I’m totally onboard with her as a candidate but I am confused by the implication that her status as a veteran would make a meaningful difference, when the article itself makes the following statement:
So if it’s no longer an advantage why list that among the reasons she should run?
Today’s GOP (and certainly their current standard-bearer) is just going to call her a “loser” and “sucker” for leaving her legs behind in Iraq. Which certainly shouldn’t stop her from running but she’s not getting their votes either way.
If you add up those on active duty and veterans, plus their families, plus all the former card-carrying members of the Republican party who are now without a party – those that the Lincoln Party folks are targeting – the net gain over diehard MAGAts would be significant in a close election.
So you’re making the argument that it is an advantage for a candidate. That’s fine, but the article explicitly said it wasn’t so I wasn’t sure what point the article’s author was trying to make.
There is a legal theory that the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment effectively did away with the “natural born” requirement since all U.S. Citizens are now supposed to have the same rights. But the only way to definitively settle that question would be for someone to take the case for a candidate’s eligibility to the Supreme Court, and neither party seems interested enough in running an immigrant candidate to make that kind of effort.
The ideal test case would be if Republicans decided to run an immigrant candidate. It wasn’t so many years ago it seemed feasible that Arnold Schwarzenegger might be such a candidate, but the party has taken a hard right turn and a few crazy loop-de-loops since then.
In the original director’s cut of Macbeth the big twist at the end is that while Macduff’s cesarean birth allowed him to kill the usurper without contradicting the Weird Sisters’ prophecy, it was also the reason he was disqualified from taking the office himself.
