John McCain Joins the Ted Cruz Birther Train
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/ ... dian-birth
The former presidential candidate says Cruz’s eligibility for the office is a “legitimate question.”
BY TINA NGUYEN
Like camel coats and suede, birtherism is back in style this week thanks to two unlikely bedfellows, Donald Trump and Senator John McCain, who made waves in a radio interview Wednesday by echoing Trump in casting doubt on whether his colleague Senator Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, is even eligible for the presidency.
Yes, Canada: in 1970, a wailing baby named Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz was brought into this world in Calgary, where his mother, a U.S. citizen, happened to be living while working for the oil industry. Now, 45 years later, Cruz’s political enemies are raising questions about whether being born on foreign soil should disqualify his White House run. Trump, who initially didn’t give a damn about Cruz’s birth, said recently that the legal question actually could be “very precarious” for the G.O.P. due to the possibility that the issue could force him to go to court. (Not so coincidentally, Cruz, who gave up his Canadian passport when the question first arose years ago, had recently overtaken Trump in the polls in Iowa.)
But it’s one thing when Trump, known for going full birther on Barack Obama in 2011, questions Cruz’s American-ness. It’s another when McCain, a respected party elder, decorated veteran, and former Republican presidential nominee—one who happens to dislike Cruz intensely—repeats the question.
When asked about the issue on The Chris Merrill Show on Wednesday, McCain said he “[didn’t] know the answer” as to whether Cruz’s Calgary birth would bar him from the presidency.
“I know it came up in my race because I was born in Panama, but I was born in the Canal Zone, which is a territory,” McCain added, noting later that he was born on a U.S. military base and therefore fulfilled the constitutional requirement of being born on American soil. He also noted that the issue came up for 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who was born in the Arizona territory before it became an official state, but that it didn’t preclude him from the candidacy.
McCain suggested that Cruz attempt to preempt the question of his status—though that might be hard now that Trump is making hay of it—but admitted that it “may be the case” that the Supreme Court could be forced to decide the issue once and for all.
Such a case, according to the Congressional Research Service, would be unprecedented: while the Supreme Court has already settled the meaning of a “natural-born citizen” in regard to people born on American territory, it’s still fuzzy whether U.S. citizens born on foreign soil count:
The weight of legal and historical authority indicates that the term “natural born” citizen would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship “by birth” or “at birth,” either by being born “in” the United States and under its jurisdiction, even those born to alien parents; by being born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents; or by being born in other situations meeting legal requirements for U.S. citizenship “at birth.” Such term, however, would not include a person who was not a U.S. citizen by birth or at birth, and who was thus born an “alien” required to go through the legal process of “naturalization” to become a U.S. citizen.
To many Americans, however, Canada is the cultural and spiritual antithesis of the United States, what with their politeness and socialist health care and their bacon that looks like ham. And much like how one photo convinced an entire faction of Americans that Obama was a secret Muslim, Cruz’s image may be irreparably tied up with foreigners who drink milk out of a bag—even if he is a natural-born American.
In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Cruz, a constitutional scholar himself, brushed the issue aside, saying that the question was akin to “Fonzie jumping over a shark,” and derided the media for engaging in “silly sideshows.”
Update (4:20 P.M.): In another interview later on Thursday, Cruz accused McCain of raising the issue in order to help Senator Marco Rubio, considered Cruz’s top establishment rival for the G.O.P. nomination.
“I think it is no surprise to anybody that John McCain is going to be supporting Marco Rubio in this election,” Cruz told Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin. “It's no surprise at all that he's trying to do what he can to help the candidate that he's favoring who he thinks shares policy positions with him.”
