A constitutional law professor wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post Tuesday, claiming that Republican Senator Ted Cruz is ineligible to become president under the articles of the constitution due to his Canadian birth status.
“Let me be clear: I am not a so-called ‘birther.’ I am a legal historian,” Mary Brigid McManamon, professor at Widener University’s Delaware Law School, wrote.
Cruz was born in Alberta, Canada to an American mother and Cuban father in 1970. The young Cruz moved to the United States following high school and graduated from Princeton University in 1992.
McManamon joins Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe in raising concerns that Cruz might not meet the “natural born citizen” requirement for presidency according to the nation’s highest document.
According to the Post, McManamon argues that if one uses the “common law” definition of “natural born citizen,” he will find that 18th century English jurist William Blackstone defined the term as a “born within the dominions of the crown of England” and that U.S. founding father James Madison called birth place “the most certain criterion” of allegiance.
Former solicitors general Neal Katyal and Paul Clement interpreted “natural born citizen” to mean anyone who was a U.S. citizen at birth. However, McManamon criticized their interpretation due to its dependency on “radical 18th-century British statutes.”
Of course, infamous “Obama birther” and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump was first to make the senator’s birth status an issue on the campaign trail.
Featured image via The National Memo
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