Sphinx wrote:
“...Ted Cruz, whose native-born status he challenged, can trace family in America back to the 18th century. ...”
Not on both sides of his family; mom was American & dad was Cuban.
No, that would not have been an answer to those who were busily inventing fictitious constitutional definitions of "native born," but c'mon: he was debating Donald Trump. Poor Ted, champion debater, could not think outside of the box. Trump does not operate in the world of strict linear logic. His Republican primary opponents never adjusted. But that's ancient history.
Cruz wasn't lucky enough to have had an ancestor with Washington at Valley Forge or on either side of The Angle at Gettysburg. He would have had to make do with a humbler American icon. But whatever his Irish forebears were doing in backwoods America in the 1730's and 40's, and whatever his factory hand Irish and Italian forebears were doing in the 1880's and 90's, would have anchored his story in such a way that Trump's harrumphing would have seemed silly -- especially coming from a man whose own family were recent newcomers.