Whether or not you believe me, I'm not looking at this in an effort to knock out Cruz, and as my posts show, I don't see any risk to his candidacy based on the constitution. The constitution says whatever people want it to say, that day. "Situational con law," a form of situational ethics. It's in vogue.
I'm interested both from a con law point of view, and a human/mob behavior point of view, as well as watching and marveling at how effectively the elites and message-makers are able to put false belief in people's heads. Not disparage the people, we're all human and susceptible to persuasion, even to a false conclusion.
-- It's quite a matter for academic debate --
It is indeed. I find the academic question to be easy to resolve. The fact that it is presented as "difficult" or "unsettled" is a tool to manipulate public belief.
500 years ago, most everybody believed that the sun orbits the earth. Today, lots of people believe there is such a thing as "global warming" and that it caused by human activity. I mean they really and truly believe. And as far as it has an effect on politics, belief is all that matters. The truth is (or at least can be) irrelevant.
I don’t have so much of an attachment to Cruz. I do instead to Jesus Christ.
But it seems to me that there are people treating the Constitution like the Bible, and it’s not. Law if it’s there should be followed if it’s godly, but people are ignoring the fact that while some things those who composed the Constitution made crystal-clear, like the age qualifications for offices, other things they didn’t, like “natural-born citizen.”
And that was necessary because there are all sorts of different circumstances that someone could come from, and being “natural-born” only goes so far in terms of protecting against foreign influence. Someone who’s “natural-born” could have communist sympathizers for parents, or spend much of their life in a hostile country.
The Constitution doesn’t make a black-and-white disqualification of anyone except those obviously tied to foreign countries, and the benefit of that is the people don’t become complacent to think simply barring someone guarantees you don’t have to look at the allegiances of eligible candidates.