GOP primary voters: Ted Cruz's birthplace isn't a serious issue
Republican primary voters were clear about one thing in the latest CBS News Battleground Tracker poll: Concerns about the birthplace of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz probably aren't doing much to shape their opinions of whether to vote for him for president.
For weeks, businessman Donald Trump, who leads many polls of the Republican field, has been suggesting that Cruz isn't eligible to run for president because he was born in Canada. Cruz has called it a "non-issue" and it's clear the voters agree.
Asked whether Cruz's birthplace is a "serious issue or not," 84 percent of Republican primary voters surveyed said it's not serious. Sixteen percent said it is.
Trump has continued to drum up the issue, insisting Democrats will slap Cruz with a lawsuit if he is the GOP's nominee. He has advised Cruz to seek a declaratory judgment in court to settle the issue once and for all.
Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada in 1970 to a Cuban father and American mother. For the past couple of years, some have been raising questions about whether his foreign birth would preclude him from running for president. The Constitution says that only "natural-born citizens" can be president, but it does not clearly define the term. In 2013, Cruz released his birth certificate and said in a statement, "Because my mother was a U.S. citizen, born in Delaware, I was a U.S. citizen by birth."
In an article in the Harvard Law Review last year, attorneys Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, who both served as U.S. solicitor general, wrote that "there is no question that Senator Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus a 'natural born Citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution... The less time spent dealing with specious objections to candidate eligibility, the better."
Still, the question hounds Cruz, as it has followed other candidates in the past. In 2008, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution declaring that GOP candidate John McCain was a natural-born citizen, even though he was born on an American military base in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936.