In a post earlier today, I discussed the serious issues surrounding Donald Trump’s charge that Ted Cruz may not be eligible for the presidency. But there is a lighter side to it and what Cruz should really worry about is what Orly Taitz thinks.
As long time readers know, I have long had a mad crush on this triple threat of lawyer/dentist/real estate agent, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union herself, who has made it her life’s work to prevent ineligible people from becoming president. I was thrilled when she visited this blog and commented, even though it is clear that my love for her is unrequited.
She filed case after case against Obama and got nowhere. So what does she think about Cruz? The bad news for him is that she is an equal-opportunity birther, respecting no partisan boundaries and she thinks he is ineligible too, even though she agrees with Cruz’s and Tea Party policies. She thinks Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal are also ineligible.
Doggedness is Orly’s middle name. Once Orly is on your case, she never lets go, so this should be a real source of worry to Cruz and Rubio. Unfortunately for our litigation-hungry heroine, she has switched her voter registration from Republican to Independent and so she likely will not have standing to sue Cruz or Rubio until and if one of them becomes the Republican nominee at the convention in July
The flap over Ted Cruz’s’ citizenship has become the source for considerable humor.
The Daily Show also had a clip about Cruz’s birther problem.
(This clip aired on January 7, 2016. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Nightly Show outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
In most cases, I feel the framers of the Constitution really thought long and hard about their issues, but I think they really dropped the ball on this particular one. In my experience, the ones you can most count on to work enthusiastically for an organization to succeed are the ones who consciously decided to join it, be it a club, or a church, or a country. I do think that people with dual citizenship should probably be excluded, and maybe we need a good long history as a U.S. citizen, like maybe 20 years, to demonstrate solid commitment to the country, but I would have no problem with a naturalized citizen becoming President (in general. Of course in Cruz’s case I’m not terribly thrilled at the idea.)
Well I believe it was to prevent foreign powers from attempting a coup of the fledgling nation. Which at the time of the framing of the Constitution was a real concern. It is true that they didn’t seem to apply much thought to how things would be many years later, as they seemed to do on other issues. However, it was a pretty rational choice at the time.
There is something to the idea that the founders were worried about mixed loyalties in the leadership of the nation. But, IMHO, the main issue had to do with the typical government of the day, monarchy. Specifically rule by a family line. The founders made a considerable effort to prevent the establishment and maintenance of a line of succession.
I suspect that Cruz is legally qualified. It is sweet to see the GOP leadership have one of their preferred candidates being beat on with a club that was created as a purpose built tool to hammer Obama with.
It is especially sweet for me to contemplate that Cruz, a boy raised from birth to be his fathers tool to impose a stricter and idiosyncratic view of Christianity upon a not quite righteous enough nation, a boy intensively indoctrinated and programmed at considerable expense to fulfill this mission, might be thwarted by a previously unconsidered, seemingly minor, flaw in his creation that makes him completely unsuitable.
Can you point to a quote where Trump literally said that? Or is that your interpretation of something more vague that Trump said, onto which you’ve imprinted your own spin? I’d be interested to see precisely what it is Trump has said about this.
On this issue, what I’ve seen (and it isn’t much, I freely admit) is Trump ASKING something like “do you really want a candidate who’s going to be tied up in court for years?”. He didn’t say he’s not eligible. He didn’t even say he MAY not be eligible. All he did -- all he needed to do -- was raise the spectre of distraction, and you fill in the blanks yourself.
sonofrojblake, Google is your friend.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+cruz+citizenship
(Apparently, everyone but you can fill in the blanks)
I admit I have two major disadvantages in this discussion:
1. I don’t live in the US so my everyday media (i.e. BBC Radio 4) isn’t reporting this much.
2. I really truly don’t care who wins enough to follow it particularly closely.
I brought it up only because so far, really startlingly often I see blog posts, news stories, Facebook posts and so on where people from both sides of the political divide indignantly say something like “Trump said THIS!!!!!1!!1!”, and when I’ve been bothered to go and look what he actually said, it was nothing of the kind. It was usually close, and very often “obviously” he meant what they thought… except that’s not what he said. I repeat -- not once or twice, but over and over. Obviously a large part of this is the combination of Trump saying deliberately inflammatory things and the media slavishly reporting them, but it’s enough of a pattern that it occurred to me to question this.