The National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) has cited the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which stated that enslaved people weren’t citizens, to argue that Vice President Kamala Harris is ineligible to run for president according to the Constitution.
The group also challenged the right of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley to appear on Republican primary ballots.
The Republican group’s platform and policy document noted that “The Constitutional qualifications of Presidential eligibility” states that “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.”
The same document included former President Donald Trump’s running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance on a list of preferred candidates for vice president.
The group, which adopted the document during their last national convention held between October 13 and 15 last year, goes on to argue in the document that a natural-born citizen has to be born in the US to parents who are citizens when the child is born, pointing to the thinking of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
key word is ‘or’. You can be President if you’re a natural born citizen, and they’re suggesting that in order to be a natural born citizen one must prove that at some point in their family’s history, two citizens produced offspring on each side of the family.
Which is absolutely bonkers because there are probably a hundred million white people in America that have no fucking clue if their great-great-great grandparents or great-great-great-great grandparents obtained citizenship. Someone’s citizenship is illegitimate until proven otherwise with this kind of reasoning. We’re gonna need a bigger prison system lol, maybe convert the western half of Iowa into an open-air detention center? The implications are hilarious to me
Even if their great-great grandparents weren’t citizens, being born on US soil makes them natural-born US citizens.
If they maintain this sort of thinking then nobody in my very white, very extended family whose been here since 1733 and never officially got citizenship are eligible for the presidency.