Our View: It’s not Cruz’s birthplace that worries us
As recently as 2012, Ted Cruz was at the forefront of the “birther” movement along with Donald Trump. Cruz took every opportunity to insist President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, wasn’t truly an American. The president eventually felt compelled to release his Hawaiian “long form” birth certificate to quiet all but the most paranoid critics.
Such hijinks. Trump and Cruz must have been having a blast.
Sen. Cruz likely finds it less funny now. Donald Trump is insisting someone might challenge Cruz’s eligibility to be president due to his own birther controversy.
“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.
In this case, Cruz really wasn’t born in the United States. He was born in Calgary, Alberta. Like Obama, Cruz’s father wasn’t even an American – he was Cuban, and didn’t become a citizen until 2005. But Cruz’s mother was an American, born in Delaware, and she was living in Canada because that’s where her husband worked (for an oil company). They moved to the United States when little Ted was 4 years old.
The Constitution requires the president to be a “natural-born citizen.” Experts agree that children who are born abroad to U.S. citizens automatically qualify for citizenship. It’s the same reason Sen. John McCain, who was born at a U.S. military hospital in the Panama Canal zone, was qualified to be the Republican nominee in 2008.
In September, Trump said, “Ted is in fine shape.” But then Cruz jumped ahead of Trump in the Iowa polls and Trump is back to flogging birther conspiracies, just with a different target. Still, this scenario presents an interesting question. Being born in Canada, Cruz immediately became a Canadian citizen. He would be, if his parents had wanted to stay in Calgary, a Canadian anchor baby (to borrow his phrase).
As an adult, Cruz has been at the forefront of the movement to change our Constitution, to deprive children born in this country (of undocumented immigrants) their citizenship. Is he channeling some early childhood stigma? Why does he want to deprive them of something he was clearly granted?
And what took Sen. Cruz so long to renounce his Canadian citizenship? He didn’t get around to doing that until 2014, after he decided he would like to be president of the United States (and presumably not prime minister of Canada). It wouldn’t look so good to have a dual citizen running for president. So he ditched something he had held onto for 44 years.
It strikes us as more than a little hypocritical that the candidate most eager to deny birthplace citizenship to others enjoyed that same status his entire adult life. That he got rid of it only after a newspaper questioned him might sound like patriotism to some but sounds more like CYA to us.
Dual citizenship doesn’t necessarily connote divided loyalties. But in this case, getting rid of it strikes as the act of someone with a singular ambition.
This story was originally published January 12, 2016 at 5:59 PM with the headline "Our View: It’s not Cruz’s birthplace that worries us."