> Republican leadership debate,
WASHINGTON — It was Calgary’s big moment on the American political stage Thursday — as a candidate defended his right to run for president of the United States despite being born in the biggest city of Alberta.
Sen. Ted Cruz responded with indignation as he was pressed on his Canadian birth, by both the moderators of the Republican debate and by his emerging nemesis Donald Trump.
“I’ve spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Cruz, who is running neckand-neck with the real-estate mogul in Iowa.
“And I tell you, I’m not going to be taking legal advice from Donald Trump.”
The partisan crowd appeared to back him up, cheering the Texas senator and booing when the debate moderator and Trump dabbled in the country-of-birth issue.
Trump fired back that multiple constitutional scholars have raised Cruz’s birth as a legal question mark. One of them is Harvard’s Laurence Tribe — Cruz’s former law professor.
“Take it from your professor,” Trump retorted. He urged Cruz to get a judge’s opinion certifying his right to run, lest he later become the nominee and find his candidacy tied up in court: “There’s a big question mark over the head. And you can’t do that to the party.”
Cruz pointed out that Tribe is a Democrat. He said Trump started raising the issue only as Cruz’s poll numbers improved in Iowa.
With just weeks before the first nominating contests ahead of the November presidential election, the debate tested the dynamics of the Republican race: a tight contest in Iowa where Cruz’s organization and grass-roots appeal have made inroads against Trump’s persistent national advantage; a fierce fight between governors looking to position themselves for a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary; and the uncertainty about what happens after that in South Carolina, the site of Thursday’s debate.
Trump entered the night fresh off an NBC News survey that found he had expanded his lead over the field nationally. One-third of Republican voters favoured the real estate mogul, compared with 20 per cent for Cruz, 13 per cent for Rubio and 12 per cent for Dr. Ben Carson.
Cruz’s critics have revelled in the fact that he was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban-American father, and spent his first few years there as they worked in the Alberta oil industry.
Some pranksters have attempted to edit his Wikipedia page to point out his Canadian birth. A lawsuit has been launched, and more are expected.
Several constitutional scholars have emerged to call it a legitimate question because they say the Supreme Court has never ruled on the definition of what constitutes a “natural-born” U.S. citizen, which is a constitutional requirement to run for president.
Tribe said he believes Cruz should qualify, because Tribe favours a flexible approach to interpreting the Constitution, one that evolves over the centuries.
But he noted an irony: Cruz himself sees the Constitution differently.
He’s a strict originalist who believes the Constitution should be interpreted exactly as written — which means, according to this view, that the 18thcentury right to bear arms for the purposes of a militia should extend to all 21st-century U.S. citizens and include new forms of high-powered weaponry.
“To his kind of judge, Cruz ironically wouldn’t be eligible,” Tribe wrote in the Boston Globe. “Because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and ’90s required that someone actually be born on U.S. soil to be a ‘natural born’ citizen.”
Cruz recently relinquished his Canadian citizenship, which he was granted at birth.
On the Democratic side, much of the enthusiasm in the Democratic race appears to reside with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as front-runner Hillary Clinton scrambles to regain her momentum.
Sanders has consistently led preference polls in New Hampshire, and now appears to be gaining momentum in Iowa as well, buoyed by support from many of the young, progressive voters who backed Barack Obama eight years ago en route to his ascendancy to the presidency.
It’s unclear, however, whether Sanders can broaden his appeal and win the support of other Democratic constituencies that helped Obama defeat Clinton, including black and Hispanic voters.
Clinton is leaning hard on an experience-above-all-else argument, reminding people that as a former first lady and secretary of state, she wouldn’t need a tour of the White House if elected president.