Donald Trump Suggests Ted Cruz’s Canadian Birth Could Be A Problem For The GOP
In response to questions from reporters, Donald Trump suggested that Ted Cruz's Canadian birth could pose problems for the GOP if Cruz won the party's nomination.
Donald Trump said last night that the fact that Ted Cruz was born in Canada could be an issue if the Texas Senator ends up being the Republican nominee:
LOWELL, Mass. — Donald Trump said in an interview that rival Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace was a “very precarious” issue that could make the senator from Texas vulnerable if he became the Republican presidential nominee.
“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said when asked about the topic. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”
Trump added: “I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”
Cruz responded to Trump’s comments on Twitter later Tuesday evening by referring to an iconic episode of the sitcom “Happy Days,” in which the character Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis. The image has become a symbol of something shopworn and overdone.
Trump’s remarks — part of a backstage interview before a rally here Monday night — come as Cruz is rising as a serious threat in the presidential campaign, especially in Iowa, where some polls have shown Cruz eclipsing the billionaire mogul. The two have had a cordial and at times even friendly relationship over the past year, but they are competing intensely for the support of conservatives as the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses draw near.
There have been recent signs of tension. At a rally last month in Iowa, Trump told voters of Cruz: “Just remember this — you’ve got to remember, in all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, okay? Just remember that . . . just remember.”
In the interview with The Washington Post, Trump said he was providing a candid assessment of his leading opponent rather than initiating a personal attack and reviving the “birther” debate that he once led against President Obama. He repeatedly said he is hearing chatter on the topic among voices on the right. “People are bringing it up,” he said.
Trump has veered from shrugging off the issue to raising more questions himself. In an interview with ABC News in September, Trump said he did not think Cruz’s birthplace was an issue. “I hear it was checked out by every attorney and every which way and I understand Ted is in fine shape,” he said.
But months earlier in Iowa, Trump told reporters that it could be a “difficult problem.”
“He’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him. . . . certainly it’s a stumbling block, and he’s going to have to have it solved before he goes too far,” Trump said, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Speaking late Tuesday in Sioux Center, Iowa, Cruz laughed off questions about Trump’s comment, saying he would let his campaign’s “Happy Days” tweet speak for itself.
To be fair to Trump, it’s worth noting that he did not bring up the issue of Cruz’s birth himself, but instead was responding to questions asked by reporters on the campaign trail regarding the matter, nor has be brought up the issue of either Cruz’s Canadian birth or the campaign he led during the 2012 election cycle regarding specious claims that the President was not born in the United States during the course of his campaign, Indeed, when he has been asked about the latter issue on over the course of the past six months Trump has dismissed questions about the President’s birth by essentially saying he’s not talking about that any more. If Trump starts raising the issue of Cruz’s birth in his speeches, that would mark a decided turn from the way he has handled Cruz up until now. Indeed, even if Trump chooses to start taking on Cruz directly the way he has run his campaign this time around suggests he’s likely to stay away from the birther nonsense.
As for the issue of Cruz’s Canadian birth and his eligibility to serve as President, as I noted in March when the issue came up shortly after Cruz officially entered the race, it is clear that Cruz does qualify as a “natural born citizen” and is therefore eligible to serve as President of the United States. While it is true that Cruz was born in Canada, his mother was an American citizen at the time he was born and had lived in the United States for at least fourteen years after her fourteenth birthday to giving birth to her son, a fact which is relevant since it was one of the requirements under the relevant law for her to be able to pass on American citizenship to her son notwithstanding the fact that he was born abroad. This makes him an American citizen from birth, or a “natural born citizen” as the Constitutional language goes, and therefore fully eligible to serve as President.
This analysis is supported by a piece earlier this year in the Harvard Law Review by Neal Kaytal and Paul Clement, two of the best appellate litigators in the country, that answers this question quite definitively and makes it clear that Cruz is indeed a “natural born citizen” as that term is used in Article II of the Constitution:II
While some constitutional issues are truly difficult, with framing-era sources either nonexistent or contradictory, here, the relevant materials clearly indicate that a “natural born Citizen” means a citizen from birth with no need to go through naturalization proceedings. The Supreme Court has long recognized that two particularly useful sources in understanding constitutional terms are British common law. Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase “natural born Citizen” includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent.
