Donald Trump has a habit of causing controversy, and his remarks on Ted Cruz‘s Presidential eligibility have been no exception, reports Matt Strong on LawNews.com. The Texas senator now faces several lawsuits across the country — in Illinois, Texas, New York and Utah — that are bringing the candidate unwelcome distractions.

“Since January 17, Trump has made inflammatory threats of litigation over Cruz’s Canadian-birth and the question of whether Cruz is a ‘natural born citizen’ five times,” the site reports.

And others have gone so as to frame their challenges as lawsuits. “Of the litany of filed suits, four in particular pass muster, either by creatively suing a state election board, scaring Cruz’s campaign into a response, or originating from lawyers in pursuit of more than political gamesmanship or political frivolity,” Strong wrote.

Read the article.

There is good evidence that the founding fathers would have understood the words “natural born citizen” to mean only people born within a nation’s borders, but there’s also strong evidence on the other side of the debate, according to an article published by ThinkProgress.

Harvard University Law Professor Laurence Tribe, for example, wrote in a newspaper op-ed piece that “the constitutional definition of a ‘natural born citizen’ is completely unsettled,” and then he claims that, under the method of constitutional interpretation Cruz preferred when he was Tribe’s student, Cruz “wouldn’t be eligible, because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and ’90s required that someone actually be born on US soil to be a ‘natural born” citizen.’”

But two former United States Solicitors cite the Naturalization Act of 1790, which states that children born outside of the country, but with parents who are U.S. citizens, are natural born citizens themselves.

Read the article.