In response to a report by the Dallas Morning News that suggested Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) could see his 2016 presidential hopes evaporate because he possesses Canadian citizenship, Cruz announced on Monday that he will renounce his citizenship there. Cruz, 42, also gave a copy of his birth certificate to the News, which posted a picture of it online in an article this morning. It indicates that Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta on December 22, 1970, and lists his mother as being born in Delaware and his father as a native of Cuba. The Texas senator says his mother's citizenship is enough to make him a "natural-born" American citizen, which the US Constitution requires of a presidential candidate.
Business Insider refers to a nonpartisan Congressional Research Service report from November 2011 on the question of what qualifies an individual as a "natural-born citizen", concluding that Cruz probably would be eligible to run for president.
"The weight of legal and historical authority," the CRS report says, "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."
Cruz is a favorite among Tea Partiers. Members and politicians associated with the movement had long needled President Barack Obama with calls for him to release his birth certificate, suspecting he was born abroad. Obama finally made public the document, which showed he was born in Hawaii, in April 2011. Cruz never joined that chorus of "birthers", but he has been the most consistently defiant voice in the Republican Party, known for taunting his Democratic opposition and daring his party to join him in shutting down the federal government to block funding for Obama's health-care law.
"Given the raft of stories today about my birth certificate, it must be a slow news day," Cruz wrote in a press release. "The facts of my birth are straightforward: I was born in 1970 in Calgary, Canada. Because my mother was a U.S. citizen, born in Delaware, I was a U.S. citizen by birth. When I was a kid, my Mom told me that I could choose to claim Canadian citizenship if I wanted. I got my U.S. passport in high school.
"Because I was a U.S. citizen at birth, because I left Calgary when I was 4 and have lived my entire life since then in the U.S., and because I have never taken affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship, I assumed that was the end of the matter."
The senator seemed to have been taken by surprise by the News' report that he had dual citizenship, writing, "Now the Dallas Morning News says that I may technically have dual citizenship. Assuming that is true, then sure, I will renounce any Canadian citizenship. Nothing against Canada, but I'm an American by birth and as a U.S. Senator, I believe I should be only an American."
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