The birther issue is back. No, not the Obama birther crazies; the Ted Cruz birther crazies.
In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) on Monday's All Things Considered, Sarah Duggin of the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law claimed that Ted Cruz’s eligibility for the Presidency is not “an open-and-shut case” because “we don’t know precisely what the framers of the Constitution meant when they put into Article II that no person except a natural-born citizen shall be eligible to the office of president.”
To her credit, Professor Duggin did concede that "the better argument is that Senator Cruz is eligible to run for president and to serve as president of the United States." She just thinks that everything is up in the air "absent a Supreme Court ruling or a constitutional amendment."
Had the NPR reporter and the professor actually read (or re-read) Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, they would have seen that one does not have to be a “natural born citizen,” to be president. “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.”
Beyond the fact that both Siegel and Duggin wasted four minutes discussing a nonexistent crisis born of a poor reading of the Constitution, the timing of the discussion is questionable, given that NPR had already settled the issue in Cruz’s favor in a previous article earlier on Monday:
Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, and Paul Clement, who was solicitor general under George W. Bush, wrote earlier this month in the Harvard Law Review that "there is no question" Cruz is eligible.
If the answer was settled, even on NPR's website, why bring up the issue on a national radio broadcast?
Siegel’s question to Professor Duggin hints at an answer, “Do you think that all of this stuff about President Obama not having been born...in Honolulu...has given more life to this whole argument about what a natural-born citizen is?"
An excerpt from the first article all but confirms the answer, “Democrats are sure to remind voters of Cruz's Canadian birth since some on the right have questioned where President Obama was born.”
In other words, NPR’s interview with Professor Duggin seems to have served little purpose beyond putting a stick in the eyes of Republicans
