Ted Cruz may have to wait months to renounce Canadian citizenship
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during the 2013 NRA Leadership Forum at the George R. Brown Convention Center on May 3, 2013 in Houston.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who may run for president in 2016, wants to stop being Canadian.
Like, right now.
But the Texas Republican may have to wait up to eight months to renounce his Canadian citizenship after vowing to do so in an announcement late Monday night, Reuters reported.
"Nothing against Canada, but I’m an American by birth and as a US senator, I believe I should be only an American," Cruz said in a statement.
He'll also have to fill out a four-page form and win clearance from Canada's spy agency first.
The move follows a report by the Dallas Morning News claiming Cruz, a Tea Party favorite, is a dual citizen of the US and Canada after being born to an American mother in Calgary in 1970.
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A spokesman initially denied the report.
But then came Cruz's announcement, and with it speculation over how the issue could impact the 2016 election and whether it even matters.
Political analysts say Cruz may think he's tamping down any controversy by renouncing his Canadian citizenship, but it may come back to haunt him like President Obama's birth certificate did in the 2008 race.
"If we learned anything from the allegations surrounding President Obama's citizenship, it's this: Facts may be stubborn things, but people's beliefs can be a lot more stubborn than the facts," Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told USA Today.
"Many people believe what they want to believe, regardless of the facts, especially when it's about a public figure they do not like in the first place."
The US Constitution allows only a "natural-born" American citizen to serve as president.
But while most legal scholars agree that includes an American born overseas to American parents, the Constitution says nothing about would-be presidents born with dual citizenship, according to the Dallas Morning News.
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