Getty Senator Kamala D. Harris speaks on stage at The United State of Women Summit 2018 - Day 1 on May 5, 2018 in Los Angeles, California.
One day after Kamala Harris announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination for president, conspiracy theorists began spreading rumors that she is not eligible to run for president. Those rumors are false. Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, was born in California and is a US citizen who is fully eligible to run for president of the United States.
Here’s one of the tweets in question:
There appear to be two Twitter accounts at the center of the “birther” rumor. One of those accounts , @WeAreOne_Q, is run by a self-described Q Anon conspiracy believer. The other account at the heart of the new birther rumor is Jacob Wohl, the same conspiracy theorist who was connected to the alleged sexual assault claims against special counsel Robert Mueller last year. You can read more about Wohl here.
On Tuesday morning, Wohl tweeted that Harris is “ineligible” to run for president because, in his words, “Her father arrived from Jamaica in 1961—mother from India arrived in 1960 Neither parent was a legal resident for 5 years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement for naturalization.” Wohl also tweeted that Harris was “raised in Canada” and, in a separate tweet on Tuesday morning, posted photos of Harris’s high school yearbook from Montreal.
Here’s what you need to know:
Kamala Harris Was Born in Oakland, California, Making Her a US Citizen at Birth & Therefore Eligible to be President
GettyKamala Harris
The second article of the US Constitution states that only a “natural born citizen” may become the president of the United States. The 14th amendment to the US constitution later spelled out exactly what it means to be a US citizen: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute specifies that anybody born on US soil is a “natural born US citizenship.” This concept, known as “birthright citizenship” has held up in court and stands as the law of the land: “Under the 14th Amendment’s Naturalization Clause and the Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 US. 649, anyone born on U.S. soil and subject to its jurisdiction is a natural born citizen, regardless of parental citizenship. This type of citizenship is referred to as birthright citizenship.”
Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California, making her a US citizen at birth. Her parents were immigrants; her father, Donald Harris, came from Jamaica, and her mother, Shyamala Harris, came from India.
Kamala Harris Spent Part of Her Childhood in Montreal, Where She Attended Westmount High School
GettyKamala Harris
Jacob Wohl has been making much of the fact that Harris was “raised in Canada.” In fact, Harris was born in Oakland, California, where she spent the early years of her childhood. After her parents’ divorce, Harris’ mother, a breast cancer researcher, got a job teaching at McGill University in Montreal. Harris attended Westmount High School in Montreal from grades 7 to 11.
Her high school friends have fond memories of their time with her. One classmate, Dean Smith, told Canada’s CBC that Harris was “a good person,” describing her as “always smiling, friendly. A shining light the whole time.”
CNN Anchor Chris Cuomo Is Taking Heat for His Role in Spreading the ‘Birther’ Rumors About Kamala Harris
After the ‘birther’ rumors about Kamala Harris started to spread online, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo took to twitter to give his own views. Cuomo wrote, “And hopefully there will be no games where the issue keeps changing for righty accusers…and…the legit info abt Harris comes out to deal with the allegation ASAP. The longer there is no proof either way, the deeper the effect.” That tweet has since been deleted.
Many people thought it sounded like Cuomo was urging Kamala Harris produce her birth certificate to “prove” that she was, in fact, born in the United States, and Cuomo took a lot of heat from people who thought he was fanning the flames of a scurrilous rumor. Others said that Cuomo was falling into the “same mistake” that the media made when Obama faced his own “birther” rumors, namely, the mistake of acting as though this is a legitimate debate with two sides to it.
Cuomo later tweeted that he had been misunderstood, writing, “I don’t see two sides here nor did I there. You accuse, you approve. Was never for Obama or Harris to respond unless there is credible, corroborated proof of the accusation.”
Barack Obama, John McCain,& Ted Cruz Have All Faced Questions About Whether They Were ‘Natural Born’ US Citizens
GettyTed Cruz
When Barack Obama first ran for the presidency, he famously faced an onslaught of erroneous questions about whether he was, in fact, a natural born US citizen. He was. Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother, was born in Hawaii, making him a US citizen who was eligible to run for president. But false rumors about Obama’s birthplace continued to circulate for years, even after Obama released his birth certificate proving that he was born in Hawaii. Donald Trump helped to spread those rumors by tweeting regularly about false, baseless allegations that Obama was born in Kenya, or that his birth certificate was “false”.
John McCain, who ran against Obama in 2008, also faced questions about his own right to run for president. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father, a Naval officer, was stationed at the time. At least one law professor concluded that McCain was not a “natural born citizen” since, even though his parents were both US citizens, McCain was not born on US soil. In 2008, the Senate agreed to a nonbinding resolution which declared that McCain was eligible to be president. The resolution’s sponsors said that the writers of the constitution would not have intended to deny a child of military personnel who were stationed overseas the right to run for president.
More recently, Texas Senator Ted Cruz faced questions about whether he was a “natural born” US citizen. Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1970. His birth certificate shows that his mother was born in Delaware and his father was born in Cuba. During the Republican primary in 2016, Donald Trump argued that the fact that Cruz was born in Canada put him in a “precarious position” and that it could hurt the Republican party if Cruz became the party’s candidate for the White House. Trump told the Washington Post, “Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem. It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.” But most legal scholars said at the time that, since Cruz’s mother was a US citizen, Cruz was automatically a US citizen at the time of his birth, making him a “natural born” US citizen.