Now that
this election is over, and as I reflect on the eventful months that have
transpired since President-elect Trump first announced he was seeking the
highest office in the land, one pervasive argument from his opponents comes to
mind, and that is that he is “…fundamentally unqualified to be [the] President.”
Now, I ask
you, who makes that assessment? Who
decides what the qualifications are?
Are you
qualified to be President because you have been in the Congress, either as a
Senator or as a Representative?
Are you
qualified because you have spent decades in Washington D.C.?
Are you
qualified because you have been a governor of a state? A famous mayor? A former House Speaker?
No wait! Maybe you’re most qualified if you have a
family member who has already been the President.
Or, maybe
your qualifications have nothing to do with you directly. Maybe you’re not qualified because you are vilified
by the press, mocked by late night comedians, ridiculed by daytime talking
heads, insulted by foreign leaders, audited by the IRS, ostracized by Silicon
Valley, and burned in effigy by coddled students.
None of the
above? How about you’re not qualified
because the talk radio audience likes you, or that you are popular throughout flyover country, or wherever guns are
sold. Maybe you’re unqualified because
your supporters keep getting banned from social media sites. That’s got to be it, right?
It’s all so
confusing to me, so I went to the source of the presidency, the United States
Constitution, to see if it could shed a light on what the qualifications are,
and lo and behold, they are right there written in ink and entrenched in the soul
of our American experience under Article II, Section 1:
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.
Hmmm, sounds
pretty clear to me in a straight forward kind of way, but what else does the
Constitution have to say on the matter? It
has, after all, been amended several times since the above words were penned. Let’s see what Amendment XXII, Section 1 adds
to the matter of qualifications:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President
more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted
as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was
elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than
once. But this Article shall not apply
to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed
by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office
of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article
becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President
during the remainder of such term.
A bit more winded
than what we see written in Article II, and more related to what happens after one is elected President.
So, in conclusion,
what does this say about whether Donald J. Trump is qualified to be
President? Well let’s see, I am pretty
sure he is over thirty-five years old though I haven’t seen his birth
certificate to prove that. And he is
likely a citizen, but again, I haven’t seen his birth certificate to prove this
either, but since we took his predecessor’s word for it I’ll give Donald Trump
the benefit of the doubt here.
I know this much
though! Nowhere in the Constitution did
I find qualifications such as how long someone has been a politician or if they
have even been one at all, or need to be.
Nothing there about being a former military leader either (and we’ve had
a few of those as presidents), and certainly nowhere did I see it written that
you deserve to be President because you are of a certain race or sex, or that
you paid your dues!
So it seems to this “deplorable”
white guy with no college degree, who had a black man as his best man at his
wedding, grew up with friends who were of Chinese, Armenian, Russian and
Persian descent, saluted female officers during his military career with the
same admiration and respect he did the male ones [sometimes even more so] that
I did weigh Donald Trump’s qualifications very carefully and am satisfied that
voting for him was the right thing to do.
