Democracy Has Prevailed.

March 25, 2015

More On Right-Wing Eligibility Hypocrisy

The Houston Chronicle reported:
Sen. Ted Cruz plans to announce Monday that he will run for president of the United States, according to his senior advisers, accelerating his already rapid three-year rise from a tea party insurgent in Texas into a divisive political force in Washington.

Cruz, scheduled to speak Monday at a convocation ceremony at Liberty University in Virginia, will not form an exploratory committee but rather launch a presidential bid outright, said advisers with direct knowledge of his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an official announcement had not been made yet. They say he is done exploring and is now ready to become the first Republican presidential candidate.
And this is going to be a big problem for our friends in the birther crowd.  Even Joseph Farah at World Net Daily offered up an opinion on the issue in a few years ago (kinda).  While clinging, as only he can, to the lie that Obama's not eligible to be president he starts with another falsehood:
I know many members of Congress personally. Almost all of them know the truth. But they fear talking about it because of what the media will do to them. They know the facts about Obama will never get a fair hearing in the establishment press. Even some of the media are cowed into silence. It’s just a subject they know you can’t talk about without being pilloried and ridiculed with the vilest name-calling by Obama’s Palace Guard and the defenders of Obama who dominate the press.

Then Ted Cruz comes along.

And what happens?

Every media outlet in the country is questioning his constitutional eligibility.
He wrote that August 22, 2013 and by that point this was published (a week earlier) at CNN:
The question about eligibility has always been with regard to children of U.S. citizens born overseas, like Ted Cruz, and Republican presidential candidates John McCain and George Romney before him. The Supreme Court has held that foreign-born children are U.S. citizens only to the extent that a law passed by Congress makes them so. As the child of a U.S. citizen mother, Ted Cruz was born a citizen by virtue of the Immigration and Nationality Act. But did that make him a natural born citizen?

The United States has citizens, not subjects; we are a nation of free people, not ruled by a hereditary sovereign. Therefore, the English concept does not translate directly to the American context. Instead, the question is who is a natural member of the political community.

Most immigration and citizenship scholars, including me, believe that the answer is that any person who is a U.S. citizen at birth is naturally a part of the political community and hence eligible to be president. [Emphasis added.]
So Farah started with a lie.  In any event Farah, only four months later (January, 2014), showed the birther community the way out of their own hypocrisy
So if anyone has the right and the duty to weigh in on Ted Cruz’s eligibility, it’s me – even though no one is asking.

My answer is, “I don’t care.”
And in defending his newly found apathy, he reasserts all the birther lies that have maggot squirmed out of WND for years:
I don’t care because the Constitution was not written and ratified to be applied to some and not others. If no one cared about Obama’s questionable eligibility, despite his shocking lack of transparency and thin paper trail, then they have no business questioning Ted Cruz...
While I'm not here to assert that Cruz is ineligible, I am here to say that if we were to accept the birthers' criteria for eligibility (the ones they incorrectly say invalidates the Obama presidency), he'd definitely not be.

In 2008, this showed up at World Net Daily:
The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to help the nation avoid a constitutional crisis by halting Tuesday’s election until Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama documents his eligibility to run for the top office in the nation.

Democratic attorney Philip Berg had filed a lawsuit alleging Obama is ineligible to be president because of possible birth in Kenya, but as WND reported, a federal judge dismissed the complaint claiming Berg lacks standing to bring the action.
Well we all know that Obama was born in Hawaii - but if the criteria for eligibility include WHERE on the planet a presidential candidate was born (even if one parent is an American citizen), then that would have to mean that Ted Cruz is ineligible because (again as we all know) he was born in Canada (regardless of his mother's citizenship status).

For the record, I'm not saying anything about Cruz' eligibility.  What I am saying is this: If we follow the criteria for establishing eligibility that the birthers look to impose, then by their own standards, Cruz is ineligible.

Let's see them scream as loudly now against the conservative Republican Senator from Texas has they screamed against the NON-conservative NON-Republican former Senator from Illinois.

Either that, or they're just a bunch of spineless hypocrites.

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