AMERICAN MADE

Senator Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, CA on 20 October 1964.

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There should not be this discussion but apparently, it is happening in regards to Harris just like what was done to Barack Obama a decade ago.

The source of the conspiracy that somehow Barack Obama did not meet the constitutional requirements to run for the presidency thus making him ineligible to run began around the time Obama delivered remarks at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, began circulating conservative circles while Obama was weighing a run, and became whispers among Republicans in the 2008 campaign.

There are only three requirements to be President of the United States: natural born citizen of the United States, a resident of this country for 14 years, and a minimum age of 35.

Those are also the same requirements to be vice-president, the office that Senator Harris is pursing in Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency.

The questions about his eligibility surrounded his birth, specifically the location and who his parents were specifically his father. Barack Obama was born to Ann Dunham – a white woman from Kansas – and Barack Obama Sr. – a black man from Kenya – on 4 August 1961 in Honolulu, HI.

I mean it was in the local paper 

After his win, those on the fringes made coded remarks – some covertly; others blatantly obvious – that eventually infiltrated to Republicans in elected office such as Michelle Bachmann, Mike Coffman, Newt Gingrich, Roy Moore, Steve King, Sarah Palin, and David Vitter. It should be noted that many of these shameful examples are no longer in office with the exception of Mike Coffman who is currently the Mayor of Aurora, CO and his city’s police department is under increased attention due to the death of Elijah McClain.

Polls on Obama’s 49th birthday in August 2010 showed that 27% of those surveyed believed that Obama was not born in the United States and as many as 41% of Republicans had doubts of Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president. 

In the spring of 2011, Donald Trump – while as host of the television program The Apprentice – became the Pied Piper of the long-discredited birther conspiracy theory but amplified it up to 11 due to his profile. His third wife, Melania, also joined her husband in echoing those remarks. Trump supposedly sent a crack investigative team to Hawaii to uncover the truth.

There has been no word on what they uncovered and if anything, they received a free trip to Hawaii on Donald Trump’s dime.

President Barack Obama on 27 April 2011 released a copy of his long form birth certificate with the hopes that doing so would finally end the madness.

Obama even had fun with it at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that took place three days later.

Unfortunately, this did not satisfy those who continued to exert skepticism over Obama’s birth. Orly Taitz continued her quixotic crusade to prove that Obama did not meet the birth requirement to be president by filing several frivolous lawsuits to get the incumbent president removed from various primary ballots in 2012. Former Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio dedicated five years to uncover evidence that Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent. Donald Trump tweeted a link to a conspiracy theory-based website three weeks after the Obama press conference and continued to voice those baseless claims until he renounced those beliefs in September 2016 when it jeopardized his candidacy for the presidency.

No

It was part of a chain e-mail that was circulated among disgruntled Clinton campaigners in Iowa that resulted in one of its volunteer county coordinators being fired in December 2007.

And according to The New York Times, as recently as November 2017 Trump still questions the birthplace of his predecessor among other things.

Now Trump is repeating those same dog whistles towards Senator Harris, just hours after Joe Biden selected her to join him on the 2020 Democratic ticket. He is also having help from his apologists such as hack Chapman University law professor John Eastman whose recent opinion piece in Newsweek further fanned the flames about Harris’ eligibility to be put on the ticket.

Newsweek has published an apology but has not retracted the piece from its website.

Now I’m no fancy law professor like Mr. Eastman, but I do know a thing about the Constitution. He is probably still mad that he did not get the chance to lose to Harris in the 2010 California Attorney General’s race.

And, yes, Harris is eligible to be vice-president since she meets all of the requirements for office. Remember, there are only three requirements to be president and vice-president.

The concern over her eligibility is because of her parents: Shyamala Gopalan who was from India and Donald J Harris who was from Jamaica. Both Shyamala and Donald came to the United States in the early 1960s to pursue education at the University of California in Berkeley.

Again, the issue is not her parents; it is about whether Kamala Harris is eligible, which once again, she marks all three constitutional requirements to be vice-president.

What the whole birtherism nonsense comes down to is this: it is that among the promoters of this long-discredited theory is that when people of color pursue higher office, EVERYTHING they have ever done is over scrutinized, misrepresented, and lied about in the same manner that white men candidates are not.

Don’t believe it? Look at how those who promoted it did to Barack Obama, by extension Hillary Clinton four years ago, and the misrepresentation about Harris' record while she was running for president.

And especially candidates of color, even their birth and claim to citizenship

As I stated in my lengthy set up about Harris potentially being Biden’s running mate, if you transplanted Harris’ record and accomplishments over to say… me, not only would I have won the Democratic nomination easily but I would have consistently led Donald Trump by at a minimum ten points and that margin would grow as Election Day draws near.

All this does is add to the many racist acts and statements perpetrated by Donald Trump in his life in the public arena and it distracts from the many failures of his administration, specifically the criminal mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed over 170,000 (and rising) Americans.

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