Ex-FEC Chair: Ted Cruz’s Birth Issue Is A Closer Call Than John McCain’s Was

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain talks to reporters about an incident earlier when members of an anti-war group approached a witness table where former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, Madele... Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain talks to reporters about an incident earlier when members of an anti-war group approached a witness table where former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and George P. Shultz were testifying, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015. The protesters carried signs calling the 91-year-old Kissinger a war criminal, when McCain blurted out, "Get out of here, you low-life scum." As a Navy aviator during the Vietnam War, McCain was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi, then imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese for five years. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) MORE LESS
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Trevor Potter — a former Federal Election Commission chairman who served as Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign legal counsel in 2008 — told Bloomberg View that he doesn’t think Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has as strong a case for his eligibility to be President as McCain did.

“After conducting our legal analysis of the term ‘natural born citizen’ we were very comfortable with Senator McCain’s eligibility based on multiple factors,” Potter said. “Without those specific factors — two U.S. citizen parents, birth on a U.S. base on U.S.-controlled territory — our comfort level that the candidate met the constitutional requirement would have declined.”

McCain’s birth to two American citizens on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal zone — a U.S.-controlled territory at the time — received scrutiny during his 2008 campaign for the White House. Now similar concerns — inflamed by Donald Trump — are being raised about Cruz, who was born to an American mother in Canada in 1970.

Potter said the campaign took challenges involving McCain’s birth seriously, and after looking into it, believed that all the facts in McCain’s case would have supported his presidential eligibility in court.

“One American parent and one foreign parent; a birth in a foreign country and not on a U.S. base; and not while the parents were in the service of the nation; dual citizenship for an entire adult life — all of those facts are certainly different from Senator McCain’s case,” Potter said.

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Notable Replies

  1. Well, if Cruz would just announce that his Vice-Presidential pick would be both Palin sisters, Brewster and Twiggy, then he’d be doubly good.

  2. Avatar for rb639 rb639 says:

    Knowing how many Americans are born abroad to U.S. citizen parents makes me a little unhappy that this issue would be resolved against Cruz, on the one hand, but on the other – I have difficulty believing that Karmic justice could possibly be so perfect – that Cruz would not be able to become president on the basis that he is insufficiently American.

  3. McCain enjoys shitting in Cruz’s gaping pie hole.

  4. One way to resolve this is to cut taxes on the rich and ease firearms regulations.

  5. Nope. He was granted citizenship at birth through his mother’s citizenship, regardless of his place of birth. What other interpretation could there be of “natural-born citizen”? This is just a distraction from the fact that everyone hates him for what he is, not his citizenship claims.

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