Ted Cruz celebrates his support from birthers
Texas Senator Ted Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, and
remains a Canadian citizen to this very day, but he is perfectly eligible to be president of the United States because as the child of on American mother,
he is a natural-born citizen.
Given the right-wing's obsessions with President Obama's birthplace, this is a quirky and amusing fact, but it's no more controversial than the fact that both John McCain (born in the Panama Canal Zone) and George Romney (born in Mexico) were born outside the United States. Put simply, if you're interested in running for president, you're a natural-born citizen if you were born on U.S. soil or if at the time of your birth both of your parents were U.S. citizens or one of them had been a citizen for at least ten years.
Note that this means that birthers were all obsessing over the wrong thing, because even if President Obama had been born in Kenya (or Mars, for that matter), he'd still be a natural-born American, because his mother was a lifelong U.S. citizen.
Of course, the birthers really don't care about pesky little things like accuracy or logic, so it's no surprise that one of their leaders, Joseph Farah, has come up with the world's worst explanation for why he has no problem with the prospects of a Ted Cruz presidential candidacy:
I don’t care because the Constitution was not written and ratified to be applied to some and not others. If no one cared about Obama’s questionable eligibility, despite his shocking lack of transparency and thin paper trail, then they have no business questioning Ted Cruz – who has released his birth certificate, renounced his Canadian citizenship and upheld every provision of the Constitution to the best of his ability throughout his life.
According to Farah, Obama's eligibility was questionable because he may have been born in Kenya. That's an insane position to hold, but to defend taking the exact opposite position with respect to Cruz by accusing your critics of hypocrisy takes a fair bit of chutzpah. The good news, I guess, is that Farah is finally on the right side of a birther question, despite his foolish rationale.
The great news, however, is that we're still talking about Ted Cruz 2016. What a gift that would be.