I know, I know. Technically, you only have to be 30 years old, a United States citizen for 9 of those, and live in the state you want to represent to serve as a United States Senator. Still, do some of these people running understand what the job is? It’s all about writing laws. That’s pretty much it.

So, how can you do this job, if you don’t have even a basic understanding of the foundations of our laws?

I’m not saying you have to be a lawyer. (I might even say, it would be preferable not to be!) I am saying, “Read the damn Constitution before you try to convince us you’re fit for the job!” It’s not really that long. (No, the amendments aren’t extra credit. They’re standard.) Are civics classes even taught in high school any more? Shouldn’t it be required? And shouldn’t voters care whether the person they’re considering for the job even knows what the job is about?

How can you vote on, much less craft our nation’s laws if you have no grasp of what’s already in place? What the principles our laws our grounded are?

I never cease to be amazed at politicians who are so quick to claim that someone else is trampling on the Constitution when they have never even read it.

You know who it is today, yes? It’s all over the news:

• O’Donnell Questions Separation of Church, State
• Christine O’Donnell: “Where in the Constitution is the Separation of Church and State?”
• O’Donnell Questions Church-State Separation

I won’t list more. Just Google it.

When the subject of the separation of Church and State came up in a Senatorial debate, O’ Donnell (who would like to see us be a religious state) claimed that nothing in the Constitution supports the idea of said separation. Nevermind that in the main body of the Constitution there is this:

Article 6
. . . but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

When Coons, her opponent, paraphrases the First Amendment, almost verbatim (yes, in contrast, he has it pretty much memorized), she’s so unfamiliar with the document that she says,

“That’s in the First Amendment…?”

But, previously, she claimed to have studied the Constitution:

I have a graduate fellowship from the Claremont Institute in constitutional govt and it is that deep analysis of the constitution that has helped me to analyze and have an opinion on what is going on today and be able to determine that our leaders in Washington have lost their way and no longer follow the constitutional principles otherwise we wouldn’t have ‘Obamacare’ we wouldn’t have these massive bailouts we wouldn’t be taking over GM.

Ok, Claremont does not have her name on their list of fellows. Still, she claims to have done a “deep analysis”, yet she doesn’t recognize the language of the First Amendment. Oy.

My focus here is not on the fibbing – which she apparently does a lot of. It’s about the fact that currently, though she seems to be losing, polls show her getting about 40% of the vote on election day. So, 40% of the voters in Delaware think that this woman, without a grasp our Constitution, is qualified to go to Washington and start making laws.

Seems to me, that any law she authored would end up being challenged as un-Constitutional, since, after all, she’d have no way of knowing when she crafted it, if it met Constitutional requirements or not.

Talk about wasting taxpayer dollars. And doing nothing to accomplish anything for the country. What exactly would be the point to hiring this woman for this job?

I know we’re in a highly partisan environment, but where is the line? As I tend to vote Democrat, I’ll point out that I would want to know if Alvin Greene has any grasp of the Constitution, too. Since he is unwilling to talk to the press and answer any questions, I would never vote for him, either.

Can we have some de facto qualifications? Regardless of your political leanings, can’t we all agree that in order to craft the laws of our country you need to be familiar with and understand the foundation of them?