The Problem With Running For President in a Nativist Party (When Your Name is Rafael Cruz)

CruzCertificate

It was really only a matter of time before Ted Cruz, presidential candidate and most hated man in the U.S. senate, would fall victim to his own party’s anti-immigrant fervor. Climbing in the polls and threatening the Trump campaign in Iowa, Cruz has become the target of accusations and insinuations that the conservative firebrand, born of a Cuban father and American mother on Canadian soil (Calgary), does not meet the Constitutional requirement that a president be a “natural born citizen.”

From the left, it’s deliciously ironic to see this sort of comeuppance for man who sought to reassure GOP voters of his anti-immigrant bonafides by paraphrasing George Wallace’s “segregation forever speech” for The New York Times. And of course, there’s more than just a little satisfaction to be gained by watching the party that spawned an industry of nutty conspiracy theorists dedicated to casting doubt on Barack Obama’s eligibility now setting its sights on destroying one of its own.

While questions about Cruz’s eligibility have popped up now and again for years, this latest round of doubt sowing started with Donald Trump, who in his typically disingenuos, trademarked passive-aggressive way insisted that he was only looking out for the good of the Republican Party:

“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. It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head. I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

Not long after Trump lobbed his non-accusation accusation right-wing harpy Ann Coulter chimed in in more direct fashion, explicitly proclaiming through her twitter account that Cruz was not at natural born citizen.

And now the floodgates seem to be opening with Rand Paul and John McCain questioning the Texas senator’s eligibility to hold the highest office in the land. The McCain attack is particularly amusing, given that the Arizona senator was himself born abroad and ran for president nonetheless. The distinction, as McCain sees it, is that he was born in a U.S. Territory (a military base in the Panama Canal zone):

“Barry Goldwater ran for president; was born in Arizona when it was a territory. The Panama Canal was a territory of the United States of America. That’s different than being born on foreign soil. I think there is a question. I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into. I don’t think its illegitimate to look into it.”

In 2008, when John McCain decided to seek the presidency, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama co-sponsored a Senate resolution affirming the Arizona senator’s eligibility to run for president. Today, Texas senator Ted Cruz is seeing questions about his eligibility being raised within his own party. I guess that’s what happens when you set out to promote your personal career by trashing everyone around you, then cynically shut down the government to establish your own “holier than thou” ideological purity, while forcing others in your party to do the thankless work of keeping the country from a disastrous default.

I think I’ll just sit back an enjoy the show.

 

11 Comments

This Schadenfreude is great for my complexion.

Born down in a Canada man’s town
The first thing I did was hide that in the ground
You end up like a fool that’s protested too much
After you spent most of your life just covering it up
Not born in the U.S.A.
I was not born in the U.S.A.
I was not born in the U.S.A.
Not born in the U.S.A.

Let’s visit the alternate universe where Ted Cruz is a Democrat and an aggressive civil-rights leader — and who, as in this universe, didn’t renounce his Canadian citizenship until 2014 — and see how this plays out.

@nojo:
It wouldn’t go well.

However, the Demrats didn’t throw down the racist birther card (repeatedly and futilely) like the GOPers did.

@ManchuCandidate: Oh, the Alt Universe Demrats would fret, as Demrats do, but we would never hear the end of it from Fox. Especially the citizenship part. Which, back in our universe, surprises me that we haven’t heard more about it.

Which requires us to go full DC and posit Earth Three, where Trump doesn’t run, establishment candidates don’t tank, and Cruz is hugely annoying to the GOP script. Never mind nativism — kneejerk patriotism requires us to ask why Cruz flew the Canuck flag so long. On Earth Three, the issue becomes known as — wait for it — the Maple Leaf rag.

I’ll show myself out.

@nojo: If only we could discover that Cruz had used that Canadian passport to enjoy some free socialist healthcare. Happy daydreams to brighten up a Saturday at the office.

@Mistress Cynica: That would be ripe.

Short of that, what other benefits did it confer? Did he fly to Havana to pick up a box of cigars?

And really, how could such an obviously ambitious dude wait so long to dispose of it? Whether it actually becomes an issue — i.e. whether Cruz becomes a real threat to Trump — it’s something he should have recognized as a potential problem. Years ago.

@nojo:
Or the passport made it handy to travel without much side eye although the Tejas sized ego and cowboy boots would give any furriner pause.

Harvard Law prof Larry Tribe trolls his former student Rafael (P.S. how do you go from Rafael to Ted?) in the best way ever:

In his emails to the Guardian, Tribe discussed Cruz’s own approach to constitutional issues, noting that under “the kind of judge Cruz says he admires and would appoint to the supreme court – an ‘originalist’ who claims to be bound by the historical meaning of the constitution’s terms at the time of their adoption – Cruz wouldn’t be eligible because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and 90s required that someone be born on US soil to be a ‘natural born’ citizen.”

He added: “Even having two US parents wouldn’t suffice for a genuine originalist. And having just an American mother, as Cruz did, would clearly have been insufficient at a time that made patrilineal descent decisive.

Go at him until he snaps and makes a bigger ass of himself. If only there were a way to punish the bigots and sociopaths who vote for shitbags like Cruz.

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