As to the British practice, laws in force in the 1700s recognized that children born outside of the British Empire to subjects of the Crown were subjects themselves and explicitly used “natural born” to encompass such children. These statutes provided that children born abroad to subjects of the British Empire were “natural-born Subjects . . . to all Intents, Constructions, and Purposes whatsoever.” The Framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like “natural born,” since the statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War. They were also well documented in Blackstone’sCommentaries, a text widely circulated and read by the Framers and routinely invoked in interpreting the Constitution.
No doubt informed by this longstanding tradition, just three years after the drafting of the Constitution, the First Congress established that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were U.S. citizens at birth, and explicitly recognized that such children were “natural born Citizens.” The Naturalization Act of 1790 provided that “the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States . . . .” The actions and understandings of the First Congress are particularly persuasive because so many of the Framers of the Constitution were also members of the First Congress. That is particularly true in this instance, as eight of the eleven members of the committee that proposed the natural born eligibility requirement to the Convention served in the First Congress and none objected to a definition of “natural born Citizen” that included persons born abroad to citizen parents.
(…)
The original meaning of “natural born Citizen” also comports with what we know of the Framers’ purpose in including this language in the Constitution. The phrase first appeared in the draft Constitution shortly after George Washington received a letter from John Jay, the future first Chief Justice of the United States, suggesting:
[W]hether it would not be wise & seasonable to provide a . . . strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in chief of the american [sic] army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.
As recounted by Justice Joseph Story in his famous Commentaries on the Constitution, the purpose of the natural born Citizen clause was thus to “cut[] off all chances for ambitious foreigners, who might otherwise be intriguing for the office; and interpose[] a barrier against those corrupt interferences of foreign governments in executive elections.” The Framers did not fear such machinations from those who were U.S. citizens from birth just because of the happenstance of a foreign birthplace. Indeed, John Jay’s own children were born abroad while he served on diplomatic assignments, and it would be absurd to conclude that Jay proposed to exclude his own children, as foreigners of dubious loyalty, from presidential eligibility.
As with President Obama, the legal and factual issues clearly establish that there are no legitimate questions about Cruz’s eligibility. The interesting question will be whether Trump makes an issue out of this beyond the questions he’s already been asked.
I’ll believe it when I see her papers, and don’t try to fool me with the Photoshopped version.
I fully expect accusations of being extraterrestrial reptiloid replicants being hurled in this election. The American public seems to allow anything to be said, and our news media is clearly fearful and defanged.
I almost feel sorry for Cruz. Here he’s spent months kissing up to Trump so as not to alienate Trump’s fan club, which he assumed he’d inherit once Trump bailed. And what’s happened? Trump hasn’t bailed, and now he’s stuck a knife in Cruz’s back.
Will Trump pursue this? Probably. The reaction from the Trumpkins has been positive, so far, so why should he drop it?
@jukeboxgrad:
That’s funny, and I know you intended it to be so, but you have to realize that this is what it will come to.
God, what an obnoxious “I Love Me” wall.
And there seems no doubt Cruz is a genuine evangelical, in fact a complete religious whack job. So Trump lied. Who could have seen that coming?
I have a comment tied up in the spam filter, and I’m not sure why. I didn’t use any product names, obscenity, or profanity. It was a response to jukeboxgrad.
In Rogers v Bellei, the Supreme Court ruled that someone who was born to the American parent outside of the United States was not a citizen based upon the Fourteenth Amendment. (In that particular case, the immigration law at the time permitted Bellei’s citizenship to be revoked.)
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/401/815.html
There’s no ambiguity here. Cruz is obviously a citizen, but that is due to statute that grants jus sanguinis citizenship, not based upon the Constitution.
Concern Trump is concerned…..
