John Nichols | The Nation

Senator Ted Cruz during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on what lawmakers should do to curb gun violence on January 30, 2013, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

“He’s a Canadian.”

So says Toronto lawyer Stephen Green, the past chairman of the Canadian Bar Association’s Citizenship and Immigration Section, of Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Cruz, the in-a-very-big-hurry Republican who started making noises about running for president before the ink on his Senate stationery had dried, was born in Canada.

He has a Canadian birth certificate.

He spent his formative years in Canada.

But he says it never occurred to him that he was a Canadian until The Dallas Morning News reported that the senator is indeed a true son of America’s neighbor to the north.

“If a child was born in the territory, he is Canadian, period,” France Houle, a law professor at the University of Montreal, told the Texas paper. “He can ask for a passport. He can vote.”

Indeed, since the requirements to gain election to the Canadian House of Commons hold that the candidate be a citizen and of voting age, and since prime ministers are invariably parliamentarians, Cruz could be excused for imagining himself not just as a potential US presidential prospect but a potential prime minister of Canada. (Former Canadian Prime Minister John Turner was born in Britain and arrived in Canada at the age of 3.)

Cruz is not just Canadian. He is also American. His mother was a US citizen outside the country at the time of his birth, and that makes her son a dual citizen.

So the Tea Party favorite should be able to run for president—a prospect that unsettles Republican strategists but rather delights Democrats.

Just to assure that there are no questions about his loyalties, however, Cruz says he’ll renounce his Canadian citizenship. As he puts it, “I believe I should be only an American.”

That’s cool.

The whole “Canadian Ted” thing is tiresome.

In fact, the whole discussion about candidate citizenship and birth certificates and the Americanism of potential presidents is tiresome.

It should be put to rest.

The US Constitution should be amended to remove the section that reads, “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.”

Anyone who is a citizen and who meets the other requirements for seeking and holding the presidency should be able to lead the country. The “natural-born citizen” language does not merely limit the ability of otherwise qualified candidates to seek the presidency or vice-presidency—former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who was born in Canada, or former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, who was born in Switzerland. It also limits the ability of voters to choose from candidates who would be credible contenders except for an accident of birth.

A decade ago, when there was a brief enthusiasm among Republicans for a presidential run by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born movie star who had recently been elected governor of California, one of the leading Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Utah’s Orrin Hatch, proposed “The Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment.”

The measure would have repealed the “natural-born citizen” clause and allowed anyone who has been a US citizen for twenty years to seek the presidency or vice-presidency. The language Hatch wanted to add to the Constitution declared, “A person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been for 20 years a citizen of the United States, and who is otherwise eligible to the Office of President, is not ineligible to that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States.”

Hatch’s amendment did not get very far after its introduction in 2003. A Judiciary Committee hearing was held in 2004, but the full Senate never took up the proposal. It should now—not for the sake of Ted Cruz or any other candidate but for the sake of the American experiment in democracy.

Despite the fact that seven of the thirty-nine men who signed the US Constitution in 1787 did not meet the “natural-born citizen” standard, there was just enough fear at the time that a foreign-born monarch would take charge of the newly formed United States to cause the clause to be added.

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The line’s inclusion was at odds with the Enlightenment vision of the best of the founders (including British-born Thomas Paine) and, as constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar noted at the 2004 Judiciary Committee hearing, the rest of the Constitution “repudiated this [English] tradition across the board, opening the House, Senate, Cabinet and federal judiciary to naturalized and native alike.”

It is time to get over the fears of 226 years ago and embrace the Enlightenment vision, recognizing that Amar was right when he told the Judiciary Committee that “modern Americans can best honor the Founders’ generally egalitarian vision by repealing the specific natural-born rule that has outlived its original purpose.”

John Nichols and Bob McChesney are the authors of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Books), which outlines an agenda of constitutional reforms to extend American democracy.

Why did Chris Christie back down on gun control?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie answers a question during a campaign event in Manville, New Jersey, Monday, May 13, 2013. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

Scheduling matters—especially when it comes to manipulating election dates.

Just ask Chris Christie. He’s choreographing a confusing series of statewide elections in New Jersey this fall—all with the goal of benefiting Chris Christie.

And what benefits Chris Christie most is diminished democracy. So the governor—and potential 2016 Republican presidential contender—has managed his election schedule with an eye toward keeping voter turnout low.

Very, very low.

The first step in the process went according to plan. On Tuesday, New Jersey held US Senate special election primaries to choose candidates to finish the term of the late Frank Lautenberg.

From a crowded and competitive field of Democrats, Newark Mayor Cory Booker was nominated with almost 60 percent of the vote.

