WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 (UPI) — Florida Congressman Alan Grayson said in an interview he would file a lawsuit against Texas Senator Ted Cruz challenging him as ineligible to be president if Republicans nominate him to run because he was born in Canada.
Grayson, a Democrat, told Fox News Radio Cruz does not meet the constitutional requirement that the president be a natural born citizen.
Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1970 to a Cuban-born father and American-born mother, and had American and Canadian dual citizenship as a result.
Cruz did not acknowledge his dual citizenship publicly until 2013 when the Dallas Morning News published his birth certificate, but renounced it in 2014, saying at the time “as a U.S. senator, I believe I should be only an American.”
“The Constitution says natural born Americans, so now we’re counting Canadians as natural born Americans?” Grayson said during an interview with Alan Colmes on the radio network. “How does that work? I’m waiting for the moment that he gets the nomination and then I will file that beautiful lawsuit saying that he’s unqualified for the job because he’s ineligible.”
Colmes told Grayson he thought it was interesting that many of the people who were concerned about President Barack Obama having a Kenyan-born father — his mother was American and he was born in Hawaii — don’t share the same concern about Cruz.
A Congressional Research Service Report, brought on by several lawsuits and a longtime debate about Obama’s eligibility, said the natural born clause in the Constitution probably includes “those born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent who, prior to the birth, had met the requirements of federal law for physical presence in the country,” according to Talking Points Memo.
