Some Republicans appear to have decided that Kamala Harris is only 3/5ths of a person and therefore cannot run for president.
What do Senator Ted Cruz’s father Rafael Cruz, Kellyanne Conway, former Governor Mike Huckabee, Senator Rand Paul, Former Representative Michele Bachmann, Former Republican Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan, Publisher and former Republican Presidential Candidate Steve Forbes, former diplomat and Republican Presidential Candidate Alan Keyes, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell have in common?
All are members, executives within, or endorsers of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), a group that grew out of a 1934 California assembly and went national in 1996. The group has been called “The Tea Party before there was a Tea Party” and “the Republican wing of the Republican Party,” although it operates independently from the GOP.
They made big news last week, though, when they charged that Kamala Harris is not a “natural born citizen” and therefore not eligible to run for or to hold the office of President of the United States.
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In an echo of Donald Trump’s notorious birther movement of 2008, NFRA cited the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which removed citizenship rights from Black Americans, as a basis for their argument.
The Dred Scott case was an American tragedy, and the life of Mr. Dred Scott himself is really worth learning more about. In essence, he was an enslaved man who had been taken into free northern territories (Minnesota) by the man who owned him and was then being posted around the country by the military.
Scott got married in Minnesota and appeared to be emancipated. When he, his wife, and the man who theoretically owned him at that point were sent to Missouri, state officials demanded that Scott go back into slavery. Scott sued and went through three state and 2 federal court cases to get to the US Supreme Court. And finally, at the Supreme Court, he lost when the Court ruled that no African-American could ever be a real US citizen, regardless of the state he lived in.
(This is probably the most famous case where a president ignored the Supreme Court: Abraham Lincoln essentially said, “That’s a shame that poor Mr. Scott has to go back into slavery, but I’m not going to recognize this ruling for any other person in America.”)
When these Republicans bring up the argument that because of slavery and the 3/5ths compromise, which were the basis of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, they’re referring to Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 5 of the US Constitution, which states:
“No person except a natural born Citizen, shall be eligible, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President…”
They draw a distinction between a “natural born Citizen” eligible to be president and a “Citizen of the United States” who is not eligible as having to do with whether their parents were citizens when they were born.
They assert that the caveat eliminating the “natural born” requirement for citizens “at the time of Adoption of this Constitution” allowed Washington, Adams, Jefferson, etc. — whose parents were all North American British citizens at the time of their birth and thus not “natural born” — to still qualify for the presidency.
That loophole, these Republicans argue, expired with the death of the Revolutionary generation; ever since then your parents must be citizens upon your birth for you to be a “natural born citizen” by their logic. Their platform lays it out:
“An originalist and strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution in the Scalia and Thomas tradition, as well as precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases below, have found that a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ is defined as a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child’s birth.”
In support of this they explicitly cite the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott case, a 7-2 decision which ruled that persons brought to the United States from Africa — upon whom “the strongest mark of inferiority and degradation was fastened” to quote the Dred Scott decision — can never be or even give birth to “natural born citizens.”
The argument was simple. Enslaved Africans were not truly human but instead mere property according to the Dred Scott decision, which has never formally been overturned by the Court itself (they ignore the 13th Amendment), so they couldn’t possibly have rights of citizenship. As Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote:
“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?
“The alien is excluded, because, being born in a foreign country, he cannot be a member of the community until he is naturalized. But why are the African race, born in the State, not permitted to share in one of the highest duties of the citizen? The answer is obvious; he is not, by the institutions and laws of the State, numbered among its people. He forms no part of the sovereignty of the State, and is not therefore called on to uphold and defend it.”
In the case of Kamala Harris, their argument appears to go, she suffers from a double-whammy: neither of her parents were American citizens when she was born, and her father was Black, and therefore even if he were to become an American citizen, his citizenship would be illegitimate.
Proof for the former argument comes from Laura Loomer, a former Republican primary candidate for the US Congress, who laid out an extensive rant about Kamala’s mother’s immigration status on Xitter. Proof for the latter is found in the Dred Scott decision itself, which NFRA cites in their platform.
Quoting Loomer and Tucker Carlson’s race-based attacks on Harris and the question of “natural born citizenship,” The New York Times noted, in an article titled “Trump Elevates False, Fringe Attacks on Harris to Center of His Campaign”:
“Their comments, seemingly aimed at suggesting to Black voters that the Democratic candidate does not represent them and, more broadly, planting the idea that Ms. Harris is inauthentic, helped turn what had been a trickle of such content into a gusher.
“Overnight, conservative corners of the internet, long fixated on Mr. Biden’s age, swung to what looked to be their newest target. Years-old video clips of Ms. Harris acknowledging her South Asian heritage found fresh currency, along with memes mocking her speaking style and even a Billy Joel song modified to say that ‘she’s not Black or white, Indian, Jamaican.’”
Arguing that NFRA, Senator Rand Paul, Rafael Cruz (an officer of NFRA), and others mentioned above are merely “fringe” members of the GOP, the story was a short-lived sensation in the media last week and then quickly died. Major news outlets weren’t interested in this latest iteration of Trump’s original birther charges against Obama 16 years ago.
Many did, however, highlight the logic of NFRA’s argument.
Headlines like “Republican group cites notorious Dred Scott ruling as reason Kamala Harris can’t be president” (The Independent), “Republican Group Says Kamala Can't Be President Because This 170-Year-Old Supreme Court Decision Likens Her to a Slave” (The Root), and Trump ally claims to have information that “may lead to Kamala Harris’ disqualification” based on her parents’ lack of citizenship (Raw Story) laid it out for all to see.
For their part, the Republican group remains defiant and holds to their position. Responding to an inquiry from The Independent, NFRA’s president Alex Johnson was unambiguous:
“We firmly believe that faux Democrat Ms. Harris should never hold office for any of the many reasons people choose to highlight…”
While most media is now ignoring the story, it hasn’t died in rightwing circles and on hate radio, where the question of Harris’ citizenship is festering as one more grievance that could conceivably provoke a loyal rightwinger like Tim McVeigh, shouting Sic Semper Tyrannis, to try to harm Vice President Harris or even Americans more generally “for the cause.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. People largely ignored or even ridiculed Tim McVeigh’s “weird” and “out there” conspiracy theories back in the day.
The one McVeigh was most fond of and wrote about at length he called the “Great Replacement Theory”: it claims wealthy Jews are paying for Black and brown people to come into the United States, or to reproduce at higher numbers, to replace white people.
That one sure went away, right? Today, it’s at the core of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s campaign for more white babies, although Tim McVeigh is long forgotten.
We may laugh at Republicans arguing Black people can never be true citizens, but militia-style white supremacist Christian nationalist rightwingers take this sort of thing very seriously. This was how Trump first injected his racist poison into the presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama, and their hate has only grown since then.
It’s the sort of “fringe theory” that animated the shooters in the Tree of Life Synagogue, the Buffalo supermarket, and the El Paso slaughter, among dozens of others. Each referenced the Great Replacement Theory, once fringe, that has now gone mainstream in the GOP.
And it’s one more vital reason why the Harris/Walz call for Americans of all races, religions, and gender identities to embrace each other and bring our nation together as one giant “us” is so vital.
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