This false claim by Trump supporters about VP Harris is invalidated by the 14th Amendment

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You may have heard rumors that Kamala Harris is ineligible to run for president because neither of her parents were born in the United States and had unclear citizenship status when Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964.

That’s a false claim that some of Harris’ opponents have started to make since he was nominated for the Democratic presidential nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to retire on July 21, 2024. The claim began in 2020, when he was chosen as Biden’s vice president. partner.

John Eastman, Trump’s former legal adviser who was charged with meddling in the 2020 presidential election, circulated the claim. But common jurists agree: There is no truth in it.

The recycling of these lies provides an opportunity to dive into the real truths about presidential eligibility, in the form of some candidates in recent history.

Harris is protected by birthright citizenship

How do we know that the claims about Harris’s fitness are wrong?

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states: “No Person but a natural-born Citizen, or citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution,” said Section 1, “shall be eligible to the Office of the President.”

Other presidential requirements in the Constitution — that a candidate be at least 35 years old and have lived in the US for 14 years before running for office — are pretty cut and dry. But what does the text “natural born citizen” mean?

The original Constitution is not specific, but both courts and legislators have weighed in since its inception. The first evidence is the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to ensure that black Americans who were enslaved and their children were recognized as citizens.

“All persons born or begotten in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the amendment states, “are citizens of the United States.”

The 14th Amendment establishes what is often referred to as “natural born citizenship” – that if a person is born on American soil, nothing else needs to be done to become a full-fledged citizen of the United States. Supreme Court cases since the passage of the 14th Amendment make it clear that those born in America to foreign parents qualify as “natural born.”

Whether Harris can be an effective president is a matter for voters to decide in a few months. But as a legal matter, he is perfectly qualified to hold the office. Because Harris was born in the US, the citizenship status or birthplace of either of his parents is irrelevant. Even those facts were not enough to silence some of the promoters of lies, who recently said that Harris was not born in the US But his birth certificate was reviewed by the Associated Press, and we confirm that he was born in Oakland.

Can people born in other countries serve as president?

History has seen more complicated cases than Harris’s, with a number of presidential candidates not born in one of the 50 states. So does being born outside the US disqualify people from being president?

That’s not the case. Take, for example, the late Arizona Senator John McCain, who was the Republican nominee in 2008. McCain was not born in the state, but in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 while his father was serving there as a military officer. However, the Canal Zone was under American control at the time of McCain’s birth. And because the 14th Amendment specifies that citizenship applies to those “under the jurisdiction” of the US, McCain was eligible to serve as president.

At the time, McCain cited as a precursor to his eligibility the successful nomination of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in 1964 was born in 1909 in the Arizona Territory, just a few years before it was admitted to the union as a state.

Even McCain’s main Democratic rivals for the presidency, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, co-sponsored a resolution in April 2008 asserting that McCain was a “natural-born citizen” and thus qualified to be president.

McCain may also have gone public because historically, US law stated that a person “born outside the United States to a parent (or parents) who is a US citizen is a US citizen at birth.” This is the same example that, if he had been elected president, he would have applied to US Senator and 2016 candidate Ted Cruz, a Republican who represents Texas, who was born in Canada but whose mother is an American citizen by birth.

Race and ethnicity in the background

No major presidential candidate has ever been more vulnerable to the “natural-born citizen” clause, and Harris is no exception.

The Constitution does not protect him, however, from the same kinds of race-based political attacks that Donald Trump made against Obama, the age-old religious war known as “nepotism”. During the Obama administration, Trump lied that Obama was not born in America. As written, Obama was born in Hawaii.

None of the vice president’s top critics, including Trump, made such dire allegations about Harris. But as with Obama, there is an unspoken, racist connotation: This person is an outsider. They are not like me and you. They are anti-American.

Charlie Hunt is an assistant professor of political science of Boise State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the first article.

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