Good find. From the link:
1. Cruz’s eligibility
Cruz, like a couple of presidential candidates before him, faces a potential hurdle to running for president in that it’s not 100 percent clear that he’s a “natural-born citizen,” as the 14th Amendment requires presidents to be.
Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born, and current U.S. law extends citizenship to anyone born to a U.S. citizen, regardless of where the birth takes place. The question is whether citizenship is the same thing as being a “natural-born citizen.”
Legal scholars generally agree that Cruz meets that requirement, and Cruz’s office agrees. But it also remains somewhat untested in the courts.
While no president-elect has formally tested the “natural-born citizen” requirement, several have run for president with that question hanging over their candidacies.
Democrats in 1967 suggested that George Romney would not be eligible to serve as president, because he was born to U.S. citizens in Mexico. But a New York Law Journal piece at the time argued forcefully that he would be, and that seemed to put the issue to rest. (Romney’s primary campaign wound up imploding.)
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the GOP’s nominee in 2008, was born in the Panama Canal Zone to U.S. citizens. After he secured the party’s nomination, the Senate in 2008 passed a resolution stating that McCain was indeed a natural-born citizen.
In fact, this debate dates back to President Chester A. Arthur and the original so-called “birther” controversy. While Arthur is listed as being born in Vermont, some argued that he was born in Canada and thus ineligible to be president.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has even weighed in on the issue, writing in November 2011 that people born to U.S. citizens in foreign countries “most likely” qualify as natural-born citizens.
“The weight of more recent federal cases, as well as the majority of scholarship on the subject, also indicates that the term ‘natural born citizen’ would most likely include, as well as native born citizens, those born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents, at least one of whom had previously resided in the United States, or those born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent who, prior to the birth, had met the requirements of federal law for physical presence in the country,” wrote Jack Maskell.
