McConnell’s primary challenger, Matt Bevin, asks McConnell whether he’s man enough to shutdown the government over Obamacare.
With all the responses to my post on Ted Cruz and his eligibility for the presidency, I wanted to flag a couple additional issues. One sub-division of birtherism hinges on residency requirements for US citizen mothers giving birth abroad. I’ve almost been ambivalent about this sub-section of birtherism because I’m not certain the laws are actually constitutional. The most stringent of these standards (INA Act 301) holds that if you’re born abroad and have only a single parent who is a US citizen that person must have been “physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years.”
Just to be clear, Cruz is totally in the clear on this since his mother meets those requirements.
But what I did not realize that the law differs if you’re parent was the father. TPM Reader JF brings us up to speed on this part of the law …
First, I agree with you entirely that Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen eligible to run for President.
Nonetheless, I think one thing you said in your post today (“Okay, People, Enough”) was sufficiently wrong to be worth clarifying. You wrote, “being born to an American citizen, no matter where you were born, makes you an American citizen.” But actually, this is not true. Ted Cruz should thank his lucky stars that his mother was the citizen and his father the not-yet-citizen, rather than the other way around, and/or that his parents were married. Because he definitely needed at least one of those things to be true.
5 Reasons to worry that Republicans really will break the country this fall.