Since President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would not stand for reelection, Vice President Kamala Harris has quickly emerged as the most likely candidate to replace him on the top of the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket.
Several right-wing political influencers have called into question her eligibility for office, despite her serving as vice president for three and a half years.
“Kamala Harris is not eligible to run for President. Neither of her parents were natural born American citizens when she was born,” says one post with more than 5.4 million views. “Even though Kamala was born in Oakland, California, neither parent was a naturalized citizen when she was born so she doesn’t qualify as a ‘natural born citizen’. She is just a citizen,” says another.
The U.S. Constitution does not actually define “natural born citizen,” and the term’s precise meaning has not been litigated directly by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, American legal scholars broadly agree that a person born in Harris’ circumstances would be considered “natural born” and qualify to serve as president.
What does “natural born” mean?
Article II Section I of the U.S. Constitution specifies that, “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
While the Constitution does not speak further to the meaning of “natural born citizen,” American legal scholars have traditionally understood it to mean any person who holds citizenship from the moment of birth. Because Section I of the 14th Amendment establishes that any person born in the U.S. and subject to U.S. jurisdiction is a citizen, most scholars agree that being born in the U.S. alone qualifies a person as “naturally born.”
In a 2018 survey article on the original meaning of the phrase, Fordham law professor Thomas Lee determined that “natural born citizen” applied to almost any individual born in the U.S. regardless of parentage. “I believe that the constitutional natural born citizen requirement to be President, as a matter of original public meanings, meant anyone who was (1) born in the United States who is not the child of a foreign diplomat or invading army; or (2) born outside of the United States to a U.S. citizen father abroad on a non-permanent basis,” Lee told The Dispatch Fact Check. “Because Harris’ parents were both lawfully admitted graduate students and she was born in the United States, I think that she qualifies as a natural born citizen eligible for the Presidency, at least from the perspective of originalism,” Lee added.
In a 2015 Harvard Law Review article, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement and former Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal reached a similar conclusion. “All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase ‘natural born Citizen’ has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time,” they wrote. Because Harris was a citizen at birth, even if her parents were not yet citizens themselves, she qualifies to serve as president under this interpretation.
Mary Brigid McManamon, an emerita professor of law at Delaware Law School and author of a 2015 law review article on the natural born citizen clause, echoed Lee, Clement, and Katyal’s positions. “[Harris] is definitely eligible. The only children born in the U.S. who would not be eligible are the children of diplomats, as long as the eligible children have reached 35 years old and lived in the US for 14 years,” she told The Dispatch Fact Check.
Concerns surrounding presidential eligibility are nothing new—several presidential hopefuls have been subject to eligibility questions in the past, though mostly for being born outside of the U.S. to American citizen parents. In 2008, both John McCain and Barack Obama saw challenges to their eligibility. McCain’s natural born status was questioned because was born at a naval air station in the Panama Canal Zone, and Obama faced challenges both because of his father’s Kenyan citizenship and unfounded conspiracy theories that he had been born outside of the U.S. More recently, some raised questions about the eligibility of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father.
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