In a two-person Republican race, former Bogota, New Jersey, mayor and Americans for Prosperity operative Steve Lonegan prevailed.

But almost no one voted. One New Jersey newspaper summed things up when it described voter participation as “little to none.”

When all the ballots were counted, the turnout figure was around 9 percent.

So 91 percent of eligible voters did not participate, despite the fact that these definitional primaries featured a celebrity contender (Booker), two sitting members of Congress (Rush Holt and Frank Pallone), a prominent legislator (Sheila Oliver) and one of the state’s most outspoken conservative leaders (Lonegan).

The primaries were a small-“d” democratic disaster and the October 16 general election, in which Booker is a favorite, could be even worse.

In other words, everything is going as Chris Christie prefers.

The governor created a schedule designed to downplay the Senate race—primaries in the middle of August vacation season, general election in October rather than November—because it was expected to generate higher interest among Democrats than Republicans. He didn’t want it to conflict in any way with his own November 5 re-election run.

True, the schedule hurts his fellow Republican Lonegan, who would have benefited from being on the same ballot as Christie.

But is also hurts Christie’s Democratic challenger, State Senator Barbara Buono, who would have benefited from being on the same ballot as Booker.

By using his authority as governor to establish a separate election schedule for the Senate race, Christie insulated his re-election run against unexpected electoral developments. He also assured that voter turnout would be, as The Jersey Journal reported Tuesday, “very poor.”

So what’s bad for democracy is good for Chris Christie.

That’s how the governor rolls.

Christie’s entire political career has benefited from election scheduling that favors Republicans in a Democratic state. New Jersey elects its governors in odd-numbered years when there are no federal elections. Since federal elections, especially presidential elections, tend to attract a lot of Democrats to the polls, Christie has enjoyed a dream scenario for a Republican seeking statewide office in a state that has not backed a Republican for president since it picked George H.W. Bush over Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Christie is not alone in benefiting from Republican-friendly scheduling.

The vast majority of states hold gubernatorial elections at the “midterm” point in the tenure of presidents, rather than on a schedule aligned with presidential voting. This means that most governors are elected when most eligible voters don’t cast ballots. This explains why states that vote solidly Democratic in presidential election years—such as Wisconsin, which has not backed a Republican for president since 1984; or Maine, which has not backed a Republican for president since 1988—have right-wing governors like Scott Walker and Paul LePage.

As former US Senator Russ Feingold has noted, if all major elections were scheduled with an eye toward getting the clearest reflection of popular sentiments, America would have a dramatically different politics—and governance.

Politicians know this.

And politicians who are not quite so honorable as Feingold are more than willing to game the process to assure that they get the electorate they want, even if that means creating circumstances where turnout is atrociously low.

That’s what Christie did when he scheduled the special election to fill the US Senate seat to assure the lowest possible level of participation.

The scheduling stunt will cost New Jersey $25 million that it did not need to spend and it has created a good deal of confusion.

But Christie’s fine with the cost, and the confusion.

Buono’s not.

Her campaign accuses the governor of using “a cynical and arrogant” scheduling scheme to “needlessly disenfranchise voters.”

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That’s true.

But, as New Jersey Working Families Alliance executive director Bill Holland notes, the disenfranchisement will undoubtedly be most severe for voters who are most likely to disagree with Chris Christie.

That, of course, is the point.

As Holland explains, Christie’s approach “guarantees that turnout will be low, and that those whose voices are not being heard in Washington will be heard even less.”

John Nichols is the author with Robert W. McChesney of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Books). It explores the many vehicles by which powerful interests manipulate election processes, including the gaming of election schedules.

What are the three questions that will decide the fate of voting rights in North Carolina?

ALEC protesters in Chicago on August 6, 2013. (Courtesy of Flickr)

The American Legislative Exchange Council is better known today than at any time in its forty-year history.

For most groups that seek to influence the governing process that would be something to celebrate. But ALEC, the corporate-funded project that develops “model legislation” to be introduced by conservative legislators across the country, historically worked off-radar.

No more.

The group highlighted by the 2011 “ALEC Exposed” project of the Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation has in recent years been the subject of investigations and inquiries by media outlets across the country. It has been the focus of a nationally broadcast “United States of ALEC” documentary by Bill Moyers & Company. It has been called out by groups such as Color of Change and Common Cause. It has been abandoned by forty-nine corporations (from Amazon.com to Walmart) that once paid for its initiatives.

