As a sort of in-kind donation to Joe Biden, the Trump campaign seems keen to create a disastrous news cycle by asking the absurd question of whether Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, is legally qualified to be vice president.
In a cringeworthy reboot of the birther conspiracy theory once aimed at Barack Obama, the Trump campaign is “Just Asking Questions!” about whether Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, satisfies the Constitution’s requirement that presidents and vice presidents be natural-born U.S. citizens.
The question of “natural-born” citizenship has been litigated in primaries with the cases of Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Michael Bennet, who were born to U.S. citizens in Calgary, Canada, and New Delhi, India, respectively. It even came up briefly for John McCain, who was born to U.S. citizens in the Panama Canal Zone. But no one has ever suggested that a candidate born on U.S. soil and in the continental U.S. in particular isn’t a natural-born citizen. That is, of course, until Biden selected Harris as his running mate, which according to the polls renders her the most likely vice president in 2021 and most likely 46th president of the United States.
Legal scholar John Eastman, who declared that Cruz was eligible to become president in 2016, offers quite the hot take on Harris’s eligibility over at Newsweek. Although Eastman concedes the constitutional consensus that birth on American soil confers citizenship, he tries to twist timelines and past precedents to argue that if Harris’s parents were merely temporary lawful visitors — both Donald Harris and Syamala Gopalan worked in America for decades after attending school here — then she “instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers.”
If it seems like a stretch, that’s because it is. Neither of Marco Rubio’s parents were citizens when he was born in Miami, and a lawsuit attempting to throw his name off of the 2016 Florida primary ballot was laughed out of court by the 17th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida. But that hasn’t stopped Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis from inviting the controversy — not just sharing the article that has since had an editor’s note attached to it, but also doubling down on it.
“It’s an open question and one I think Harris should answer so the American people know for sure she is eligible,” Ellis told ABC News.
Except that it’s not really an open question — not among serious people. Harris, a Hastings Law School graduate with three decades of legal practice, would surely answer that the 14th Amendment simply dictates that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Just as the Hawaii-born Obama and the Florida-born Rubio were citizens at birth, rendering them eligible for the presidency, so is Harris.
As her spectacular flameout of the Democratic primary proved, Harris is a paper tiger — telegenic but rigid, vicious but largely ineffective in her attacks, and the bearer of plenty of baggage. The easiest line of attack for President Trump at the moment is to argue that the seemingly senile Biden will be a president in name only, whereas the corrupt cop Kamala will redirect law enforcement and the courts to come after your churches and your guns while rioters are given free rein to turn the rest of the nation into Portland, Oregon.
This is an argument that makes neither Harris’s race nor gender an issue. If anything, it appeals to people of color who have seen what the rage and rioting of woke whites have wrought for actual working-class communities of color. It might also appeal to women who may dislike Trump but still care about their rights to worship and carry. Instead, one of Trump’s most increasingly visible surrogates is baiting him to revive his single most racist controversy in a move that will only re-enrage the swing voters revolted with his personality.
Ellis is a formal voice of the Trump campaign. Mike Pence would be wise to declare publicly now that of course Harris is eligible for his job and that he looks forward to eviscerating her on the debate stage. Otherwise, this tease doesn’t just look racist; it looks like the campaign is terrified of Harris.
