It was just a matter of time before someone questioned whether Kamala Harris is eligible because her parents are immigrants.
John Eastman published a piece in Newsweek questioning whether Kamala Harris would be eligible to take over the presidency because of her immigrant parents.
Is Kamala Harris eligible for the office of Vice President? Here's my article, published by Newsweek, exploring the issues. Short answer: It depends! https://t.co/A2K08EBUYu
— John Eastman (@DrJohnEastman) August 12, 2020
John Eastman ran for attorney general of California in 2010. He lost the Republican primary. Had he won, his competition would have been Kamala Harris, who, of course, won the election.
Eastman doesn’t deny that she was born in Oakland, but he questions whether she is nonetheless eligible because Article II requires that the President be “natural born.”
The original Constitution that included the term “natural born” was a racist document that permitted slavery. We fought a thing called the Civil War. The Confederates lost. As a result, we got the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Fourteenth Amendment states clearly that anyone born in the United States is a citizen.
Confederates and racists hate the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. They hate the Fourteenth Amendment because it not only made all freed slaves full citizens, but it required that states afford them equal protection of the laws and due process. Southern states have been trying to get around the Fourteenth Amendment since it was passed.
For a while, they were successful. Nineteenth-century judges, for example, held that women were not “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment and therefore not entitled to equal protection of the laws. The argument: infants and incompetents are also “persons” but they do not have full rights of citizenship and are not permitted to vote. The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Fergusson (1896) held that racial segregation didn’t violate the “equal protections” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We didn’t get that reversed until 1954.
It is no surprise that a Trump supporter like Eastman would try to argue that Kamala Harris might not be eligible if her parents had not yet been naturalized at the time of her birth. It’s just another right-winger trying to pretend that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t exist.
(I don’t actually know the status of Kamala’s parents at the time she was born in Oakland, and it doesn’t matter. She was born in Oakland. She is eligible.)
As long as we’re talking about racist attacks on Kamala Harris, how about this one from Dinish D-Souza:
First, the hoopla isn’t that the female descendant of slaves can make it so far. The hoopla is that a Black woman can get past all the barriers in her way now.
Second, enslaved women were routinely raped by slave owners thereby producing Black children “descended” from slave owners.
I know nothing at all about Kamala Harris’s father, and I actually don’t care unless we are going to examine the lineage of white men as well. How many white members of Congress have slave owner ancestors? Or is this only an issue with Black candidates? For that matter, how many white members of Congress have ancestors who raped enslaved women?
What’s amazing is that Dinesh and his right-wing friends think that this line of attack will diminish Sen. Harris in the eyes of Democrats. It makes us defend her more fiercely because it proves what a Black woman is up against when she moves into a position of power.
https://twitter.com/glhaize/status/1293741722069942272?s=20
So, you can tell I’m irritated?
I march through these arguments and rebuttals, not because I care what people like John Eastman or Dinesh Souza think, but because it’s obvious this stuff will be pervasive on Facebook, and many of you will hear this nonsense from family members.
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Written by Teri Kanefield. Cross-posted from her blog. If you don’t subscribe to her writings, you should.