Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has only been an official presidential candidate for less than a day, but that’s all it took until The Washington Post ran a blog piece by reporter Aaron Blake highlighting the Cruz “birther movement.”
“Cruz, like a couple of presidential candidates before him, faces a potential hurdle to running for president in that it’s not 100 percent clear that he’s a ‘natural-born citizen,’ as the Constitution requires presidents to be,” Blake writes in an article entitled: “Everything you need to know about the Ted Cruz ‘birther’ movement.”
Blake even notes that “Legal scholars generally agree that Cruz meets the [natural born citizen] requirement,” while hedging that it “remains somewhat untested in the courts” and saying the issue is “not 100 percent clear.”
He also goes out of the way to explain why the Cruz birther movement is nothing like the widely-ridiculed Obama birther movement. “Questions about Cruz’s eligibility have everything to do with interpretation of the law,” he says, “the questions about Obama’s eligibility had everything to do with a dispute over the underlying facts — more specifically, conspiracy theories about whether the president was actually born in the United States…”
Cruz was born to an American mother in Canada, and for most of his life held duel Canadian and American citizenship. The consensus among the vast majority of legal scholars is that because he was a citizen at the time of his birth, Cruz fulfills the requirement that the U.S. president be a “natural born citizen.”
Other media outlets, such as Politifact, National Journal, Bloomberg, The Texas Tribune, The Atlantic, and even freaking Salon, have all come down on Cruz being eligible. (RELATED: Liberal WaPo Columnist Admits That ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Was A Lie)