Suppose your neighbor gets drunk and accidentally kills someone in a drunken driving incident. But, 2 days before, another neighbor’s house went up in flames and the one neighbor went inside the burning house to rescue 3 children and the neighbor’s elderly mother.
When his intoxication manslaughter case goes to court, should he be given a pass because he saved the neighbor’s family? Should our system of laws be conditional in order to be “more fair”? Should murderers serve lesser sentences because they were abused as children or helped the homeless?
Laws exist to provide guidance and control over societies. Once we start to water them down and make them conditional, it leads to chaos and disorder. History has numerous examples of societies breaking down over issues such as this.
I would love it if, 4 years from now (if he wanted), Cruz could be a POTUS candidate. But, the Founders had good reasons for writng the Constitution they way that they did. Most conservatives believe that the Founders were highly intelligent and thoughtful men who tried to take every situation into consideration before codifying their ideas and memorializing them in our founding documents.
If you believe, like Al Gore does, that the Constitution is a living document and should be changed to match the whims of society, you might want to re-consider whether you are really a conservative or not. I’m not saying that you aren’t a conservative, but if you believe that the Constitution should be changed because someone doesn’t agree with a given provision, that belief goes against the values typically held by conservatives.
So far, Ted Cruz is proving to be everything we wanted him to be. The question must be considered whether 6 years in Washington will change him as it does to so many conservatives. And, while he may be prohibited from being POTUS by the Constitution, it doesn’t mean that he can’t be VPOTUS. As a VPOTUS and president of the Senate, he could still accomplish a great many things on behalf of America and conservatives.
But, to respond to your post, the law is what it is. And, once we begin changing the law because of this or that circumstance, we begin the ride down a slippery slope that has only bad things associated with it.
And, I believe that even Senator Cruz would agree with that.
There were two important developments over the last hundred years that have led us to this...
1. The redefinition of a “crime” to mean simply breaking the law.
2. Judicial activism. Redefining laws by twisting the language or creating new law from the bench.
It used to be that a “crime” had a victim, a perp, and damage done. Everything else was just considered public nuisance misdemeanors. We now have “felonies” where there is no victim or damage other than to the law itself. Anathema to a “Republic” based on freedom.
It used to be that a judge looked at the facts of a case and made a decision on if they fit. Further, if the law itself was within the rightful limits of governing power. The jury was to back him up on this. We canned the “reasonable man” standard and are now using precedent as a dodge for doing what is right. All for the sake of politics rather than any real sense of justice.
Now, we have what Jefferson warned us against...
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” -Thomas Jefferson
And this is about as clear a violation of our Rights as we have EVER seen.