Jan. 14--Having spent the better part of the week doing a deep dive on the increasingly relevant question of whether Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is eligible to become president, I've come away certain of one thing:
The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution needed a better copy editor.
Copy editors are the ones who save writers from themselves -- they not only catch typos and brainos, but they also flag grammatical lapses, confusing or muddled sentences, redundancies and ambiguous phrases.
"What are you trying to say here?" is their signature question. It tells the writer that even smart people who read for a living are going to stumble on or be confused by a particular passage, so a rewrite is in order. "How about we change it to ...?"
It's the question that should have been posed to those framers who specified in Article II that "no person except a natural born citizen ... shall be eligible to the office of president."
"What are you trying to say with 'natural born'?" a good copy editor would have asked. "The word 'natural' is tripping me up. Do you mean that all future presidents have to have been born in the country? Or that they have to have been citizens at the moment of birth?"
Sad to say there's no record of that question coming up at the time, and there's no definitive evidence in history of what the answer might have been if it had. Legal scholars have kicked the matter around for decades but have lately been analyzing it with more urgency now that Cruz, born in Canada to a mother who was a U.S. citizen, is among the leading candidates in the 2016 race for the White House.
By law, Cruz was a citizen at birth. But was he a "natural born" citizen in the eyes of the Founders?
Common sense suggests that "natural" was a meaningless rhetorical flourish; that "natural born" is a pleonasm -- one of those redundant idioms, such as "safe haven," "temper tantrum," "closed fist" and "future plans," that we use without thinking and that copy editors strive to excise.
After all, the purpose of the clause was plainly to prevent overthrow of the fledgling nation from within by foreign usurpers, not to discourage travel abroad by pregnant American women or disadvantage their offspring.
But, as University of San Diego Law School professor Michael D. Ramsey points out in a 19,000-word article titled, "The Original Meaning of 'Natural Born,'" published earlier this month on the Social Science Research Network, pretending "natural" has no meaning violates the surplusage canon, a legal principle that demands we take each word in a statute seriously.
