President Donald Trump on Thursday promoted a false and racist theory that sen. Kamala Harris, the first woman of color on a general election card for political parties, and who was born in California, is not eligible to become vice president because her parents were immigrants.
In a White House briefing, Trump reinforced the baseless theory that has been gaining traction in some right-wing circles since Harris was announced as Joe Biden’s running mate on Tuesday, including being covered by his own reelection campaign legal adviser.
Despite Trump and his allies’ claims about Harris, experts say the false theory has absolutely no basis in the U.S. Constitution, and Harris, born in 1964 in Oakland, is a U.S. citizen capable of serving as president. to serve as vice president.
“I heard it today that she does not meet the requirements,” the president said when asked by a reporter, while also reinforcing the author’s references from a broadly panned op-ed that supported the theory. marked as a “very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.”
“I have no idea if that is exactly what I would have. I would have assumed that the Democrats would have checked that beforehand before being elected to run for vice president. That is very serious,” the president said. hesitant previous racist attacks by the president made on former president Barack Obama, false doubts about his birth certificate and the legitimacy of the first Black American president.
Kate Shaw, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and an associate of the Supreme Court of ABC News, said it was an “absolutely baseless argument” and that the concerns did not compare to questions raised in the 2016 campaign about Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz.
“She was born here and has lived here all her life; she is a natural born citizen, eligible, full stop,” Shaw said. “The questions about the eligibility of Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada, were legion, although I thought he was eligible. They are not.”
Sheldon Goldman, a leading professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, called the argument made about Harris’ eligibility “100% false.”
“The 14th Amendment provides a clear definition of citizenship. Everyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen, regardless of where their parents were born,” Goldman told ABC News.
The Biden-Harris campaign quickly condemned the false theory, and Trump for giving oxygen at Thursday’s briefing, pointing to his history of spreading a similar false and racist theory about his predecessor.
“Donald Trump was the national leader of the grotesque, racist birthing movement with respect for President Obama and has tried every day of his presidency to burn racism and bring our nation apart,” a Biden spokesman told ABC News in a statement. . “That it is not surprising, but no less appalling, that if Trump makes a fool of himself to punish the American people for distracting the terrible toll of his failed coronavirus response that his campaign and its allies would be touchingly, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic despair. “
Before Trump applied the false theory to Harris’ citizenship, the treat was won after a wide-ranging Newsweek op-ed by conservative conservatory professor John C. Eastman, who argued that Harris may not be a ‘naturally born citizen’, despite being born in California, because Harris’s parents were not naturalized citizens at the time she was born.
But Bernadette Meyle, Carl and Sheila Spaeth, law professors at Stanford Law School, told ABC News that argument “has no basis in constitutional law”, saying it has been regulated law since the Supreme Court ruled the matter in 1898.
“The language of the Fourteenth Amendment which ‘made it subject to its jurisdiction’ was discussed for a period after the Amendment, where some argued that this sentence was intended to incorporate the origin and civic initiative of parents in ‘ the amendment in terms of considering whether someone should be considered a citizen at birth … However, Trump tried in his 2016 campaign to make the argument that the Newsweek article makes, then it seems to fall later. It has been a claim that has been brought to mind several times by right-wing thinkers for decades or so. However, it has no basis in constitutional law. ”
Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis shared the op-ed on Twitter on Tuesday morning and later, when asked about the falsity of the theory itself, told ABC News: “It’s an open question, and one thinks i [Sen. Kamala D.] Harris would have to answer so the American people are sure she is eligible. ”
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests from ABC News for comment on Ellis’ statement.
On Friday, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, told CBS This Morning: “” At the end of the day, it’s what it is “before she said,” I personally have no reason to believe that she does not , “referring to Harris’ qualification.
Trump now encourages questions about Harris’ citizenship reflects how he came to political prominence, in part, by making false accusations about Obama’s birth certificate as part of the “birther” conspiracy movement.
In recent years, however, Trump has tried to publicly distance himself from the false birther theory he had long championed. In September 2016, then-Republican presidents nominated Trump for the first time – five years after the former president issued his longest-serving birth certificate – that Obama was born in the United States.
Still, in late 2017, the president continued to question his authenticity behind closed doors, according to The New York Times.
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