Ted Cruz, a member of the U.S. Senate for just a few weeks, already is being talked about as a possible Republican candidate for president.
I hope he runs. I really do.
The freshman Texas Republican senator, though, might have to answer some questions about – are you ready for this? – whether he’s constitutionally qualified to hold the office. Sound familiar? It should. This bogus controversy dogged the current president, Barack Obama, for most of his first term.
Even though Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother – and has produced documentation to prove it – the idiotic “birther” crowd among Republicans kept raising the place of birth issue as a way to derail his presidency. They expressed doubts he was telling the truth, saying he was born in Kenya, the birthplace of his father.
Now we have Ted Cruz quite possibly lining up to run for the office in 2016. He’s a star with the tea party crowd of the GOP. But unlike the phony issue of Obama’s place of birth, Cruz in fact was born outside the United States of America. Is he constitutionally qualified? Here’s what the Constitution says in Article II Section 1, word for word, about that issue: “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President …”
There you have it. Clear as mud, right?
Baby Ted was born in Canada in 1970 to an American mother and a Cuban father. Does that disqualify him? Cruz says it wouldn’t, were he to run for the presidency. Cruz inherited his mother’s U.S. citizenship immediately upon his birth, say constitutional scholars. No problem there, right? Maybe, maybe not. Then again, if there’s no problem with Cruz’s birth, given his mother’s citizenship, why would it have been a problem with Obama’s birth had he been born outside the United States? Barack Obama’s mother was a U.S. citizen, too.
Gosh, you don’t suppose the race of his father had anything to do with it … do you?
Ted Cruz has time to consider his options here. If he decides to take the presidential plunge, he’d better be ready to answer the question: Is he or isn’t he qualified to run? Maybe he can ask the current president how to handle that one.