Donald Trump has been questioning whether Ted Cruz is eligible to run for President because he was born in Canada. I thought it might be worth it to look at the circumstances of Cruz’s birth, then get an opinion from some legal experts.

So as far as I can tell, there are 3 people on the planet who think that Cruz is not eligible to run for President. Donald Trump, Rand Paul and Ann Coulter, a famous celebrity comedian who supported Mitt Romney, and now supports Donald Trump. She is very fond of getting attention by saying outrageous things, which she later claims are “jokes”. This week, she wanted to have the Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, deported. She later said she was joking.

Ted Cruz’s mother was born in the USA

So, let’s start with the facts:

Eleanor Darragh, mother of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), was born in Delaware on Nov. 23, 1934, establishing her citizenship by birth–and, according to U.S. law, that of her son, even though he was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Dec. 22, 1970.

You can look at her birth certificate on Breitbart News. This is the thing that all the birthers on Daily Kos and Democratic Underground denied the existence of, until it appeared. There is no doubt that Ted Cruz’s mother is an American citizen, and she met the residency requirements to pass on birthright citizenship to baby Ted.

Ted Cruz’s mother passes the residency requirement to pass on birthright citizenship

Former assistant U.S. attorney, and law professor Andrew McCarthy explains in National Review:

Under the law in effect when Cruz was born in 1970 (i.e., statutes applying to people born between 1952 and 1986), the requirement was that, at the time of birth, the American citizen parent had to have resided in the U.S. for ten years, including five years after the age of fourteen. Cruz’s mother, Eleanor, easily met that requirement: she was in her mid-thirties when Ted was born and had spent most of her life in the U.S., including graduating from Rice University with a math degree that led to employment in Houston as a computer programmer at Shell Oil.

Ted’s mother registered baby Ted with the U.S. Consulate in Calgary. Cruz moved back to the USA when he was 4 years old. Cruz was able to get a U.S. passport to travel abroad in 1986. The U.S. government does not hand out U.S. passports to non-citizens.

A legal opinion from the Harvard Law Review

Now, I didn’t think this topic was worth writing about. It was actually my friend Robb who urged me to do it.

Robb sent me this article from the Harvard Law Review, which is what made me decide to go ahead and write about it.

The article is written by two experts in the law:

Neal Kumar Katyal is an American lawyer and chaired professor of law. He served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States from May 2010[2] until June 2011… Katyal was the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University Law Center and the lead counsel for the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. While serving at the Justice Department, he argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court.

Paul Drew Clement is a former United States Solicitor General and current Georgetown University law professor. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. He was nominated by President George W. Bush on March 14, 2005 for the post of Solicitor-General, confirmed by the United States Senate on June 8, 2005, and took the oath of office on June 13. Clement replaced Theodore Olson. Clement resigned on May 14, 2008, effective June 2, 2008, and joined the Georgetown University Law Center as a visiting professor and senior fellow at the Supreme Court Institute.

The article says:

The Constitution directly addresses the minimum qualifications necessary to serve as President. In addition to requiring thirty-five years of age and fourteen years of residency, the Constitution limits the presidency to “a natural born Citizen.” All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase “natural born Citizen” has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time. And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States.

While some constitutional issues are truly difficult, with framing-era sources either nonexistent or contradictory, here, the relevant materials clearly indicate that a “natural born Citizen” means a citizen from birth with no need to go through naturalization proceedings. The Supreme Court has long recognized that two particularly useful sources in understanding constitutional terms are British common law and enactments of the First Congress. Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase “natural born Citizen” includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent.

“Natural born” means no naturalization process. Ted Cruz’s mother was a citizen by birth. She meets the residency requirements to pass on birthright citizenship. We have her birth certificate. We also have Ted’s birth certificate with her name on it as his mother. This ends the issue for all the people who are governed by reason and evidence.