ALEC has been decried by labor, environmental and clean government groups in state capitols across the country. National political figures, such as Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, are launching inquiries into how the group promotes its legislative agenda. And this week, as ALEC gathers its corporate and legislative “members” in the city of its founding to celebrate four decades of service to special interests and ambitious politicians, demonstrations against the group have drawn thousands of union members, civil rights activists and social justice campaigners into the streets of Chicago.

An organization that once held its annual meetings virtually unnoticed is now met with mass protests so large that streets around its hotel were closed Thursday as activists staged “die-ins” recalling ALEC’s role in the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws and headlines screamed, “ALEC convention protests: Labor vs. lobbyists.”

ALEC has felt the pressure of public scrutiny. Last year, the group distanced itself from some of its more controversial initiatives, such as restrictive voter ID laws and the Stand Your Ground measures that gained national attention after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

Yet, with continued backing from longtime allies such as the Koch brothers and the support of corporations that have disregarded calls from civil rights groups for them to quit the council, ALEC remains a defining force in statehouses across the country. A new report from the Center for Media and Democracy details the extent of the group’s ongoing engagement.

CMD has identified 466 ALEC bills that were introduced in state legislatures during 2013 sessions. At least eighty-four of these measures have become law.

According to CMD:

• One hundred and seventeen ALEC bills that seek to restrict worker rights, weaken unions, promote privatization and undermine advocacy for wage hikes. At least fourteen of these measures have become law.

• One hunded and thirty-nine ALEC bills that address education issues with proposals to use taxpayer dollars to fund private schools among the favorites. At least thirty-one ALEC education measures have become law.

• Seventy-seven ALEC bills that CMD says “promote a fossil fuel and fracking agenda and undermine environmental regulations.” At least seventeen of these measures have become law.

ALEC’s influence is broad, as is its legislative legacy. The CMD report explains: “Despite ALEC’s effort to distance itself from Voter ID and Stand Your Ground by disbanding its controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force, 62 of these laws were introduced: 10 Stand Your Ground bills and 52 bills to enact or tighten Voter ID restrictions. Five states enacted additional Voter ID restrictions, and two states passed Stand Your Ground.”

Indeed, among the featured speakers at ALEC’s fortieth annual meeting is former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who signed the Stand Your Ground law that provided the outline for the group’s model legislation.

So ALEC is still very much what ALEC has been for decades: a key player, perhaps the key player, in advancing the corporate agenda on a host of issues in statehouses across the country.

What has changed for ALEC is that a lot more Americans are now paying attention to its advocacy.

New national campaigns to get corporations and foundations to quit ALEC are ramping up.

So, too, are efforts to ask whether ALEC, which says it is not a lobbying group, should have to follow federal and state rules that are supposed to regulate groups that seek to influence the legislative process.

Legislators in a number of states have proposed that ALEC be required to follow existing lobbying laws when, as Center for Media and Democracy executive director Lisa Graves says, they are “[advancing] the lobbying agenda of special interests to the detriment of ordinary Americans.”

On Monday, Common Cause and CMD submitted a joint letter to the IRS requesting “an immediate investigation into the American Legislative Exchange Council’s massive underreporting of payment for state lawmakers’ travel on its Form 990s, filed with the Internal Revenue Service.”

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The letter charges that ALEC “engaged in an impermissible amount of lobbying and served private rather than public interests.”

In addition to asking for the federal examining of whether ALEC’s approach is appropriate in light of its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, the groups are also asking state ethics officials to determine if ALEC’s “scholarship” programs complies with state gift and disclosure laws.

Common Cause and CMD argue that the conflict is clear.

“Ultimately,” the groups argue in their letter to the IRS, “ALEC’s scholarship fund activity provides private benefits to two core constituents: (1) state legislators, who receive all-expense-paid vacations, and (2) corporate donors, who are able to obtain “business-friendly” legislation through this influence peddling.”

John Nichols is the author, with Robert W. McChesney, of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Books), which examines the role played by ALEC and other national groups in shaping policy at the state and local levels of government.

Can Chris Christie change the gun control debate?

Reince Priebus speaking at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Courtesy of Flickr)

The big media story this week is not the purchase of The Washington Post by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

For as long as there have been newspapers, rich people have bought them as toys and tools.

So, while it is significant that Bezos bought the Post for $250 million, this is not exactly a definitional development on the media landscape.

Bezos is not even the only rich guy to buy a major metropolitan daily paper in the past week. It was announced on Saturday that Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry has purchased another of the twenty-five largest dailies in the United States, The Boston Globe, for $70 million.

