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There will be a question from some about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility to run for president.

That's because even though Cruz grew up in Texas, he was born in Canada. (He renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2013.)

Democrats are sure to remind voters of Cruz's Canadian birth since some on the right have questioned where President Obama was born. The president is a native of Hawaii.

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Sen. Ted Cruz says because his mother was born in the United States that makes him a "natural born citizen" and eligible to run for president. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Scott Olson/Getty Images

Sen. Ted Cruz says because his mother was born in the United States that makes him a "natural born citizen" and eligible to run for president.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The U.S. Constitution says presidential candidates have to be "natural-born citizens." But the Supreme Court has never weighed in with a definition, leaving it open to interpretation.

It's a question that has come up before. In 2008, senators passed a resolution, making it clear, for example, that John McCain was allowed to run given that he was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both senators then, voted for it.

Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, was born in Arizona when it was a territory – not a state. And some questioned George Romney's eligibility to run in 1968, because he was born in Mexico. Romney's parents were U.S. residents.

Cruz's parents worked in the oil industry in Calgary, Canada, when he was born. His mother was born in the United States. His father was born in Cuba, but later became a U.S. resident. Cruz argues that because his mother was born in Delaware, he is, in fact, a "natural-born citizen."

Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen...shall be eligible to the Office of President." U.S. Constitution hide caption

itoggle caption U.S. Constitution

And most legal scholars agree. In fact, two of the best-known Supreme Court lawyers – who are not normally on the same side – make the case that Cruz – as well as McCain, George Romney and Goldwater – is eligible to run.

Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, and Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under George W. Bush, wrote earlier this month in the Harvard Law Review that "there is no question" Cruz is eligible.

They cite that because Cruz's mother was a U.S. citizen and his father was a U.S. resident, "Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus a 'natural born Citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution" and the "Naturalization Act of 1790."

They also point to British common law and enactments by the First Congress, both of which have been cited by the Supreme Court.

Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase "natural born Citizen" includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent. As to the British practice, laws in force in the 1700s recognized that children born outside of the British Empire to subjects of the Crown were subjects themselves and explicitly used "natural born" to encompass such children. These statutes provided that children born abroad to subjects of the British Empire were "natural-born Subjects . . . to all Intents, Constructions, and Purposes whatsoever."

The Framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like "natural born," since the statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War. They were also well documented in Blackstone's Commentaries, a text widely circulated and read by the Framers and routinely invoked in interpreting the Constitution.

No doubt informed by this longstanding tradition, just three years after the drafting of the Constitution, the First Congress established that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were U.S. citizens at birth, and explicitly recognized that such children were "natural born Citizens." The Naturalization Act of 1790 provided that "the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States ... ."

The actions and understandings of the First Congress are particularly persuasive because so many of the Framers of the Constitution were also members of the First Congress. That is particularly true in this instance, as eight of the eleven members of the committee that proposed the natural born eligibility requirement to the Convention served in the First Congress and none objected to a definition of "natural born Citizen" that included persons born abroad to citizen parents.

Katyal and Clement conclude, "There are plenty of serious issues to debate in the upcoming presidential election cycle. The less time spent dealing with specious objections to candidate eligibility, the better. Fortunately, the Constitution is refreshingly clear on these eligibility issues."

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Michelle Niescierenko is a pediatric emergency physician at Boston Children's Hospital. But for the last five months she's been in Liberia, helping the country's 21 public hospitals get back on their feet after the devastating Ebola outbreak there. She says the challenges they face are shocking.

Ebola: A Grim Anniversary

A year ago Monday — on March 22, 2014 — the World Health Organization announced that the Ebola disease had broken out in West Africa.

Goats and Soda

A Year Of Ebola: Memorable Moments From Our Reporters' Notebooks

"Almost all the hospitals that we worked with in Liberia are running on generators," she says. The trouble with generators is that they require fuel.

"And fuel is really expensive, really difficult to move. It's not like there's a functioning gas station, you know, every 10 miles."

