RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Reader (including those of you born in Canada),

I guess we should start there. I find this birther stuff to be a lot like women’s prison movies: compelling, entertaining, and totally ridiculous.

Other than the presidency, there’s no place in American life where the distinction between “naturalized” and “natural-born” citizenship matters.

But imagine if it did? Imagine that your American-born mother just happened to give birth to you in Canada or Belize while on vacation. Your American-born mom and dad bring you home days later and raise you exactly as they would have had they been in Cleveland the whole time. Now imagine there are also all sorts of jobs you are barred from having. Not only can you not be president, but you can’t be, say, a chiropodist or an embalmer. Pick your restrictions: You can’t go to certain colleges or you can’t get the best ESPN bundle. Americans born abroad can’t buy basset hounds. Unless you were born here, you can’t get cheese on your hamburger. Whatever. It really doesn’t matter.

If that were the case the Constitution would be amended — either properly or through interpretation — to get rid of this distinction instantly (which means this would have happened centuries before the invention of ESPN, but you get the point).

My point is simple: This issue remains unsettled because it matters so little.

Psephology is a branch of political science which deals with the study and scientific analysis of elections. rsk
“Our expert psephologists tell us that Trump is way ahead in many polls. But as I say, I suspect they are measuring fans, not supporters. The difference is between cheering on a successful mud wrestler and appointing a general to lead the army.Donald Trump is an amusing entertainer whose antics have shone a light on some dark corners that needed illumination. He is a sort of Liberace of Liberalism: a recent supporter of Chuck Schumer, of Nancy Pelosi, of Hillary Clinton, who also (until about ten minutes ago) was as pro-abortion as it is possible to be.”

The consensus seems to be that Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio were the only three candidates who emerged standing from the debate last night. Christie got off some good lines as usual, while Ben Carson once again left me wondering what pharmaceutical cocktail he had ingested before mounting the stage, and John Kasich once again made me feel sorry that he had to cope with that species of motor-neuron disease with which he is afflicted.

I also felt a little sorry for Jeb Bush.

He is clearly a competent man whose record as governor of Florida should inspire admiration. Sure, you might disagree with him about this or that — Common Core, for example, or the details of his ideas about immigration — but he is a thoughtful, steady person of good will. He exudes maturity, and it tells us a lot about the texture of our current political situation, I think, that Donald Trump should have been able to score one of his first rhetorical victories of the primary season by charging that Jeb Bush was “low energy.”

The charge stuck, but it was unfair. Jeb is not low energy. He is simply deliberate — a good thing in a statesman.

I say this not because I am a Bush supporter. I’m not, for many reasons. But I think it is worth pausing to acknowledge that he acts with dignity, like an adult. Last night, Chris Christie described Barack Obama as a “petulant child.” That was apt. Obama is notoriously thin-skinned, as are many narcissists, and that combined with his breathtaking incompetence has been a recipe for petulance.

For the last seven years, the nation has suffered under a president who ignores the law and treats the legal process as a political weapon. Yet in the most recent Republican debate, Donald Trump displayed a clownish, similar disregard for the law when he demanded Senator Ted Cruz “get a declaratory judgment” about his eligibility to run for president.

The meritless nature of Trump’s birther controversy was neatly summarized by Susan Carleson in the Washington Times:

As the Supreme Court made clear, there are only two types of American citizenship — citizens at birth, such as Sen. Cruz, and those who become citizens through the naturalization process.

A declaratory judgment is when a judge, in a legitimate contested lawsuit, makes a ruling about which side is correct about a legal controversy.

Trump has some knowledge of this process — because of what he did to Vera Coking.

Vera Coking lived for 30 years in a modest Atlantic City home, until Trump coveted her land. As David Boaz summarizes:

Trump turned to a government agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) — to take Coking’s property. CRDA offered her $250,000 for the property — one-fourth of what another hotel builder had offered her a decade earlier. When she turned that down, the agency went into court to claim her property under eminent domain so that Trump could pave it and put up a parking lot.

Coking wasn’t the only person who faced a declaratory judgment because Donald Trump wanted the government to take their land for his private benefit. He did the same thing to others in Atlantic City, and proposed the same for an amusement park in Connecticut. Trump still supports the abusive eminent domain practices that took the home of Susette Kelo in New London, Connecticut.

A birther lawsuit challenging Ted Cruz’s eligibility was filed today in federal court in Texas. I had previously written that such a lawsuit challenging the eligibility would most certainly lack standing and would be frivolous. The lawyer who filed the complaint, Newton B. Schwartz, Sr., had been suspended from the practice of law by two separate states for disciplinary infractions.
According to the detailed disciplinary ruling against Schwartz in Louisiana, he engaged in legal matters in Louisiana but was never admitted to practice law in the state and never sought temporary admission. (You can read the lengthy disciplinary case against Schwartz here).

Beware the zeal of the reformer. True, the reform impulse has occupied a long and sometimes necessary place in American politics, going back to Andrew Jackson’s fiery allegation that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay stole the 1824 presidential election through a “corrupt bargain.” Four years later, Jackson rode to the White House on the wings of the outrage he had summoned. His refrain—that malefactors of power had undermined American democracy by thwarting the will of the people—has probably been the most catalytic recurrent theme in the country’s politics. Even when the flames of populist passion subside, they seem ever-present through a kind of after-burner of latent protest.

Yet the political reforms generated by these passions often go awry, producing unintended consequences. Sometimes they fall victim to the vicissitudes of human nature and the reality that politics is rarely about good guys versus bad guys. Reformers are human, and often when power comes their way their frailties are exposed.
Let The People Rule

By Geoffrey Cowan
Norton, 404 pages, $27.95

A particularly potent period of reformist zeal followed the tumultuous campaign year of 1968, when activist Democrats infuriated by the Vietnam War flooded the early presidential primary states and obliterated President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second full term. For their pains they got, instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who embraced Johnson’s war policy and cadged his party’s nomination without having entered a single primary. The reformist refrain went up: The party’s nomination process was dominated by backroom bosses who exercised power without regard to voter sentiment.

The reformist answer was to revise party rules in order to encourage states to select national convention delegates through primaries rather than boss-controlled caucuses and state conventions. The result was the nominating system we have today, with generally 80% of national convention delegates selected through primaries.