential candidate says Cruz’s eligibility for the office is a “legitimate question”. A lawsuit has been filed in Vermont to keep him off the ballot there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if suits were filed in other states as well. He also was a Canadian citizen until he renounced that in 2014.

Senator Ted Cruz and President Barack Obama’s political orientations may be poles apart, but otherwise they share a lot of similarities. That would also be the earliest a five-year phase-out could end if Cruz were president, given that his term would begin in 2017.

Catholic University law professor Sarah Helene Duggin told ABC she believes there is a scholarly consensus that Cruz would qualify as a natural born citizen, “but it’s not a done deal”. “Go to court now & seek Declaratory Judgment-you will win!” he tweeted.

Cruz brushed aside a question about McCain’s remarks as he arrived for his first event of the day in Iowa, at the Pizza Ranch in Pocahontas.

Cruz responded in his own CNN interview, saying, “Listen, the Constitution and the laws of the United States are straightforward”.

“With all due respect to our friends in the news media, elections are not won in newsrooms in Manhattan and D.C.”, Cruz said to dozens of assembled media outlets on Thursday afternoon.

“The differences between us and other candidates is that some candidates are focused on only one place and we, of course, are campaigning in multiple places”, Rubio told the Des Moines Register’s editorial board on Wednesday.

“Our campaign is not going to be a campaign of personalities, it is going to be a campaign of issues”, she said.

The Congressional Research Service, the arm of the Library of Congress which for more than a century has been tasked with providing (allegedly) non-partisan research and legal analysis to members of Congress, has described a “natural born” citizen as one who is a citizen “at birth” or “by birth”, as opposed to a “naturalized” citizen.

Cruz was born in Calgary but is an American citizen by birth thanks to his mother’s citizenship.

Few took those questions seriously; even McCain’s harshest critics dismissed the concerns out of hand; and the Senate quickly approved a resolution – written and sponsored by Democrat Claire McCaskill – declaring, “John Sidney McCain, III, is a “natural born citizen” under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States”.

But we were talking about Trump, and whether it’s surprising he’s raising questions about Cruz.

For Cruz, the questions might not have gained much steam if not for the fact that Obama and his allies spent years battling allegations from “birthers” that he wasn’t really born in Hawaii.

Appearing on an Arizona radio talk show, McCain was asked about Cruz’ qualifications, and gave Cruz a bruising. Cruz should be deemed unsuitable for the presidency because of his wrongheaded ultra-right-wing views and his unsafe political ruthlessness, not because his American mother happened to be living in Canada when he was born.

McCain noted that he was born in Panama Canal Zone, a US military base, but said, “that’s different from being born on foreign soil”.