To recap:
• Republican Ted Cruz, a Tea Party favorite, was elected in 2012 to the US Senate from Texas.
• Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1970 to a Cuban-born father (who fought along with Fidel Castro and fled Cuba before the overthrow of Batista) and a US-born mother, working in the oil industry there. His family moved back to the US when he was four years old. He has never tried to hide these facts.
• All indications are that Cruz is planning to seek the Republican nomination for President in 2016.
• The US Constitution requires (rather ambiguously) that the President be a “natural born Citizen” of the United States.
• Most legal experts believe that because Cruz’s mother was a US citizen, he is constitutionally qualified to be President, even though he was born outside the US. I tend to agree.
• For reasons that are not entirely clear, Cruz on Monday released his birth certificate to The Dallas Morning News.
(Looks a little phony to me, but I’ll let it pass.)
• The Morning News reported that under Canadian law, Cruz holds both Canadian and US citizenship.
• After initially denying that he was a citizen of Canada, Cruz said he will renounce his 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.”
Still, let’s face it: Cruz’s Canadian origins raise all kinds of troubling questions.
If Cruz’s parents were temporary workers or permanent residents in Canada, they were entitled to coverage under the country’s system of single-payer government-funded health insurance– AKA “socialism.” So how can Cruz explain that he managed to survive and apparently thrive despite socialized pre-natal care, delivery and pediatric care? There’s something deeply suspicious here.
In addition, who knows what pernicious Canadian values Cruz absorbed during those crucial first four years of his life? As Josh Marshall observes:
[Y]ou have to wonder what kind of influences he was exposed to growing up in a primitive, post-colonial setting like Canada during the radical Trudeau regime.
I’m looking forward to Dinesh D’Souza‘s upcoming book and film investigating Cruz’s foreign influences and how they have shaped his worldview. Certainly if Cruz aspires to be President, he shouldn’t object to his Canadian pre-school years being fully vetted.