While it cannot be said for certain regarding Bezos and Henry, the best bet is that these very wealthy men will run their papers as side projects—Bezos, a little less hands-on; Henry, a little more hands-on—in the tradition of another wealthy newspaper purchaser, Warren Buffett. The fact that these guys don’t need big profits from newspapers that no longer post big profits actually provides a measure of insulation that financially struggling metro dailies owned by publicly traded companies lack. And while Bezos, Henry and Buffett have political pedigrees, none has the take-no-prisoners edge that has made the prospect of purchases of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune by the brothers Koch so unsettling to so many of the free-press faithful.

If new owners maintain old papers pretty much as they have been, that’s not dramatic news. Indeed, the only real “news” may be that newspapers, which cannot survive as publicly traded entities where stockholders demand big payouts, might have a future as the vanity projects of rich people. Or even better, as nonprofit entities, cooperatives and public trusts.

So if the sale of the Post is not as dramatic a development as might initially seem to be the case, what is?

The big deal in media this week has to do with the relationship of broadcast and cable news networks to the two major political parties. And it matters—more—because it gets to a question that is at the heart of all of our discussions about the future of print, broadcast and digital media: will we have a sufficient journalism, and a sufficiently independent journalism, to sustain democracy?

Ever since the Democratic and Republican parties took over the nation’s presidential debates in 1987, with the creation of a corporate-funded “Commission on Presidential Debates” run by the former chairs of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, the dialogue in presidential election years has been the ultimate insiders’ game.

Debate rules have for a quarter-century been dictated by parties and campaigns, not by the television networks that present them—and certainly not by nonpartisan good-government groups such as the League of Women Voters, which used to organize debates before the parties elbowed them aside. The change has resulted in a degeneration of the discourse that has tended to reinforce the status quo rather than extend America’s experiment with democracy.

Parallel to the commission’s management of fall debates featuring the presidential and vice presidential nominees of the major parties—it’s been more than two decades since billionaire Ross Perot bought his way onto the stage in a way that no independent or third-party candidate has since been able to do—there’s been an equally ugly phenomenon: the “partnering” of major parties with networks to organize debates between candidates seeking presidential nominations.

The partnering deals have been just as ugly as the corruption of the election process by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

That ugliness went public this week when Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus threatened a broadcast network, NBC, and a cable network, CNN, over planned projects on Hillary Clinton.

That Clinton, a former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state who started her public career as a Watergate prosecutor and played a significant role in struggles for women’s rights and children’s rights, is a worthy subject for examination should be beyond question journalistically and academically. But it is not beyond question politically.

Because Clinton might seek the Democratic presidential nod in 2016, Priebus says NBC must cancel plans for a four-hour mini-series and CNN must dump its plan for a documentary. Presuming that the projects would be positive in their portrayals of Clinton, despite the fact that she’s been a frequently controversial figure, Priebus accused each network of engaging in a “thinly-veiled attempt at putting a thumb on the scales of the 2016 presidential election.”

Priebus has a long history of complaining about media coverage of his party and its candidates. Besides, both the CNN and NBC projects are likely to air before Clinton decides on whether to run. If anything, the most likely candidates to be harmed are prospective Democratic primary challengers to Clinton.

So the chairman’s letter would have been stashed in the “whiner” file, except for one component: the threat.

“If you have not agreed to pull this programming prior to the start of the RNC’s summer meeting on August 14,” wrote Priebus, “I will seek a binding vote of the RNC stating that the committee will neither partner with you in 2016 primary debates nor sanction primary debates which you sponsor.”

The reactions from the networks were uninspired. NBC News declined to comment; CNN offered a vapid, “We would encourage the members of the Republican National Committee to reserve judgment until they know more.”

The networks should have told Priebus, “Good riddance!”

Seriously.

Partnerships between the networks and the major political parties are a far greater concern than the ownership of newspapers by new generations of rich people. By cutting deals with the parties to host “exclusive” primary debates, and by accepting the parameters established by the two major parties for fall debates, the networks defer to the political establishment in the worst of ways.

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It’s time for the networks, wealthy and powerful entities that they are, to declare independence from the major parties. If they want to partner with the League of Women Voters, which remains honorably committed to fairness and openness, that’s great. If they want to work with groups such as Common Cause, or state-based good government organizations and, yes, newspapers, that’s terrific.

But the network partnerships with the parties reinforce the worst status quo instincts—in our media and our politics. Americans should be interested in who owns newspapers, but they should be indignant about an arrangement that has television news operations negotiating with, partnering with and being threatened by political parties.

John Nichols and Robert McChesney, the co-founders of Free Press, the nation’s media reform network, are the authors of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Basic Books/Nation Books), and examination of media and politics that pays close scrutiny the changing newspaper business and how presidential debates are manipulated by the parties.

Did Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker really compare himself to FDR?