WASHINGTON — Candidates in American presidential debates are frequently forced to deny they're too liberal, too conservative, too wishy-washy or simply wrong-headed.
Now one has been forced to parry the calumny that he's too Canadian.
Sen. Ted Cruz responded indignantly during Thursday's Republican debate when both the moderators and his emerging rival Donald Trump pressed him on his Calgary birth.
He brushed off the notion that being born abroad should disqualify him from the presidency. And he drew attention to his past career as a high-level litigator, to point out his familiarity with constitutional law.
"I've spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court," said Cruz, who is running neck-and-neck with the real-estate mogul in Iowa.
"And I tell you, I'm not going to be taking legal advice from Donald Trump."
The partisan crowd appeared to back him up. It cheered the Texas senator and booed when a debate moderator and Trump dabbled in the country-of-origin quandary.
Trump fired back that multiple constitutional scholars have raised Cruz's birth as a legal question mark — one being Cruz's former Ivy League law professor, Laurence Tribe.
"Take it from your professor," Trump retorted.
He urged Cruz to go get a judge's opinion certifying his right to run, lest he later become the nominee and find his candidacy tangled up in court: "There's a big question mark over the head. And you can't do that to the party."
The U.S. Constitution restricts the right to run for president to "natural-born" citizens, without specifying what that means. Most of the contemporary political class assumes that protects foreign-born children of American citizens, including Cruz.
But several constitutional scholars have emerged to call it a legitimate question. They say the Supreme Court has never ruled on the definition of a natural-born citizen for the purposes of seeking the presidency.
Cruz replied that Tribe is a committed Democrat. He also pointed out that his increasingly bitter adversary has only suddenly started raising the birth issue, because his poll numbers are improving in Iowa. Trump admitted it.
Cruz's critics have revelled in teasing him about the fact that he was born outside the U.S. His American mother and Cuban-American father were working in the Alberta oil industry and he spent his first few years there.
Some pranksters edited his Wikipedia page Thursday to emphasize his Canadian birth. A lawsuit against Cruz's candidacy has already been launched, and more are expected.
Tribe says he believes Cruz should qualify — only because Tribe personally favours a flexible approach to interpreting the Constitution, one that evolves over the centuries.
But he notes an irony: Cruz himself sees the Constitution differently.
He's a strict originalist who believes the Constitution should be interpreted exactly as written — which means, according to Cruz's view, that the 18th century right to bear arms for the purposes of a militia should extend to all 21st-century U.S. citizens and include new forms of high-powered weaponry.
"To his kind of judge, Cruz ironically wouldn't be eligible," the Harvard professor wrote in the Boston Globe.
"Because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and '90s required that someone actually be born on U.S. soil to be a 'natural born' citizen."
When Cruz pointed out that his former professor was a Democrat, Trump replied that several other scholars have voiced similar concerns. Cruz recently relinquished his Canadian citizenship, which he received at birth.
Donald Trump, Ted Cruz Assert Their Standing Atop Republican Field
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz asserted their standing atop their party's race in a fiery debate, overshadowing a crowded field of rivals with just two weeks to go before early voting begins.
Thursday night's debate was a shift from the relative civility between the billionaire and the senator in the days leading up to the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses.
Trump renewed his suggestion that Cruz may not be eligible to serve as commander in chief, saying the senator has a "big question mark" hanging over his candidacy, given his birth in Canada to an American mother. Cruz suggested Trump was only turning on him because he's now challenging for the lead in Iowa, and the businessman agreed.
And Trump, accused of having "New York values," gave an emotional recounting of his hometown's response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
"When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York," Trump said. "That was a very insulting statement that Ted made."
Sen. Marco Rubio, who holds a slight advantage over the field of more mainstream candidates, found himself in heated exchanges with both Cruz and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Rubio likened Christie's policies to President Barack Obama's, particularly on guns, Planned Parenthood and education reform — an attack Christie declared false.
Cruz confronted Rubio over his support for a Senate bill that would have created a pathway to citizenship for people in the U.S. illegally, an unpopular position among Republican primary voters. Rubio accused Cruz of switching positions on immigration himself.
Cruz was also on the defensive about his failure to disclose on federal election forms some $1 million in loans from Wall Street banks during his 2012 Senate campaign. He said it was little more than a "paperwork error."
The debate came at the end of a week that has highlighted anew the deep rifts in the Republican Party. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, a rising star, was praised by many party leaders for including a veiled criticism of Trump's angry rhetoric during her response Tuesday to Obama's State of the Union address, only to be chastised by conservative commentators.
Trump said he wasn't offended by Haley's speech and stuck with his controversial call for temporarily banning Muslims from the United States because of fear of attacks emanating from abroad.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who has struggled to gain any momentum in the race, urged Trump to reconsider the policy.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich called for at least a temporary halt on the Obama administration's plan to allow thousands of Syrian refugees into the country.
On the economy and national security, the candidates agreed any of them would be better than Obama or Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate.
Republicans have one more debate scheduled — a Jan. 28 event in Des Moines — before voting begins in Iowa.
