The
22nd Amendment to the Constitution says no one may be elected to more than two terms as president of the United States.
It passed Congress in 1947 just after Republicans took control of Congress and largely in reaction to four-term Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt. It was ratified by the states in 1951.
The first person who wasn’t eligible to run for re-election to a third term because of the amendment was Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican.
Greene’s Law of Ironic Political Karma: Don’t yell too loudly that the other guy’s pants are split in the seat unless you’re double sure about the stitches in your own britches.
That came to mind as I was thinking about the brewing controversy over the presidential candidacy of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
Cruz is a Republican and a tea party favorite, but through an accident of history he was born in Calgary, which is in Canada, which isn’t part of the United States. His mother was an American. His father was a Cuban expatriot.
So, the storm and fury of the birther movement could come back to rain on the tea party candidate.
Because his mother was an American, Cruz was an American from birth. But
legal scholars told the Dallas Morning News that he was also a Canadian citizen from birth. He initially denied any Canadian citizenship, then renounced it.
There’s still a sliver of doubt about whether Cruz is a “natural born citizen,” the phrase mandated in the Constitution and never defined there.
But after the hassle that Barack Obama put up with over his Hawaiian birth certificate, you can bet someone will ask. As was first pointed out in
a Washington Post blog, the issue in Obama’s case was about the facts: Was he really born in Hawaii? This issue in Cruz’s case is the law: Is a citizen from birth a natural born citizens, if he wasn’t born on U.S. soil?
In Oklahoma, you may recall Sen. Ralph Shortey, R-Oklahoma City, a tea partier’s partier, proposed in 2011 that anyone running in the state’s presidential preference primary had to present birth certificate proof of qualification for office.
Different versions of Shortey’s proposal passed the House and Senate, but it eventually was watered down in the legislative process and then died without a conference committee being approved.
But
another state statute still requires anyone running for office in Oklahoma “be qualified to hold the office” and
another statute allows any opposing candidate to challenge those credentials in a hearing before the state election board.
So, a Republican candidate for president could challenge Cruz to prove his natural-born status to the satisfaction of the state election board. That would be, as they say, a very interesting day.
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