Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) exulted when the U.S. Supreme Court recently vacated several lower court injunctions against President Trump’s executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship for the children of “illegal entrants.”

Within hours, he posted a video declaring that “birthright citizenship is a policy that doesn’t make any sense,” even though it is the first sentence of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Cruz has sponsored legislation to exclude disfavored children from the Constitution. Yet he was born in Canada in 1970, to an American mother and a Cuban émigré father. He has never been naturalized.

Cruz’s own citizenship derives not directly from the Constitution, but from Section 301 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which applies to children born outside the U.S. to “parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States.”

Because Cruz’s statutory citizenship arose at birth, he was likely

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