Posted on 01/15/2016 10:18:55 AM PST by Isara
The support of conservative talk radio has been a boost for the Texas senator in his tussle with Trump.
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.- Donald Trump rarely misses when he swings hard at a rival. But when it comes to his questioning of Ted Cruz's eligibility to run for president, Cruz has a formidable defense that draws on the backing of not only legal scholars but conservative media.
Confidence in the strength of his position came across clearly Thursday night as Cruz and Trump squared off on the issue for the first time in person at the Fox Business debate, with Cruz turning questions about how his Canadian birthplace affects his eligibility to run for president into a blow on Trump, saying that the real estate mogul is only stirring up those concerns because he is trailing Cruz in some polls in Iowa.
"Back in September, my friend Donald said he had his lawyers look at this in every which way, and there was no issue there, there was nothing to this birther issue," Cruz said. "Now, since September the Constitution hasn't changed, but the poll numbers have. And I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa. But the facts and the law here are really quite clear."
Cruz's ability to authoritatively dismiss the issue stems in part from the backing he is enjoying from conservative talk radio, where some of the most influential hosts appear to be circling the wagons around Cruz on the matter since it burst to the forefront last week. Mark Levin, who claims around 7 million listeners a week, has been especially outspoken in objecting to Trump's persistent pushing of the matter, something Cruz's team has pointed to in arguing that they don't expect the "birther" argument to move numbers with conservatives.
"Birthers stuck on stupid," Levin tweeted on Jan. 10.
"Birther attack flopping," he tweeted the next day.
On Wednesday, he tweeted a link to an article headlined, "It's beyond time for a cold hard look at Trump's record."
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham also came out in support of Cruz.
Limbaugh marveled that Sen. John McCain was even jumping on the bandwagon in questioning Cruz's eligibility. "It's getting into bizarro territory here now. Remember now, McCain was born in Panama, and his presidential eligibility is the same, and based on the same constitutionality as is Ted Cruz's," Limbaugh said last week.
Hannity, meanwhile, said "I see no issue here for Ted Cruz," with Ingraham agreeing - "There's no issue whatsoever," she said.
"The reality is, the reach of talk radio is greater than any other medium," Cruz campaign chairman Chad Sweet said in a post-debate interview. He went on to add, "There is no other candidate that has had the groundswell of organic support among talk radio that Ted Cruz [has]."
Nodding in particular to Levin and Ingraham, who have legal backgrounds, Sweet continued, "They came forward and very persuasively made the case for why Donald Trump's [attempt] to assert this nonsensical argument over his citizenship is totally misleading and unproductive."
And Cruz, a Harvard Law School-educated former Supreme Court clerk and ex-solicitor general of Texas, is also plenty capable of defending himself, easily brushing off Trump's claims that the question of his citizenship would be an issue Democrats would pursue in the courts should he be the nominee. Cruz was born in Calgary but to an American citizen mother.
"Listen, I've spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court," Cruz said during the debate. "And I'll tell you, I'm not going to be taking legal advice from Donald Trump."
He added later, "The chances of any litigation proceeding and succeeding on this are zero."
Cruz's team has also pointed to an article published in the Harvard Law Review, written by two former U.S. solicitors general, that clarifies that he is a natural-born citizen, spelling out a view shared by other legal scholars.
But at the debate, Trump noted that another expert--Cruz's former professor, Laurence Tribe-- has said that the matter is not one of settled law (it has not been ruled on by the Supreme Court). As he did earlier this week, Cruz immediately pounced on Tribe's liberal leanings, and used the moment to suggest Democrats were siding with Trump because they saw him as beatable in a general election, an argument Cruz's backers have long made, but that until this week Cruz himself had not made explicitly.
"He's a left-wing judicial activist, Harvard Law professor who was Al Gore's lawyer in Bush versus Gore. He's a major Hillary Clinton supporter," Cruz said of Tribe. "And there's a reason why Hillary's supporters are echoing Donald's attacks on me, because Hillary wants to face Donald Trump in the general election."
Cruz then pushed the argument that Trump - -whose campaign is based in part on the notion that he is a "winner" -- is raising the issue for purely political purposes, because he has slipped in some Iowa polls.
Later, Trump essentially admitted as much: "Because now he's going a little bit better," he said, when asked why he was raising the issue now. "No, I didn't care...It's true. No, it's true. Hey look, he never had a chance. Now, he's doing better. He's got probably a four or five percent chance."
But Cruz, confident that he is far stronger than that on the citizenship issue, suggested that if Trump's argument were extrapolated to logical conclusions, many people, including Trump himself, would be disqualified from running.
"At the end of the day, the legal issue is quite straightforward, but I would note that the birther issues that Donald has been relying on, some of the more extreme ones insist that you not only must be born on U.S. soil, but have two parents born on U.S. soil," Cruz said. "Under that theory, not only would I be disqualified, Marco Rubio would be disqualified, Bobby Jindal would be disqualified, and interestingly enough, Donald J. Trump would be disqualified because, because Donald's mother was born in Scotland, she was naturalized."
Trump bristled at that, noting that he was born in the U.S. Cruz breezed past his objections.
"On the issue of citizenship, Donald, I'm not going to use your mother's birth against you," he said, appearing to crib from Ronald Reagan, who famously pledged not to use his opponent's "youth and inexperience" against him when asked whether he was too old to run for president.
The Constitution clearly distinguishes between citizens and natural born citizens at a time when ‘naturalization’ Laws had not yet been written.
Who should One suppose were those citizens that were not ‘natural born?’
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LOL!
Exactly, and the whole country will keep talking about this right past Iowa, NH & on to SC. If you do not think that will hurt Rafael Cruz, I have a magnificent ocean front villa in Kansas to sell you at half price!
>> the federal government and most states enacted statutes in the 1920s and 1930s authorizing their courts to issue declaratory judgments <<
I scanned the Wikipedia article you cited, and all I could find was that Federal courts are authorized by statute to issue declaratory judgments only in patent and other intellectual property cases. So unless I missed some detail that you’ve found, there would seem to be no chance of their issuing a declaratory judgment about Cruz’s citizenship.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
If you have some money in your pockets which you can afford to lose, how much you wanna bet polls released on Monday will show Donald ahead over Rafael by double digits in NH & SC and nationally? And Iowa polls with less than 3% going to caucus, the polls will be within margin of error.
SCOTUS Trumps them all by a mile! They are the final authority over all other courts and even laws passed by congress critters which are judged to be unconstitutional.
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