In what can only be an indication that he has his sights on the 2016 Republican presidential nomination Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, released his birth certificate to the Dallas Morning News.
As the first term senator from the Lone Star State considers running for president of the United States there has been speculation as to whether or not Cruz is a "natural born American citizen," which the Constitution dictates the president needs to be.
Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother. American law says that Cruz would be an American citizen because of his mother's origin while Canadian law makes Cruz a Canadian since he was born north of the border. Therefore, according to legal experts, Cruz has dual citizenship, reports the Dallas Morning News.
"Senator Cruz became a U.S. citizen at birth, and he never had to go through a naturalization process after birth to become a U.S. citizen," Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Cruz, told the Dallas Morning News. "To our knowledge, he never had Canadian citizenship, so there is nothing to renounce."
Julie Lafortune, a spokeswoman with the Canadian ministry, spoke with the Dallas Morning News and although she could not speak specifically about the case of Cruz she seems to believe that the senator is a Canadian citizen.
"Generally speaking, under the Citizenship Act of 1947, those born in Canada were automatically citizens at birth unless their parent was a foreign diplomat," Lafortune said.
Allison Christians, a law professor at Montreal's McGill University, agreed with Lafortune's assumption.
"If you leave when you're two minutes old, you're still an American. It's the same in Canada," Christians told the Dallas Morning News. "They can feel as American as they want. But the question of citizenship is determined by the law of the territory in which you were physically born. It's not up to the Cruz family to decide whether they're citizens."
Cruz is not the first to have his eligibility to run for president questioned over issues of citizenship. A conservative movement derisively referred to as "birthers" spent significant amounts of time and money trying to prove that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya prior to both the 2008 and 2012 elections, according to USA Today.
One of the main voices in the birther movement came from Donald Trump. The business mogul turned reality TV star suggested that Sen. Cruz might not be able to run for president while appearing on ABC's "This Week," according to the Huffington Post.
"I don't know the circumstances," Trump said. "I heard somebody told me he was born in Canada. That's really his thing."
