Do you know how hard it is to write yet another post about how much everyone hates Ted Cruz? Not because it makes us sad to write it, or because it is difficult to write. Hating a face like that, the O.G. face made for punching, is actually super easy. What is hard is tracking down all the one million times we’ve already written about how much everyone hates him so we can make sure to link to them all again for your convenience.
Perhaps that’s why so many people on his side of the aisle have also jumped on the birther train and are riding it all the way to CruzCan’tBePresidentVille. Trump kicked it off, of course, because Trump is That Guy who will always Go There. John McCain gleefully joined in for the fun of kicking a man while he’s down Canadian. And Carly Fiorina didn’t quite say he was a dirty furriner, but did point out that Cruz only just started loving America instead of making sweet sweet love to Canada. We guess we shouldn’t be so surprised that even his Senate colleagues have declined to defend him on this front.
McConnell, whom Cruz called a “liar” on the Senate floor in July, said Sunday in an ABC interview. “I don’t think the Senate ought to get in the middle of it.”
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa similarly declined to say if she believes Cruz is a natural born citizen.”Yeah, I’m not going to comment on that. I just think—let’s go through the process and see who Iowa picks.” […]
Bloomberg Politics has sought the opinion of all 54 Republican senators on whether Cruz is eligible to serve. We queried offices and presidential campaigns and evaluated previous media statements. Aside from Cruz, only five senators—Marco Rubio of Florida, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch of Utah, and Jeff Flake of Arizona—offered a response that appeared to support Cruz.
In 2008, by contrast, the Senate passed a resolution saying that year’s Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, was eligible to serve despite having been born in Panama. Two of McCain’s potential opponents, then-Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, submitted the resolution, along with three other Democrats.
The Constitution provides that “No person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of President.” […] On this subject, the common law is clear and unambiguous. The 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on it, declared natural-born citizens are “such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” while aliens are “such as are born out of it.” The key to this division is the assumption of allegiance to one’s country of birth. The Americans who drafted the Constitution adopted this principle for the United States. James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” stated, “It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. [And] place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.”
The “known as the father of the Constitution” bit is a nice touch, jabbing as it does at every conservative who dreams of skull-fucking the Founding Fathers. Con Law Prof Lady does have a point, however. The whole reason that the Founding Fathers were completely obsessed with making sure you were born on this here ‘Merican soil was the concern that if you were born in Merry Olde England, you might be a secret Limey who would bring down America. Also too she gets the snarkiest aside in later in the piece:
Let me be clear: I am not a so-called birther. I am a legal historian. President Obama is without question eligible for the office he serves. The distinction between the president and Cruz is simple: The president was born within the United States, and the senator was born outside of it. That is a distinction with a difference.
We think we might be a little bit in love with this lady. Like all good journalists, we googled her before writing this just to make sure she was a respectable professor and didn’t instead teach at that weird Catholic law school started by the guy who founded Domino’s Pizza or Liberty University or some place like that. In doing so, we found that she apparently feels so strongly about Ted Cruz not being eligible to be president (as do we all!) that she wrote an entire law review article about the Natural Born Citizen Clause last year, merrily name-checking Cruz throughout. She gets all deep down and dirty originalist and textualist about it, just the way conservatives such as Ted Cruz like, and concludes:
The introduction to this Article posed a question: “in the eyes of early Americans, would someone born in a foreign country of American parents be a ‘natural born citizen’ and therefore eligible to be President of the United States?” The pertinent historical materials lead to only one conclusion: aside from children born to U.S. ambassadors or soldiers in hostile armies, the answer is “no.”
Pack it in, Ted. Literally no one likes you. Especially not us.