Doug, you’re being reasonable and logical and sensible and lawyerly about this….none of which flies with the Trumpenproletariat.
They want to scream like toddlers. It’s the knee-jerk reaction from the naked Id. They’re not getting what they want out of the world, so it’s everyone else’s fault.
While this is correct, it’s important to keep in mind that the two cases are different in one crucial way: Cruz was in fact born outside the United States, whereas Obama is only imagined to have been in the minds of conspiracy theorists who are accusing the President of forgery and fraud. The legal conclusion is the same either way (both Cruz and Obama are eligible to be president), but in only one case is there a conspiracy theory as opposed to simply a misreading of constitutional law.
CSK:
I know the reason why:
There’s a bug in the Reply command here, and it’s somehow linked to my name. It’s been this way for a long time. Weird. The simple solution is to just reply to me without using the Reply feature.
By the way, there is already one Republican Senator on record saying Cruz cannot be president (link):
JBGrad: Ah, okay. Thanks. The gist of my comment was that I liked yours, thought it was funny–but I can see the Trumpkins demanding a birth certificate at some point.
Among those who are untainted by the birther stupidity this has to be just the very definition of irony. Sen Cruz’s father has been one of the most vociferous birthers, being on youtube telling a TeaParty crowd that Barack should ‘go back to Kenya’. And in a delicious aside, plenty of Repubs won’t believe that Sen Cruz’s birthplace could be an issue because they believe that he was born in the US. In Jan ’12, the Dallas Morning News published a poll showing that 29% of R’s believed Barack was born in the US but 40% believed the same thing of Sen Cruz.
Another of those issues that has the Left pointing at Repubs and laughing at something the R’s don’t comprehend at all.
Who exactly does Donald Trump think would kneecap the Republican nominee with frivolous court cases? Probably Donald Trump. He has promised not to run as an independent if he loses the Republican nomination. He has not promised not to sabotage the eventual nominee.
Canada has me worried.
Why are they sending us low lifers like Ted Cruz?
Time to build a wall from Vancouver to New Brunswick, I’m pretty sure Trump can get Canada to pay for it.
Why do the Republicans seem like they are trying out for a spot on the Kardashians reality show?
When did the GOP stop caring about policy?
@al-Ameda: We will happily pay for it if it keeps Ted Cruz and Justin Bieber from coming back….
Of course this won’t be an issue for the GOP.
Cruz is white.
@al-Ameda: Canada might build the wall but it won’t be to keep Canadians from fleeing south.
“I know the reason why:
It was a response to jukeboxgrad.
There’s a bug in the Reply command here, and it’s somehow linked to my name.”
Actually it’s a result of the filter’s anagram detector. ‘jukeboxgrad’ is code for ‘Go Ax Jerk Dub’. No threats against our presidents can be permitted.
@J-Dub:
Some people are wiling to do anything to get away from harsh Winter weather.
Not many American cities are better places than Vancouver BC.
Doug, you’re such a buzzkill.
Ah yes, Trump v. Cruz, where we’re rooting for injuries, kind of like the Patriots/Cowboys.
@JohnMcC:
This just infuriates me. (Ditto for Orly Taitz). Cruz Sr. and Taitz are both immigrants. How dare they question Obama’s citizenship, when he has family roots in this country going back centuries?! I am not one to normally say, “Go back to where you came from,” but in both their cases, it’s appropriate.
Well, now La Coulter claims Cruz ain’t eligible.
I put this down to a desperate attempt to get talked about again rather than actual belief. Annie’s trajectory has been following in many ways that of Snowbilly Snookie.
That’s not the major issue here, the major issue here is the rumor that Rafael Cruz isn’t Ted’s father. The rumor that Ted’s actual father is Fidel Castro and that Ted is an actual Manchurian candidate. That rumor isn’t going away until Ted and Rafael Cruz both agree to have their blood tested to prove linage. So far neither of them have agreed to this, so the rumor won’t die.
