ELECTION POLITICS-Kamala Harris has been Joe Biden’s running mate for less than a week, but the birthers are already questioning whether she’s constitutionally eligible to ever be president.
On Tuesday, a day after the former vice president announced that the California senator would be his running mate, Newsweek ran an op-ed questioning Harris’ eligibility. The argument by John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University and a failed GOP candidate, centers around the status of Harris’ parents.
“Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964,” he wrote.
Harris’ parents met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Her father, an economist, immigrated from Jamaica; her mother, a cancer researcher, immigrated from India.
Harris was born in California and is therefore a U.S. citizen.
Another post that received a couple of thousand shares on Facebook also said Harris cannot become president if Biden is unable to serve out his term, because she is “an anchor baby, mother is from India, father is Jamaican, and neither were American citizens at time of her birth.”
The president of the right-wing group Judicial Watch tweeted Chapman’s piece, and it has been picked up by President Donald Trump’s campaign. Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, retweeted that post.
“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.
It is not an open question. Harris is the first Black person to be nominated by a major party for vice president, and the first Asian American person to be nominated by a major party at all. (Read the rest.)
-cw
