Before we get in to the ridiculousness that is that statement, I think it is important to establish the fact that Grayson is not always the dumbest man in the room. In fact, at points in his life, he has been fairly brilliant. Like when he earned his Juris Doctorate from Harvard in 1983 (graduating magna cum laude.) During his underclassman career, he finished in the top 2 percent of his class, and finished his bachelor's degree in only 3 years. Later in life, he helped found IDT Corp., and served as its first president.
Of course, he hasn't always been brilliant, nor has he been polite as he began and continued his political career. No one is perfect, though, so we'll just overlook his bitter partisanship, and chalk it up to bitter bitter butter corn due to losses he had suffered in that arena.
Before we fully delve in to the moronic statement that began this post, I'd like you to take a couple of minutes to listen to Rep. Grayson push forward a resolution to teach students about the Constitution. It's quite obvious that Grayson should have pushed a similar resolution for Congressmen/women (along with POTUS and VPOTUS, members of the Supreme Court, etc.), but for whatever reason, he did not. Perhaps that was an early warning sign of his fallibility on the issue.
Later in the interview, he would go on to say:
In a sense, I guess, Cruz is not technically that way — because technically he’s not even an America. His mother was born here, so I guess like [President Barack] Obama, it's interesting to me that the people who had a problem with Obama’s birth certificate don’t have a problem with Ted Cruz, who literally was born in another country and renounced his Canadian citizenry.I guess my first question would be the other side of that coin: why didn't he have a problem with Obama not being vetted during his 2008 campaign for POTUS? He was a big supporter of Obama's campaign, and has been a big supporter of many of Obama's unConstitutional attacks on these United States.
It is well known that Obama's father was not a U.S. citizen, and there have been those who have argued that even if Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 as he maintains, his mother could not legally confer citizenship to her son. The son who would grow up to despise her. I'm not here to go down that road, again. Obama's term is drawing to a close, and scaredy cat Republicans who have had had 8+ years to figure out what to do about that particular Constitutional crisis, and they've chosen to sit back on their laurels.
Rather, I'd like to enlighten Congressman Grayson to the particulars of the Constitutional requirements for a person to become President of the United States of America:
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; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.The Latin phrasing of this concept would be jus sanguinis (literally "right of blood") & jus soli (literally "right of soil"), and it is these concepts that are applicable to whether or not a person has the right to call themselves an American citizen. As noted in the link above that detailed whether or not Obama may have been Constitutionally eligible to be elected President, determining exactly what 'natural born citizen' means is a bit difficult. While Cruz would not qualify for American citizenship under jus soli, I don't believe (he was born in Canada), both of his parents are and were American citizens, which means that he would qualify under jus sanguinis. This is a concept so basic, that Congressman Grayson shouldn't even need to take a Constitutional refresher course in order to understand it.
What it truly shows, I believe, is that Grayson is afraid that Ted Cruz is a strong enough candidate to defeat whomsoever the democrats put forth as their candidate in 2016. On that front, I have an update for him: unless some heretofore unseen democratic candidate emerges, a Republican will be elected President in 2016. Grayson obviously has a bone to pick with all Republicans, but is doing his very best to scare voters away from Cruz. That may work in some instances, but in others, it may draw people to him that might not otherwise had him as their first choice. Persons such as myself, for instance. Anytime someone so diametrically opposed to my belief system is so vehemently opposed to something or someone, it gives that item or person extra credibility in my eyes. At the least, it will cause me to investigate the situation further for myself, to prove the moron wrong.
Another thought is that Grayson may be looking to get his name back out in front of the public eye, as he runs for the U.S. Senate seat that Marco Rubio is vacating at the end of his term. I wouldn't think that insulting a Cuban-American would play well in many parts of Florida, but perhaps he is reaching out to those with prejudices against minorities (the very people he claims to despise) as he goes about his campaign.
However, it is also just possible that he's a moronic Troll.
