Report: Ocasio-Cortez Forgets What the Constitution Says Right Before Joking About Presidential Run
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the joke that keeps on giving this holiday season.
There isn’t a thing she touches that doesn’t seem to have a gaffe attached to it. And even when she’s joking, she can’t get the joke down properly.
Politico found this out when she was at Harvard for a photoshoot hosted by the magazine. At the event, the photographer asked her age.
“Twenty-nine,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I just turned 29.”
“Happy birthday!” the photographer said, garnering a thank you from Ocasio-Cortez.
Then the inevitable question about a possible White House run came up.
“You can’t even run for president for another six years,” the photographer said.
“No, not for a long time. Thank God,” Ocasio-Cortez said, echoing our thoughts. Then she tried to crack a funny.
“Although we’ve been joking that because the Equal Rights Amendment hasn’t been passed yet, the Constitution technically says he cannot run unless he’s 35,” she told the photographer.
“So what we’ll do is we’ll force the Republican Party to pass the Equal Rights Amendment by threatening to run for president.”
Firstly, if that were actually true, no Republican would ever support the ERA. Please, jump into the 2020 race, representative-elect. Now that Michael Avenatti is gone, we need another fringe candidate who inadvertently brings the funny.
As it turns out, though, the joke is slightly problematic. Read the relevant part of the Constitution, Article II, Section I:
“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.”
Oh, wow. It’s almost like our framers anticipated women running for president. Nobody at the time, however, seemed to notice the issue.
“That is awesome,” the photographer apparently responded. “All the people who say a literal interpretation of the Constitution is the only thing you should be paying attention to.”
“Exactly, all those constitutionalists, I will keep vigilance,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.
Not enough vigilance to actually read the thing, but hey.
Ocasio-Cortez has had a gaffe-filled couple of weeks since her fait accompli electoral triumph on Nov. 6.
She was most recently at an ecology town hall and claimed that green energy could end racism somehow, although she didn’t elaborate on this.
This wasn’t the only environmental-related silliness from Ocasio-Cortez; there was also her claim that we should mobilize our economy as we did in World War II to beat global warming. (You can just see it now — those eco-friendly tanks rolling off the production lines.)
Then there was her infamous tweet on Pentagon costs which confused transactions with spending and claimed the Pentagon had lost more money in about 20 years than it had spent in more than 200.
All I’m saying is that I’m a constitutionalist and I’d be fine with Ocasio-Cortez running. We’d be willing to overlook that age limit. Go for it, AOC. The joke, alas, will likely be on you.
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