Senator Ted Cruz: New Heights In Ignorance

As I write this we’re in the middle of a crisis with ISIS (or ISEL or the Islamic State, or whatever). This is one of those times where I don’t envy President Obama and how he needs to respond to this threat to our safety.

One of the reasons I don’t envy him is that he needs to govern when the opposition party cares little for the health of our country, its citizens, and its descendents but instead cares only with the desire to destroy him and his party.

Today I saw that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is likely going to run for President in 2016, wants to revoke the citizenship of any American citizen who joins Isis (or Isel or the Islamic State).

This is playing well with Faux News and the rest of this country’s knuckle draggers, but it’s not Constitutional. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that anyone born in the United States or naturalized is a citizen of this country. An article here shows that someone who is a naturalized citizen can have his citizenship revoked, but anyone who is born a citizen cannot have his (or her) citizenship revoked.

If Ted really wants this to pass he needs to amend the Constitution. It’s not an easy process (and it shouldn’t be). There are two ways to do this. The first (that has never been used) requires that two thirds of the states petition congress to call a Constitutional Convention. The problem with this method is that a convention can rewrite the entire Constitution and I don’t know anyone who wants this. It ignores the collective wisdom of the last 225 years.

The other method has been used 27 times. If two thirds of both the Senate and the House vote in favor of an amendment and three fourths of the state legislatures agree, it becomes an amendment of the Constitution.

Senator Cruz is clearly not aware that he cannot simply propose legislation to revoke the citizenship of natural born citizens. Or perhaps he does, and he is doing this as a publicity stunt. In any case, we shouldn’t stand by and allow him to do this.

It’s time to demand that our lawmakers understand the law. And it’s especially time to require anyone who wants to be President to understand the Constitution.

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