In fact, there's often only one gas station for a whole county. Hospitals have to send a truck along rutted dirt roads to pick up the fuel. Those roads can be impassable during the rainy season, and if the truck can't make it, then the hospital just has to make do with less power. This happens so often that a lot of the hospitals Niescierenko worked with end up operating without electricity for as long as 12 hours a day.

This has nothing to with Ebola. This is what it's been like in Liberia for years. Like the two other countries at the center of the outbreak, Guinea and Sierra Leone, Liberia is one of the world's poorest countries. And now that cases are down in Liberia — the country has seen only one new case in weeks — attention is shifting to building up the broader health system there.

Pumping Water, Finding Gloves

The lack of power is just one of the obstacles. Most hospitals also don't have a regular supply of water. They get it from wells — and those run low during the dry season or the pumps just break down.

This complicated Niescierenko's top priority — making sure the hospitals could handle patients with infectious diseases like Ebola. "Yeah, it's hard to do good infection control and hand-washing when you have no water," she says.

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A nurse walks near the empty children's ward at Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia. David Gilkey/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Gilkey/NPR

A nurse walks near the empty children's ward at Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia.

David Gilkey/NPR

Niescierenko's team was able to address some of these issues. With money from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation of Seattle, they fixed a lot of the pumps on the wells. They made sure every hospital had a three months' supply of basics, like surgical gloves.

But these were temporary fixes. Building up Liberia's health system will require a major investment in building roads, setting up a steady supply of equipment and medicine. And that's not even the toughest part:

"One of the tragic implications of this epidemic has been the death of health care workers," says Gabrielle Fitzgerald, who directs the Ebola program at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Even before Ebola hit, Liberia had only one health worker for every 3,400 people. Ebola has killed about 180 of those workers.

She points out that even before Ebola hit, Liberia had just over 50 doctors for the whole country — and only one health worker, people like nurses and midwives, for every 3,400 people. Ebola has killed about 180 of those workers.

Fitzgerald says we're already seeing the consequences.

"Routine things like immunizing children just have not happened for a year. And there are now measles epidemics."

Intangible, 'Not Sexy' — And Essential

Recruiting and training new health workers is key, because experts warn that unless the health systems in West Africa are brought up to scratch, an epidemic on the scale of this one will happen again.

Unfortunately, building national health systems doesn't tend to attract a lot of love from international donors, says Erin Hohlfelder, who's been pushing for this kind of funding on behalf of the ONE Campaign, a global health advocacy group.

"If there is a silver lining of this horrible crisis, it's the ability to illustrate why investing in health systems is so important."

- Erin Hohlfelder of the ONE Campaign

"It's certainly not as 'sexy' — quote unquote — as things like treatment for HIV or bed nets for malaria which are very tangible and easy to understand."

She says at least for now, the international community does seem to get the importance of building up West Africa's health systems. The governments of the affected countries are preparing national plans to present at a meeting of the World Bank next month. There's talk of millions of dollars in commitments.

"If there is a silver lining of this horrible crisis, it's the ability to illustrate why investing in health systems is so important," says Hohlfelder.

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The empty emergency and critical care area of Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia. David Gilkey/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption David Gilkey/NPR

The empty emergency and critical care area of Redemption Hospital in New Kru Town, Monrovia, Liberia.

David Gilkey/NPR

But she adds that it's going to take years to fix the infrastructure, let alone train up enough health workers. And she worries the world's attention and money could dry up before then.

Henry Gray of Doctors Without Borders shares that concern. He's the emergency coordinator for the group's Ebola response. He's not even convinced the world can be trusted to stick it out long enough to stamp out this outbreak.

"The world has failed Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia once by not turning up quick enough," he says. "And we don't want the world to fail them a second time by leaving before the job is done."

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Back in the pre-digital era — when telephones were used for talking, not photographing and filming, and before YouTube came along to broadcast everyone's videos — capturing and disseminating moving images was expensive, time consuming and decidedly non-portable.

