During the almost seven years of Barack Obama’s presidency of the United States of America, various people on the right of American politics have repeatedly tried to assert that he isn’t fit for office because he was, according to them, not born in the US but rather in Kenya. This has to do with a portion of the constitution stipulating that, according to them (and we’ll come onto the confusion around this in a bit), you have to be born in America in order to be able to become president. You may have missed this, by the way, given the American Right were so, you know, subtle about it all.
But now we have an interesting situation directly related: Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz was born in Canada. In fact, his actual situation eerily mirrors the one the “birthers” tried to assert falsely related to Obama and thus nullify his presidency: Cruz was born outside of the US to an American mother, and his father was not American at the time of his birth. So to recap, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, so everything to do with the birther phenomenon was false anyhow, but even if Obama had been born in Kenya, he would only have exactly as much right to be president as Ted Cruz does.
So constitutionally speaking, how much right does Ted Cruz have to be president exactly? It’s confusing given the language of the US constitution is very 18th century in construction. So it can be debated. Apparently, enough people think it’s all fine and dandy enough for Cruz to run, and (surprise, surprise) the very same people who asserted that if it could be proven that Obama was born in Kenya to an American mother he should be impeached have absolutely no problem whatsoever with Cruz running for the very same job having been born in Canada to an American mother.
To make this all extra fun, Donald Trump is now getting in on the action, telling the nation that Cruz shouldn’t be allowed to become president because of his Canadian birth. As much as I dislike Trump, at the very least he’s the only figure on the Right being absolutely consistent on the birther issue.
Here’s a question: if Ted Cruz gets elected president, will the Left make their own birther complaint a fixture of the next four years? The fun a country can have with its 18th century constitution seems likely to never end.
John McCain, 2008 losing candidate, was born in the Panama Canal Zone.
USA’s founders presumably imagined that a migrant from Europe might have divided loyalties and someone who had spent all their life in America might identify more with it as their only reality. That was at a time when a family was unlikely to bear a child in America then migrate to Europe for much of their childhood then back again. Now the rule’s collapse is a necessity of the US’s emergence from its historical racism. “Birthplace racism”, the school bully bigotry of holding a person’s country to be dictated by the arbitrary chance of birthplace, is particularly spiteful, and destructive in its random dividing of communities and families. Many folks are born in places they have no further connection with in their lives.