It's the Constitution Stupid!

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.