Former Republican Chair Michael Steele called out the GOP for opening themselves to be punked by Trump once again.
Former GOP chair slams Republican base
The Trump machine along with his sycophants are trying the birther trope once more. Recently professor of law John C. Eastman, aka quack, wrote a piece for Times that claims Senator Kamala Harris is not eligible to run as Vice President. He wrote the following.
The fact that Senator Kamala Harris has just been named the vice presidential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has some questioning her eligibility for the position. The 12th Amendment provides that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” And Article II of the Constitution specifies that “[n]o person except a natural born citizen…shall be eligible to the office of President.” Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a “natural born citizen”—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.
“Nonsense,” runs the counter-commentary. Indeed, PolitiFact rated the claim of ineligibility as “Pants on Fire” false, Snopes rated it simply “False,” and from the other side of the political spectrum, Conservative Daily News likewise rated it “False.” All three (and numerous others) simply assert that Harris is eligible because she was born in Oakland—and is therefore a natural-born citizen from location of birth. The 14th Amendment says so, they all claim, and the Supreme Court so held in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark.
But those claims are erroneous, at least as the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment was originally understood—an error to which even my good friend, renowned UCLA School of Law professor Eugene Volokh, has fallen prey.
Former GOP Chair Michael Steele would have none of it. He slammed the base for going there a second time. More importantly, he stated that they should not allow themselves to be punked once more.
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wzrd1 says
I remember the contortionism engaged with Obama, when his Hawaiian birth certificate was produced. Idiots proclaimed Hawaii was not a state and gave a long, drawn out and distorted history that was irrelevant to Congress voting Hawaii into statehood, long before his parents were born.
So, do expect to learn how California really isn’t a state from the gooper idiot brigade.
Seriously, do expect and look for it.
Meanwhile, before the 14th amendment, we had case law dating to 1830 that stated natural born citizenship, born in the US, the one born is a US citizen, save for foreign diplomatic staff and ambassadors. Something retained within the 14th amendment, with something like six granite encased court decisions that are utterly immobile.
One mystery for me is, one neighborhood in D.C., far from the governmental part of the capitol has a problem with two weeks and counting with zero USPS mail deliveries.Test run, perhaps, to see if anyone notices that their bills don’t arrive and of course, their payments are late? Or, perhaps something else?
Not sure, but my spiders are searching and little escapes their spidey senses. 😉
My first net spider was a fairly simple Boolean based version. My current spiders use regular expressions, expanding options far beyond mere Boolean searches.