Politics, Past and Current

Alexander Hamilton was never President of the United States. I knew that, but I looked it up just to be sure because a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age. Hamilton was indeed a Founding Father and he held a number of government offices in his life, but none of them required that he be a natural born citizen. The presidency is the only office with that requirement. A congressman has to be at least 25 years old, and a senator has to be at least 30. I suppose the Founders wanted people in those offices and the presidency to have a certain amount of maturity. As far as I know, all the other state and federal positions don't have an age requirement, if you are old enough to vote, you are old enough to hold office. There is a certain amount of paperwork required to get your name on any kind of ballot. I think it would be reasonable to require a copy of your birth certificate or naturalization papers as part of that paperwork, to prove that you are a citizen and old enough to vote. What's wrong with that?

I've got nothing against Hispanics except that there are so many of them, but I have the same concern about everybody. There is an old joke: "I love humanity, it's people that I can't stand." Well I'm just the opposite, I like people as individuals but am uncomfortable with vast herds of them that threaten to trample me underfoot.

The reason I mentioned Cruz and Rubio is that they are both Hispanic and Republican, which seems to contradict what you said about Republicans and Hispanics not liking each other. Of course that's only two examples, but I'm sure there are more of them than that out there. Some regions historically vote Republican and other regions historically vote Democrat. It's a lot easier to get elected to any office if you run on the same party that your region historically votes for. I'm sure that Hispanics in Chicago routinely elect other Hispanics to represent them, and it's much easier to get elected in
Chicago if you run as a Democrat. You also mentioned that Hispanics as a group are religious, but aren't they mostly Catholics, and don't Catholics tend to vote Democrat? I understand that Rubio is a Catholic and Cruz is some kind of holy roller, yet they are both Hispanic. I guess Mrs. O'Hara was right, "All generalizations are invalid."

You know that I don't follow politics nearly as much as you do. I have been taking more of an interest in it lately because of our conversations, but I will never be as into it as you are. I am interested in Supreme Court decisions because they define the law, but I never found it necessary to learn the names of all the justices. I am more interested in what the decision says than I am in who decided it. We don't get to vote on those guys anyway, so why bother to learn their names?

I certainly believe in the Second Amendment, I just believe that it was intended to guarantee the right of the states to have their own militias, not to guarantee the rights of individual gun owners. There are other things that guarantee the right of individual gun owners, not the least of which are the guns themselves.