But that changed in 1967, when Sony introduced the world's first portable video tape recorder. Before long, enthusiasts formed "media collectives" that captured the social and cultural upheaval of the era. Fueled by a mix of the tunes, the tokes and the times, video became part of the revolution it was documenting.

One of the first media collectives called itself "Videofreex." It's the subject of a documentary and a new exhibition at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York in New Paltz.

The Freex Are Born

Parry Teasdale and David Cort, two of the Videofreex founders, met at the Woodstock music festival, where each had arrived in 1969 with video gear in hand.

"I had some very clunky, old surveillance equipment, really, and he had the first generation of portable video cameras and recorders," says Teasdale. "And so he and I decided to get together." The two agreed to turn their cameras away from the music performers and toward the revelers in the mud.

Teasdale and Cort returned to New York City and moved in together with Cort's girlfriend, Mary Curtis Ratcliff. They adopted the name Videofreex at the suggestion of a neighbor.

"What we were doing is videotaping what was of interest to us," Ratcliff says, "and it was what CBS, NBC and ABC were not videotaping — the counterculture. They had no cameras in the counterculture."

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Videofreex including Parry Teasdale and David Cort, fourth and fifth from left, Bart Friedman, third from right, and Skip Blumberg, second from right, gathered in their Catskills town in 1973. Courtesy of Videofreex hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Videofreex

Videofreex including Parry Teasdale and David Cort, fourth and fifth from left, Bart Friedman, third from right, and Skip Blumberg, second from right, gathered in their Catskills town in 1973.

Courtesy of Videofreex

Their work caught the attention of an executive at one of those networks. CBS was cancelling the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and wanted to replace it with something more timely and contemporary. Using portable video gear the network bought for them, the Videofreex recorded demonstrations and interviewed counterculture figures, including Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies and Black Panther Fred Hampton, as well as various strangers.

"You know, if we had stopped to think and someone said, 'Do you think they're really gonna go for this?' we probably would've said, 'Well, obviously not,' " Ratcliff recalls. "But we didn't even let that stop us, we just went for it."

The finished program was called Subject to Change and Videofreek Skip Blumberg remembers screening the pilot for a group of "freex" ("We were high," he says), their friends and CBS executives ("They weren't high"). The network declined to pick up the program.

"They sat there evaluating this show, which was kind of a mess, I admit," Blumberg says. "This was, like, so far removed from what CBS was doing. So I was not disappointed that we didn't replace the Smothers Brothers."

Lanesville TV

Still, the Videofreex got to keep the equipment and continued to show their work in their Manhattan loft on Friday nights. But it wasn't sustainable. Fortunately for them, the New York State Council on the Arts made grants available for video projects outside the city. In 1971, the collective migrated upstate to a huge former boarding house in Lanesville, a small town in the Catskills.

At first, Blumberg recalls, locals were "somewhat suspicious about these long-haired, alternate-culture types living all together in this big house."

"But after a while, because we were providing service to the community by putting people on, covering community events, they began to trust us and became our really good friends," he says. "We were turning on people to video the way people were turning people onto pot. "

In the Catskills, the Videofreex started what may have been the country's first pirate television station, Lanesville TV, using a transmitter bought for them by Abbie Hoffman. Videofreek Bart Friedman remembers it was basically public access TV.

"We got the kids to participate in the kids' programs, we covered stocking of the stream, the firehouse, local residents, car accidents, gun club dinners, things like that," Friedman says. "It was just local television."

They also filmed drama. In one video, a local woman acts out a fantasy of escaping the tedium of small-town life.

"They made hundreds and hundreds of tapes," says Andrew Ingall, the Dorsky museum show's curator. "Some are gems; some are absolute duds."

Ingall says the Videofreex collaborated with and influenced other collectives and producers across the country. One of them was filmmaker DeeDee Halleck, now professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego.

"Their house in the Catskills became a kind of hideaway for a generation of rebels such as me," Halleck says. "I really felt that this was a place that liberated the technology and enabled the kinds of learning, the kinds of self expression that could really make the change. I mean, we were very optimistic."