@grumpy realist:
You know what’s truly ironic about that? Coulter was on the receiving end of some major trashing when she wrote some mildly critical comments about Palin years ago. I guess she doesn’t want to make the same mistake twice, since the present Trumpkins are the former Palinistas, and they’re six times as enraged as they were five years ago.
OT, but Gary Johnson has decided to run for the presidency as the Libertarian Party candidate.
Back in 1790, the naturalization law at the time specified that children of citizens who were born outside the US were “natural born,” although with some strings attached. (That law has since been repealed and replaced many times over.)
Obviously, Congress believed at a time that the ink was barely dried on the Constitution that it could use statute to define the meaning of “natural born.”
This isn’t difficult — if Congress wants to pass a law that defines someone such as Cruz as being “natural born”, then it is free to do so. But until it does, we have to rely on case law, and as of right now, it doesn’t favor Cruz, as I noted with my link above.
Personally, I would have no problem with a law that would allow Cruz to run, and I can’t see why anyone would have a sound legal justification for opposing it. So instead of leaving this up in the air, just settle the matter and pass a law. I have no doubt that Obama wouldn’t veto it.
Has Rafael Eduardo Cruz been properly vetted? Do we even know that he was actually born in Canada rather than some truly foreign country? Where is his long form birth certificate? Where are the birth announcements? I’m sorry but we have to make sure that some foreign born imposter doesnt sneak into the highest office in our fair land.
Yes the schadenfruede is tasty.
@Stonetools:
Exactly
Obama spent years benefiting from the Birther thing until Trump finally forced him to put up or shut up.
Obama supporters have gotten a hell of a lot more benefit out of the Birther stupidity than Obama’s opponents.
Nonetheless, there is a sizable contingent of Obama supporters who will push the Cruz birther thing as a form of “payback.” Around here, I could even name names.
Trump is right that this would become an issue in the election, because the a-holes will push it like hell. Some will be on the right, but a lot will be on the left.
@Pch101: I’m pretty sure that Cruz did reside in the US continuously for at least five years between 14 and 28 years of age, as stipulated in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. If that is the case, he is a citizen from birth, hence he is native born.
I personally am unlikely to vote for him, but I’m pretty sure that this means that he is, in fact, eligible. SCOTUS could rule differently someday, but I don’t think this requires legislative action.
@Jenos Idanian: How did Trump’s nonsensical birther pandering in 2012 cause then Senator Obama to post his birth certificate in 2008? Is he such a great negotiator that even the laws of time and space crumble before him? Trump didn’t cause anyone to put up or shut up, he just started priming the rubes for this years campaign.
@Jenos Idanian:
WTF are you on???
@Jenos Idanian: Oh, let’s see if I have the sequence right here: Donald Trump insists he has proof that Obama was born in Kenya, and proof that this means he is ineligible to be president. Obama presents his long-form birth certificate and challenges Trump to show his hand. Trump slinks away, humiliated, but continues to insist that he was right all along.
And to you, this was a win for Trump.
For this, I’d like to thank you. Because it’s been impossible for me to understand the thought process or lack thereof that would lead someone to support Trump. And now I see just how stupid and completely lacking in self-awareness a Trump supporter has to be.
@Pete S:
Maybe Trump got access to the time machine Obama used to plant those birth notices and to cause the financial crisis in ’08.
@Electroman:
Jus soli = Citizenship from place of birth (literally, “the soil”)
Jus sanguinis = Citizenship from the blood line
The Supreme Court has already determined that the 14th amendment applies to jus soli, not jus sanguinis.
Ted Cruz is a citizen because of a law that allows parents to pass on citizenship. That law can be changed or revoked entirely if Congress chooses to do so. His citizenship is not a constitutional right, unlike the citizenship of someone who is born on US soil.
As I noted, the Congress decided when the country was new that it can define what “native born” is. That would suggest that (a) it can do so again and (b) the definition is flexible.
@Jenos: You’ve been flogging this conspiracy-esque notion that the left ultimately benefits from Birther talk, unsuccessfully, for a long time. Interestingly, the always well-linked jukebox pointed out your own Birther tendencies in an earlier thread, as did mantis before then.
