The Ted Cruz citizenship story has another element to it: he is a U.S. citizen by definition of the law here, but he’s also a Canadian citizen.  Josh Marshall has the details.

This is getting to be more fun than I thought it would be. Ted Cruz is a natural born American citizen blah blah blah. But because he was born in Canada he’s actually a Canadian citizen too. He’s a dual citizen. This is the same as if a couple of French expats were living in the US and had a child and then returned to France. The child would be a French citizen but also an American citizen, simply by the fact of being born on American soil and whether or not that child ever took any active steps to exercise that citizenship.

After producing his birth certificate yesterday, The Dallas Morning News pointed out that Cruz is actually a dual citizen. At first Cruz and his staff appeared to deny that he is a dual citizen. But in a statement just released from his office, he seems to have come around to the fact that he is in fact a dual citizen and says he is willing to renounce his Canadian citizenship (and presumably any loyalty to Canadian head of state Elizabeth II), if it’s true.

To renounce his Canadian citizenship, Cruz simply needs to fill out this four page form and pay $100.

But before he does that, he might want to check and be sure he wants to do that.  It’s a really nice country: they have great health care, good theatre, some pretty good hockey teams, not everybody else in the world hates them or resents their swaggering bullying, they haven’t landed a drone on anyone recently, and despite what you might have seen in the tabloids, the royals are really a nice family and having that nice queen as the head of state lends a touch of class.

As a citizen, he could run for Parliament up there (Senators are appointed, though, so he’d have to be on the good side of Prime Minister Stephen Harper), and the Conservatives are in power… for now.  He could land on his feet.

On the other hand, maybe the Canadians don’t want him, either.