Apparently there is no level of stupidity too low for political arguments to fully occupy. We refer to a kerfuffle over the last few days regarding Kamala Harris’ eligibility to be president.
The idea that she is not eligible is now being labeled a “conspiracy theory”, when in fact it’s just a legal question that’s maybe not entirely clear in every case, but clear enough to conclude that Harris is not eligible. As we also concluded four years ago regarding Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
We have little to add to what we said then, but to once again go over the rather simple line of reasoning owing to the prevalence of the stubbornly stupid: the constitution says that only “natural born citizens” are eligible to be president. The best definition of “natural born citizen” is a person who is born in the United States whose parents were also born in the United States. It could be reasonably argued that you would qualify as a natural born citizen if only one parent was also born in the US. But if neither of your parents were born in the US – that is, they were both immigrants – then you are not a natural born citizen and are not eligible to be president under our constitution. And that’s the problem with Kamala Harris. She is plainly not eligible.
To reiterate what we said four years ago: we are more than agreeable to amending the constitution to delete the requirement that the president must be a natural born citizen. We don’t even object to that being done quickly so that Kamala Harris can become eligible. We think the natural born citizen requirement long ago outlived its usefulness, which was, obviously, to ensure that our commander-in-chief would be less likely to have any vestigial loyalties to the British crown.
But we still object to dishonest “scholars” peddling plain falsehoods that we are supposed to accept because of their “credentials” at the risk of being labeled “conspiracy theorists” if we don’t.
And we object to the stupidity of the debate. And the media treatment of it.