Ted Cruz now has a money problem too
Ted Cruz problems continue to mount. The verbose and pompous politician who uses every opportunity to trip up other politicians for slip ups or minor errors find all the fingers now pointing at him. Above and beyond his birther problem, his eligibility for the U.S. presidency, there is now an issue with a loan he received from Goldman Sachs.
NewsWeek is reporting that more constitutional experts are questioning Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president.
While Cruz has told reporters his eligibility to become president is “settled law” because his mother was an American citizen when he was born and never renounced her American citizenship while she was a Canadian resident. Many constitutional theorists agree with Cruz that it’s not really up for debate.
But it’s hardly unanimous. An increasing number of high-profile constitutional law professors, including one of Cruz’s own professors from Harvard Law School, have in recent days argued publicly that Cruz’s birth disqualifies him.
According to Lee, two legal theories of citizenship were popular at the time the Constitution was ratified: jus soli (Latin for “law of the land), which held that a child’s citizenship flowed from the actual, physical place of his birth, and jus sanguinis (“law of the blood”), which held that parents passed their citizenship to their children. However, Lee argues, at the time the Constitution was ratified, jus sanguinis applied only to patrilineal descent.
…
Mary Brigid McManamon, a constitutional law professor at Widener University, made a similar argument in The Washington Post Tuesday. “In this election cycle, numerous pundits have declared that Cruz is eligible to be president,” she writes. “They rely on a supposed consensus among legal experts. This notion appears to emanate largely from a recent comment in the Harvard Law Review Forum by former Solicitors General Neal Katyal and Paul Clement. In trying to put the question of who is a natural-born citizen to rest, however, the authors misunderstand, misapply and ignore the relevant law.”
If Cruz’s eligibility problem isn’t enough, there is now an issue with his past campaign funding. The New York Times reports the following.
As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.
“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.
But the couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works. That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.
Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.
Will Ted Cruz whether the storm? It is rather hard when you have alienated most.