'Something To Be Learned'

By 1978, the group was out of funds and disbanded. Some members moved back to Manhattan. Some pursued other professions. Others continued to make video.

"I'm not so interested in Videofreex as cave drawings on the wall of video history," says Teasdale, who now publishes a newspaper in upstate New York. "This [exhibition], I hope, can be valuable to people, not because we were such a great success, but because there's something perhaps to be learned about technology and living together and working together. And if that's true, then that will make it all worthwhile."

It was also, he says, a lot of fun.

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Television

video

A few months ago, inside her stall in a Mexico City market, Ofelia Contreras showed Monika Essen the intricate handwork on an indigenous Mexican skirt. She pointed out how many months it took to complete the patterns by hand.

Essen is the costume designer for the Michigan Opera Theatre's revival of the opera Frida, and came to Mexico City to get the look of the opera right, since Kahlo was so particular about her traditional wardrobe.

Fine Art

In Detroit's Rivera And Kahlo Exhibit, A Portrait Of A Resilient City

"To really get the authentic quality that I think that we're looking for, for this production, I think it was imperative for me to come here and to actually get a sense of who Frida was, where she lived," Essen said.

But in 1932, Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera also lived in Detroit — where the current revival of the production overlaps with an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit.

Opera For Everyone

To showcase the opera to a larger audience, excerpts will be performed for free outside the Detroit Opera House. Wayne Brown, the Michigan Opera Theatre's president and CEO, says it's important to show that opera isn't just a black-tie affair.

"Clearly, Frida Kahlo would have been very upset if everyone showed up in mink coats," Brown says.

So Frida is also being performed at venues throughout the city and southeast Michigan to attract young Latinos like Ricardo Barajas, who's seen ads for it on Facebook.

"I love anything that has to do with [a] real-life story that's reflected in Hispanic culture," says Barajas, who has also seen the Rivera murals at the museum. "I don't like just going on with my life and not knowing what my culture is."

Kahlo's own popularity as an artist will also attract audiences, says Colombian soprano Catalina Cuervo, who's playing Frida in the current production.

"This is the kind of opera where people go because, 'Oh, I love Frida!' 'Oh, there's a Colombian soprano? Oh no, I have to go.' 'Oh, she's hot, I'm going to go,' " Cuervo says.

Yes, this soprano is hot. In a promotional video on the opera's website, Cuervo looks fit and tan and wears a dress with a plunging neckline as she performs a monologue and sings.

At a local bakery in Detroit's Latino neighborhood, shopper Eloisa Perez said opera's boring, but shown some of the video of Cuervo on YouTube, she said with that soprano, men would go.

"Truth is, she sings beautifully. It would be really cool if people would go see it, and I think I'd be one of them," Perez said, in Spanish.

Honoring The Artists

The exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts has works by both artists in its collection, including Rivera's acclaimed "Detroit Industry" murals, about the city's manufacturing and its workers. It also has Kahlo's Henry Ford Hospital, a painful oil painting about her miscarriage there.

"The fact that she focused on her own pain and worked her way through it — I think it's really an inspiring story for anyone," says Migdalia Cruz, who wrote the lyrics and monologues for the opera. "If I did justice to how beautiful she made her own pain then I've accomplished something very special in writing the play."

The music for Frida was composed by Robert Xavier Rodriguez in 1991. He says he's especially happy the work is being revived in Detroit now, after the city overcame a difficult bankruptcy without having to break up the Art Institute's collection to pay its bills.

"It's a sign of good times, hopeful times, when the artists are supported and people recognize the beauty and wonder of art," Rodriguez says.

If nothing else, Soprano Catalina Cuervo hopes Latinos will see they can have a good time at an opera.

"This is fun and dramatic and they will love it, they will just be on the edge of their seats," she says. "Just like with the end of any, every telenovela."

After all, opera is often just a telenovela set to music.

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