Most experts agree that Cruz is eligible and that this is a settled issue.

Red Alert Politics reports.

Harvard law prof: Originalist interpretation would make Cruz ineligible

It’s the birther controversy all over again, this time to do with Ted Cruz and the Republican Party. And just like Hillary Clinton had started the birther movement against then rival Barack Obama, the trouble comes from Cruz’s own party.

Whether or not it’s an actual issue for Cruz, it doesn’t take a scholar to see why it’s become so recently relevant. The claims are the latest attack from Donald Trump. The two candidates were once quite friendly with each other, even embracing at a rally in September against the Iran nuclear deal. But, as Trump has made it well known, he has a problem with people when they start to poll better than him. Hence the attacks on Cruz’s eligibility now that he is beating Trump in Iowa.

To make his claim, Trump cited Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who taught Cruz as well as Obama and many Supreme Court justices. The Guardian was in contact with Tribe, who lamented “that’s really sad.”

Work that is fair and well-produced should know no political affiliation. But, what may be “really sad” would be if Trump is using Tribe’s name to further his own political agenda to remain the front-runner at all costs.

The Guardian noted that:

“Despite Sen[ator] Cruz’s repeated statements that the legal/constitutional issues around whether he’s a natural-born citizen are clear and settled,” he told the Guardian by email, “the truth is that they’re murky and unsettled.”

In his emails to the Guardian, Tribe discussed Cruz’s own approach to constitutional issues, noting that under “the kind of judge Cruz says he admires and would appoint to the supreme court – an ‘originalist’ who claims to be bound by the historical meaning of the constitution’s terms at the time of their adoption – Cruz wouldn’t be eligible because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and 90s required that someone be born on US soil to be a ‘natural born’ citizen.”