Riddle me this

Welcome to my Mindworker blog. Don’t expect much consistency here other than a blog a week, more or less. Look over this website, especially the freelance writer section. I’m a former teacher, so my active classroom days are done but the analysis of my teaching life has just begun.

 

I’ll be writing about my diverse field of interests: psychology, politics, adolescent problems, real estate, country life, inner-city struggles, youthful success stories, student deaths, forest fires… the list goes on. It’s not just about teaching. Some articles might intrigue you. Others may not inspire you to read. But that’s okay. As for now, I’m itching to write about one of the current Republican candidates for president. So, here it is.

 

Ted Cruz, Republican senator, was born on foreign soil: Canada. According to Thomas Lee, a professor at Fordham Law School, writing in the LA Times, there’s a clause in the U. S. Constitution that says: only a “natural-born citizen” is qualified to be president of the United States. This phrase only appears once in the Constitution but it’s often confused with “naturalized citizen” which is the commonly accepted usage of a child born on foreign soil to an American mother.

 

Cruz is the product of a Cuban father and an American mother, which makes him a “naturalized citizen.” That’s not the same as “natural-born” which requires being born in the USA. The only other qualifications for president are to be 35 years old and a U. S. citizen for 14 years. The reason for the American birth is that the founding fathers didn’t want any foreign born folks taking over the American government.

 

Riddle me this: what do these ten men (and their birth dates) have in common?

 

George Washington, 1732

John Adams, 1735

Thomas Jefferson, 1743

James Madison, 1751

James Monroe, 1758

Andrew Jackson, 1767

John Quincey Adams, 1767

William Harrison, 1773

Martin Van Buren, 1782

Zachary Taylor, 1784

 

Ready? Of course, they were all presidents born before 1789. Most were born in the 13 British Colonies. These men were not born in America because the USA didn’t exist yet. Then how did they become presidents after 1789, when the founders ratified the Constitution and we became the United States of America?

 

The answer is in one parenthesis slipped into the qualifications for president:  “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…” The founding fathers included a loophole to allow for their own future elections.

 

The Constitution clearly specifies only three requirements to be president and being a natural-born citizen is one of them. Of the 300 million Americans, we should be able to find one good president, right? We really don’t need to hijack someone from Canada, do we?

 

If Cruz really wants to fight this, there is a way. First, just ignore it. That’s what American history does with the dirty little secrets of our Constitution. It separates “free persons” (White) from “other persons” (Black). Slaves were counted for representation as “three fifths” of a human being. So, are Blacks only considered as three-fifths of a person in our Constitution? No. Why? Because everyone ignores it. So, everyone could just plain ignore Cruz’s failure to be “natural-born.” However, since no one in Congress likes him, this is unlikely.

 

There’s another way. A Constitutional amendment passed by Congress and ratified by the states could amend the Constitution. But this takes years and why would we do it for merely one person?

 

When Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California, his popularity was so high that he considered pushing for a Constitutional amendment so he could run for president. As his popularity waned, people realized that he was born of German parents in Austria and his father was a Nazi who fought on the Eastern front. Arnold has since returned to his muscle man movies.

 

Hey, Ted Cruz: forget about being president. Considering that many of your colleagues consider you to be the biggest liar in Congress, maybe the founding fathers were prophetic. They made a loophole for themselves, not for you.