Ted Cruz, the freshman senator from Texas and the newest Tea Party favorite, is leaving open the possibility of a run for the White House in 2016. Were he to win election, he will by that time have had fairly little experience in Washington, and yet more than double the experience, in terms of years, that then-Senator Barack Obama had when he determined to plague the nation by becoming the 44th president.
I very much respect and admire Sen. Cruz for what the media, were the man a Democrat, would call fearless conviction, but because he is not a member of the political party they so venerate, they call abrasive McCarthyism—a compliment, in my mind, as I view Senator Joe McCarthy to have been one of the most important and beneficently influential senators in American history.
For all my approval of Cruz as a Senator, I am unable to support his current evident ambition to run for president; Cruz, having been born a Canadian, does not meet the Constitutional requirement that our presidents, save those in America’s early history who were born in England, be “natural born citizens,” a term that has traditionally and continually, until recently, been interpreted as meaning America-born.
“Until recently” because, at least according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, “The weight of more recent federal cases, as well as the majority of scholarship on the subject, also indicate that the term ‘natural born citizen’ would most likely include, as well as native-born citizens, those born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents, at least one of whom had previously resided in the United States, or those born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent who, prior to the birth, had met the requirements of federal law for physical presence in the country.”
Cruz also attempted to mitigate any concern we Cruz “birthers” have by saying recently in an interview with Fox News, “My mom was a U.S. citizen, so I am a citizen by birth.”
That he was a citizen at birth may be the case, but it is also irrelevant in my mind, regardless of what the CRS says; Cruz was not born on American soil. This concern still is only half of the problem I have had and still have with a certain other person’s natural-born status, and I must remain consistent and not play party politics by giving Cruz a pass on my misgivings.
Still, it is a possibility that I could be persuaded to abandon this belief I have and eventually come to accept Cruz’s natural-born status and, adhering to a single standard, also accept that other person’s natural-born status. In that event, however, the additional fact would remain that that other person was born with dual citizenship, which, in accordance with court precedent, nullifies natural-born status.
Isn’t it odd, though, that calling into question the elective eligibility of one man designates me in the eyes of the left as a crazy racist, but doing the same for another man who shares my political persuasion, and who, by the way, is also only 50-percent white, designates me as simply silly?
