Trump Questions Cruz’s Legal Eligibility for President
With less than a month before Iowans caucus, Republican front-runner Donald Trump is going negative against his closest competitor in the state, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Trump said Cruz’s birthplace—Canada—could be a “precarious” issue for the Republican Party. Trump didn’t go so far as to…
01/06/2016 @ 3:57 pm
Sometimes I have trouble deciding whether Donald Trump is stupid or ignorant, if not both. Long after everyone else had given up harping on the question of whether Barack Obama was a citizen, Trump continued to brash around insinuations that his researchers had unearthed evidence that Barack Obama was not an American citizen because he was born in Kenya rather than in Hawaii as stated on his birth certificate. The Republican frontrunner has scaled back his demands for proof of Obama’s citizenship, but now wants to make a case against Ted Cruz’s eligibility to serve as Commander-in-Chief, despite the fact that Cruz was born to an American mother living in Canada. According to the Laws of the UNITED STATES, any child born to an American mother is automatically a native born American, regardless of where the child was born.
The actual law in effect when both Barack Obama and Ted Cruz was born, a period between 1952 and 1986 states that “If one parent is a U.S. citizen, the U.S. citizen parent must have resided in the U.S. for 10 years, at least 5 of which were after age 14.”
Barack Obama’s mother met that requirement, which means that Barack Obama was a native born American regardless of where in the world he was actually born (and, no, Donald, it wasn’t in Kenya.)
Ted Cruz is eligible under the exact same criteria, assuming his mother resided in the U.S. for at least five years after the age of 14, which seems to be a very odd condition, at least to me. He therefore joins the ranks of Republicans Barry Goldwater, George Romney, and John McCain, all of whom were born to American parents who were living outside the United States at the time. None of them won, of course, but Donald probably know that.
Probably. I have now concluded that Donald Trump is both stupid and ignorant, which is a very dangerous combination. Maybe he should go out and sit down with the Oregon Idiots. I am sure they would agree about the contents of the Constitution to their mutual satisfaction.