Ted Cruz seems to be sounding and acting like someone who wants to run for president of the United States in 2016.
The junior U.S. senator from Texas will keynote the tea party convention soon. The freshman Republican lawmaker has the tea party wing of his party all a-twitter these days.
But I’ll be waiting — patiently at that — for the questions that ought to come about whether he’s constitutionally qualified to hold the office he might be seeking.
Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. As I’ve re-read the Constitution, he’s still qualified to seek the presidency and hold the office if he happens to get elected a little more than three years from now. The document stipulates that he must be a U.S. citizen at birth, which Cruz was — even though he was born in the Great White North. But he got here as a child, which I guess suits his fans just fine.
But wait. I recall many of those very Ted Cruz fans saying something quite different about the current president of the United States. Up until his re-election this past November, Barack Obama’s foes — aw, heck, let’s call ’em “enemies” — refused to buy into the president’s assertion that he was born in August 1961 in Hawaii. His mother also was American; his father was Kenyan. So, what was the fuss all about, if the Constitution stipulates that to serve as president a person must be a “natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution”? Barack Obama is even more qualified to serve as president than Cruz, given that he was actually born in one of the 50 United States.
Well, I’ll be waiting for the lefties out there to yammer as loudly about Ted Cruz’s constitutional qualifications as the righties did about Obama’s.
I’m betting they’ll be silent … as the right-wingers should have been all along.