Or have I confused the name changes again? I always forget who is who.
Oh, like the a$$hole Trump himself, who pushed the issue about Obama…
This feels like a “don’t make me kill this kitten” type of warning. Trump knows what he’s doing and it’s boring and cynical.
@Jenos Idanian: How the hell do you figure Obama benefited from the birther thing? Having his legitimacy to be president challenged repeatedly is somehow “benefiting”?
Meanwhile, the only prominent Democrat talking about Cruz’s citizenship is Alan Grayson. Did you somehow forget that the Republican frontrunner is the one saying this is an issue?
@Jenos Idanian:
Or, just maybe, Trump’s detectives told Donald that, yes, Hawaii actually was a state at the time Obama was born there.
@al-Ameda: as a Canadian looking in on this American election cycle….there’s more than a few of us who might help you with that wall..depending on said election’s outcome
@Facebones: Well, he isn’t really white, but he can pass for it.
@grumpy realist: Snowbilly Snookie, heh, heh.
@Jenos Idanian:
Beano! Come out and say it. You know you want to.
Mr. Trump
@al-Ameda:
If there ever actually were Trump detectives in Hawaii I suspect it took them several months, on expense account, to determine that Hawaii was a state.
@Just ‘nutha ig’rant cracker: I think I picked that up from someone over at Balloon Juice.
Charles Pierce’s description of Trump as a ‘hirsuite talking yam” is priceless.
@grumpy realist:
As is Charlie himself.
Do you really believe Trump is self financing, or do you think Hillary is slipping him money?
if he was “illegal”, would you all like him even more?!
Free market Republican, and Kardashian wannabe, Donald Trump wants to put a 45% tax on Chinese goods.
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/01/07/donald-trump-says-he-favors-big-tariffs-on-chinese-exports/
I wonder how many framed pictures of himself Trump owns…
@anjin-san: And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
With this farce of an election cycle we’ve pretty much devolved down to “Idiocracy.”
Man, Jenos slinks away after one comment. That spanking all of you laid down must have hurt.
Time for a little update. A couple of days ago I said this:
Little did I know that Alan Grayson was about to say this:
And then there’s this:
So Tyler has seen her birth certificate, but for some strange reason they don’t want the rest of us to see it. I wonder what Cruz is trying to hide?
@jukeboxgrad:
This is classic misdirection, invent a conspiracy, and when it’s proven to be false, no one will be talking about the real issue. You can’t all have forgotten the Killian documents that killed any talk about Bush Jr. going AWOL?
And the real issue here is of course Ted’s real father…
See. My comment ended up in moderation.
I might know why.
Oh, this is priceless. Ted Cruz’s mom has shown up on a list of Canadian citizens eligible to vote. Expect the whole Birther meme to go batsh*t crazy.
@Grumpy Realist:
I lived in the U.K. for four years as a student. Despite my periodic insistence that I was a U.S. citizen, and had no right to vote in their elections, I finally got a letter from some government agency informing me that I had been put on the voting roles. Maybe Canada does something similar–just grants you electoral squatter’s rights if you hang around there long enough.
But I agree that this will make the Trumpkins start slobbering with glee.
@PJ: There’s a reason I always refer to “jukebox” instead of “jukebox[thepartwe’renotincludingforwhateverreason].” Works in replying too if, like me, you just can’t live without links.
You know the old joke, call me whatever you want, just don’t call me late for dinner. Some people know me as juke or jbg. Anyway, I always thought it was OK to say jukeboxgrad as long as you didn’t use the Reply feature.
OK, so now (apparently in response to complaints from me and Alan Grayson) they have supposedly released mom’s ‘birth certificate.’ But they have released it only via Breitbart, probably because it’s a fake. Here are just some of the problems:
Trump voters are not so easily fooled. Keep trying, Cruz.
@jukeboxgrad: “I’ll believe it when I see her papers, and don’t try to fool me with the Photoshopped version.”
I want to see the original longest-formest version, on genuine Canadian sealskin 🙂