Trump amplifies fringe ‘birther’ conspiracy about Harris

Harris is eligible to run for vice president and was named on Tuesday to be the first woman of color to serve as running mate on a main-party presidential US ticket.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Sen. Kamala Harris in the Russell Senate Office Building, June 24, 2020 (photo credit: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES/JTA)
Sen. Kamala Harris in the Russell Senate Office Building, June 24, 2020
(photo credit: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES/JTA)
At a press conference on Thursday, President Trump was asked to comment on a law professor questioning Kamala Harris’s eligibility to serve as Vice President of the United States and said that he “just heard today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” according to BBC News.
Trump went on to praise the lawyer who had made the claims about Harris’s eligibility before saying “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed the democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”
Harris is eligible to run for vice president and was named on Tuesday to be the first woman of color to serve as running mate on a main-party presidential US ticket.
“The VP has the same eligibility requirements as the president," Juliet Sorensen, a law professor at Northwestern University told the Associated Press.
"Kamala Harris, she has to be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and a resident in the United States for at least 14 years. She is. That's really the end of the inquiry."
Harris was born in Oakland, California to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. Anyone born in the US and subject to its jurisdiction is a natural-born citizen, regardless of the citizenship of their parents, says the Cornell Legal Information Institute.
Trump was asked about Harris’s status after a Trump campaign manager, Jenna Ellis, re-posted a tweet from Tim Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, in which he questions Harris’s eligibility. Fitton also shared an opinion piece published by law professor John Eastman in Newsweek arguing that Harris is ineligible.
Eastman ran to be the Republican candidate for Attorney General in 2010, losing to Steve Cooley who then lost to Harris.
Eastman’s op-ed argument hinges on the idea that because Harris’s parents were not naturalized US citizens at the time of her birth, she is not a natural-born citizen and ineligible for the office of VP.
Newsweek stood by publishing the op-ed. Editor-in-Chief Nancy Cooper said that article had “nothing to do with racist birtherism,” but was instead addressing “a long-standing, somewhat arcane legal debate.” Newsweek did, however, add a note to the op-ed warning that it “is being used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia.”
The Biden campaign issued a statement is response to Trump’s answer. "Donald 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," a Biden campaign spokesman said in an email.
"So it's 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."


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