Senator Ted may not understand what the fuss is about his citizenship, but his Teabagger superfans sure ought to

Senator Ted had his chance to speak out against the loonery of birtherism. It's only fitting that he now pay some small price.

"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."

-- from Article II, Section 1, No. 5, of the U.S. Constitution

"Because I was a U.S. citizen at birth, because I left Calgary when I was 4 and have lived my entire life since then in the U.S., and because I have never taken affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship, I assumed that was the end of the matter."

-- Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, yesterday

by Ken

Based on the savagely and mean-spiritedly imbecilic blather that has been issuing from Ted Cruz's mouth since he took his seat in the Senate, it would have been easy to assume that the guy is just a dope. But blinkering ideology can make people who aren't naturally dim-witted say pretty obtuse things. Which still leaves open the question of whether he's as stupid as his handling of his newly front-burnered citizenship issues suggest.

So the senator is going to renounce the Canadian citizenship he didn't think he had but is now presumed to have by virtue of being born in Canada, amid questions about his supposed dual citizenship. And he's flustered about all the attention being paid to the subject. "Given the raft of stories today about my birth certificate, it must be a slow news day," he said.
The poor guy thought he had put the controversy about his citizenship to rest by releasing his birth certificate, which seems a pretty foolish rookie mistake. More to the point, unless he's just kidding, he really doesn't understand what the issue is.

Which is ironic, because I agree with him that it shouldn't be an issue. "I was a U.S. citizen at birth," he says, and there's no question in my mind that he is. Since his mother was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth in Canada, of course he was a citizen at birth. I don't see what else "natural born citizen" can possibly mean.

There are two problems, though.

First, the question has never been put to the legal test. When the late George Romney (you know, the father of Dullard) made his run at the presidency, there were plenty of people who argued that, because he wasn't born in the U.S., he didn't mean the "natural born citizen" standard. On the other hand, Romney invested a lot in that presidential bid, and had a lot of the Republican Party behind him, and if his campaign hadn't self-destructed on the issue of his Vietnam "brainwashing," he and his party would have been pretty heavily invested in their belief that he was constitutionally kosher.

Quite possibly if that had happened, and especially if Romney had been elected, the issue would have been pressed to some legally definitive resolution. But that didn't happen.

On the practical level, you to wonder how it could never have occurred to Senator Ted, since he began being hailed as presidential timber on the basis of his bloviating, that he was going to have to deal with the citizenship issue at some point. After all, he did live those first four years in Canada, where his American mother and Cuban-borth father had emigrated to work in the oil industry. (The elder Rafael Cruz already had a U.S. green card when he and his wife moved north of the border, and at some point in the eight years he lived there he acquired Canadian citizenship, which he apparently renounced when the couple returned to the States.)

Which brings us to the second problem with Senator Ted's handling of the eligibility issue. The constituency to which he lays claim with his ignorant nativism and general far-right loonery is precisely the horde of loons who did everything in their power to destroy the country over the phony-baloney Obama birth issue. And while it's true that in their combination of psychosis and demagoguery they escalated their delusions and lies to the level of a conspiracy on Obama's part fo coneal his "true" birth in Kenya, the underlying "birther" issue was that because Obama was born in Kenya, he wasn't eligible to be president, which would be the loons' and liars' explanation for the birth of the Obama-birth conspiracy.

Now you really can't have this both ways. If Senator Ted was "a U.S. citizen at birth," by virtue of his mother's citizenship, then so too was Barack Obama. And yet, as we know, the leaders of the Right were at best criminally silent on the issue of the birthers, and at worst openly encouraging. Of course Obama was never properly subject to such considerations, having been born in Hawaii, but the right-wing leaders could have suggested that the right-wing rabble-rousers come back when they had a less transparently preposterous conspiracy to promote.

It was a measure of the starkly cynical political opportunism that infects the whole of the Right that no such closure was attempted by more than the occasional Republican pol. Instead the pols chose to cast their lot with paranoid craziness, apparently thinking there would be no price to pay for it. Unfortunately, Senator Ted isn't going to pay anything like the bill that should be payable.

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."