Kamala Harris has been Joe Bidenâs running mate for less than a week, but the birthers are already questioning whether sheâs 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 Harrisâ eligibility. The argument by John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University and a failed GOP candidate, centers around the status of Harrisâ parents.
âHer father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harrisâ birth in 1964,â he wrote.
Harrisâ 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 âan anchor baby, mother is from India, father is Jamaican, and neither were American citizens at time of her birth.â
The president of the right-wing group Judicial Watch tweeted Chapmanâs piece, and it has been picked up by President Donald Trumpâs campaign. Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, retweeted that post.
âItâs an open question, and one I think Harris should answer so the American people know for sure she is eligible,â Ellis told ABC News.
And on Thursday afternoon, Trump himself leaned into the conspiracy.
âI heard it today, that she doesnât meet the requirements,â Trump told reporters. He praised Chapman, saying, âthe lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.â
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.
It doesnât seem to be a coincidence that the other person birthers went after was Barack Obama, the first Black president. Biden, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are not facing any such questions.
âOne of the hallmarks of the U.S. Constitution, by virtue of the 14th Amendment, is that it directly grants citizenship to those born in the United States, regardless of the ancestry of their parents,â said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University School of Law.
He said that some countries directly grant citizenship based only on ancestry, but the United States does not.
âThe U.S. follows the principle of âjus solisâ (citizenship flows from birth âon the soilâ); the alternative is known as âjus sanguinisâ (citizenship flows from blood),â he added.
âDonald Trump was the national leader of the grotesque, racist birther movement with respect to President Obama and has sought to fuel racism and tear our nation apart on every single day of his presidency,â said Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates. âSo itâs unsurprising, but no less abhorrent, that as Trump makes a fool of himself straining to distract the American people from the horrific toll of his failed coronavirus response that his campaign and their allies would resort to wretched, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic desperation.â
Some birther conspiracies also popped up during Harrisâ presidential run last year.
âI canât believe people are making this idiotic comment,â Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor of constitutional law, told The Associated Press at the time. âShe is a natural born citizen and there is no question about her eligibility to run.â
CNN host Chris Cuomo faced swift backlash after he seemed to suggest that Harris should prove her citizenship in order to rebut the criticism.
âAnd hopefully there will be no games where the issue keeps changing for righty accusersâŠandâŠthe legit info abt Harris comes out to deal with the allegation ASAP. The longer there is no proof either way, the deeper the effect,â he wrote in a tweet.
Cuomo later deleted the post, saying his comments were misconstrued and Harris has âno duty to justify any such accusation, let alone a birtherism attack.â
Donald Trump Jr. also retweeted a post shared by a right-wing activist, which said Harris was not âan American Blackâ because she is âhalf Indian and half Jamaican.â
He later deleted it. A spokesman claimed that Trump Jr. hadnât known that Harris was half-Indian, and thatâs why he shared the tweet. At the time, Biden tweeted in Harrisâ defense.
Birthers â including Trump â also went after Obama for years, arguing that he wasnât a legitimate president. As with Harris, their claims had no basis in reality. They claimed he was born in Kenya (he was born in Hawaii) and insisted that his birth certificate was a forgery.
Dinesh DâSouza, a far-right political commentator and conspiracy theorist, also claimed on Fox News this week that Harris may not even truly be Black because her father had traced his ancestry to a slave owner.
Newsweekâs editors responded to the backlash they received for running Eastmanâs piece in a note Thursday, claiming the piece was not racist at all.
âHis essay has no connection whatsoever to so-called âbirther-ism,â the racist 2008 conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing then-candidate Barack Obama by claiming, baselessly, that he was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya,â wrote Nancy Cooper, the editor-in-chief, and Josh Hammer, the opinion editor. âWe share our readersâ revulsion at those vile lies.â
This piece has been updated with Trumpâs comments.