Just when Ted Cruz thought he was sitting pretty for the Iowa caucuses:
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.”
Now, I originally didn’t comment on this since I figured it was a settled issue: Ted Cruz’s mom was born in the US, and was probably still a US citizen at the time young Rafael Jr. was born even though she’d already applied for Canadian citizenship, and that was that.
But, as has been pointed out, none other than Laurence Tribe — who in addition to being the finest Constitutional scholar alive was one of Cruz’ professors at Harvard — is but one of the many experts to beg to differ (emphasis mine):
“I think there’s a scholarly consensus, but it’s not a done deal,” said Sarah Helene Duggin, a professor at the Catholic University of America, adding that experts aren't unanimous on the issue. “I don’t think it’s open and shut at all.”
Tribe, who also taught constitutional law to Cruz and Obama at Harvard, concurred. “I don’t agree that it’s ‘settled law,’” he told ABC News. “The Supreme Court has never addressed the issue one way or the other, as I believe Ted ought to know.”
Cruz tried to laugh it off at first, but with John McCain and Rand Paul chiming in, he’s been forced to react in such a way that shows he’s at the very least quite concerned about the damage such news does to him with the Republican base, both in Iowa and elsewhere.
Note that while the president and vice president must have had at least one parent who was an American citizen at the time the future POTUS or VPOTUS was born, this does not apply to other elected officials in American. Otherwise Ahhhnuld could never have become governor of California.
That’s why this wasn’t an issue for Cruz until now. And damn, I must give Trump props for figuring this out. When he first started spouting on this last week I thought that he was clutching at straws to keep Cruz from taking Iowa. Now it looks as if either Trump is the luckiest sumbeeyotch what stood in shoe leather, or he has a Roger-Stoneian gift for finding oppo. And when you consider that Trump and Stone have been buddies and Republican operatives for decades, you gotta wonder if the recent alleged rift between the two was either quietly patched up, or never existed in the first place.
By the way, if you’re wondering what Roger Stone thinks of Ted Cruz, here’s a tweet from him on the subject:
Somehow I don’t think that’s a complement.