Is Kamala Harris Eligible to be President?
NOTE: The following was written and published in August of 2018. Remember, ’twas Bosco who set forth the game plan. The war is heating up. ~ Ed.
Given that California Sen. Kamala Harris’s Wikipedia biography states that she was born in Oakland, CA in 1964 to immigrant parents and speculation exists that she plans to run for president in 2020, Golden State citizen Gary Wilmott has been seeking information as to her citizenship status and whether or not she meets the constitutional requirement of “natural born Citizen.”
Here it is!: Leftist Kamala Harris jumps into presidential race
The Wikipedia entry states that Harris’s mother, Dr. Shyamala G. Harris, was from India, arriving in Berkeley, CA in 1960.
Dr. Harris passed away in February 2009. Her “Legacy” obituary states that she arrived alone in the U.S. at the age of 19 after having earned her undergraduate degree from Delhi University.
Kamala’s father, Donald Harris, is a retired Stanford University economics professor whose biography affirms that he arrived in the U.S. in 1961 as an “Issa Scholar” from Jamaica. It adds that he was born in Jamaica and naturalized in the U.S. but does not provide the year.
Neither parent reportedly was present in the U.S. as a legal resident for five years prior to Harris’s birth, a requirement to apply for naturalization, Wilmott observed in an interview with The Post & Email on Thursday.
After her parents divorced when she was seven, Wikipedia reports, Harris’s mother was granted full custody of her two daughters, after which they moved to Quebec, Canada. Dr. Harris’s obituary, reposted at SFGate on March 22, 2009, states that her medical research took her to McGill University in Montreal for 16 years. It further reads, in part:
Her passion for science was augmented by a fervent commitment to social justice. While a student at Berkeley in the ’60s, she became fully engaged in the Civil Rights Movement, leading to a lifelong fight against injustice, racial discrimination and intolerance. She instilled these values in her daughters, who in turn have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of justice and equality – one as the first female elected District Attorney of SF and the other as vice president of Peace and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation in NY.
According to Wikipedia, Harris graduated from Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, presumably in 1981 or 1982. However, Harris’s U.S. Senate biography does not say that she lived and obtained most of her public education in Canada:
Growing up in Oakland, Kamala had a stroller-eye view of the Civil Rights movement. Through the example of courageous leaders like Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, and Charles Hamilton Houston, Kamala learned the kind of character it requires to stand up to the powerful, and resolved to spend her life advocating for those who could not defend themselves.
Wilmott considers a “natural born Citizen” to be an individual born to two U.S.-citizen parents subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. He openly admits that his own birth in the United Kingdom to then-British-citizen parents disqualifies him from that subset of Americans.
During our interview, Wilmott told us that at the end of last year, local “scuttlebutt” had it that Harris was eyeing a 2020 presidential run, prompting him to research her constitutional eligibility. Further supporting speculation that Harris will declare herself a 2020 presidential candidate are numerous articles dating to just after the 2016 presidential election.
An August 15, 2018, an opinion column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram contended that “the betting website Oddshark just published brand new odds for the 2020 presidential race — and for the first time California’s junior U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris has tied Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the betting favorite among potential Democratic candidates to win the election.” At the same time, the writer believes “that the soft-on-crime policies that Harris helped pass while serving as the district attorney of San Francisco and California attorney general directly contributed to the complete breakdown of one of America’s most beautiful cities,” referring to San Francisco.
The writer’s views on Harris’s approach to prosecutions appear to be supported by statistics cited by Wikipedia.
Before providing an answer to his own question, writer and radio show host John Phillips asked, “When, and if, Kamala Harris decides to run for president of the United States, voters will undoubtedly ask themselves the question, ‘Do I want the whole country to look like San Francisco?’”
Since early this year, a myriad of mainstream reports have cited San Francisco’s growing sanitation crisis powered by homelessness and rampant drug use, with discarded hypodermic needles and tent cities a common sight in some areas. Some have compared the situation there to that of a “third-world” country for various reasons.
An August 8, 2018 editorial cited the same statistics source at SFGate favoring Harris as a Democrat presidential contender.
Harris served as City and County of San Francisco District Attorney from 2003 to 2010, when she was elected California Attorney General. She served one term, was re-elected in 2014, but in January 2015 announced her intention to seek the U.S. Senate to be vacated by the retiring Barbara Boxer.
Harris’s Wikipedia entry is arguably not particularly favorable to her. Under the subheading, “2020 Presidential speculation,” it reads:
Kamala Harris has been considered a top contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President.[145][146] She has publicly stated that she is “not ruling it out”.[147] Her spending on Facebook advertising is unusually high, and targeted to reach voters outside California.[148][149]. In July 2018, it was announced that she would publish a memoir, another sign of a possible run.[150]
On November 11, 2016, The Huffington Post published an article titled, “Meet Kamala Harris, Who Could Become The First Woman President.”
As early as July of last year, a Democrat involved in fundraising reportedly said that Harris “is ‘absolutely’ running for president.”
In September 2017, Newsweek reported that “PredictIt, an online political stock market, now lists Harris as the most valuable of the possible 2020 Democratic nominees, higher even than Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as than former Vice President Joe Biden.”
On August 9, 2018, Buzzfeed News reported that “California Sen. Kamala Harris is headlining a Martha’s Vineyard reception next week amid a swell of excitement here for her possible candidacy for president.”
On August 10, 2018, a letter to the editor in The Los Angeles Times opined that “Kamala Harris is a lot more qualified to be president than Donald Trump.” The article did not raise the constitutional eligibility issue.
On Sunday, The Hill wrote that “A year and a half into her first term in office, the Judiciary Committee’s most junior member is already seen as a potential presidential front-runner.”
Former Obama eligibility litigant Commander Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret) recently posted an article arguing that Harris is not constitutionally qualified. “Senator Harris is not being transparent on this issue and her office staff has refused to answer any questions on this subject,” Kerchner wrote. “Given Kamala Harris’s year of birth, and her parents emigration years, she was born in the USA to two foreign nationals and thus inherited their respective birth nation’s citizenship when she was born, in addition to being a basic Citizen by being born in the USA to aliens legally domiciled here. Thus Senator Kamala Harris was born with citizenship and required allegiance at birth to three countries. This is hardly what the founders and framers intended when they selected the “natural born Citizen” requirement for the person who would in the future be permitted to be the President and Commander in Chief of our military, once the founding generation was gone.”
Citing the Wikipedia entry and the five-year naturalization requirement, Wilmott told us, “Each of the parents has to be here five years to apply for citizenship. So if she was born in 1964 and the father came in 1961, adding five years to that, he could not have become an American citizen until 1966, at the earliest. So I immediately wrote a letter to her, which you posted.”
Wilmott’s December 4, 2017 letter to Harris references questions surrounding Barack Obama’s eligibility given that no verifiable proof of his alleged birth in the U.S. exists and he claims a father who was never a U.S. citizen. As the result of a five-year criminal investigation, the “long-form” birth certificate image posted at the White House website in 2011 bearing Obama’s name was declared a “computer-generated forgery” in March 2012.
Wilmott’s letter to Harris states, in part:
I couldn’t help but notice that the press has recently been extolling you as the next “Obama” and the inevitable frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. While this growing presidential buzz may be quite intoxicating for you, I suggest that you take a serious look at Article II of the U.S. Constitution, i.e., the presidential eligibility clause.
Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 mandates that a president be a NATURAL-born citizen, which you clearly are not. At the time of your birth, BOTH of your parents were citizens of foreign countries, so your birth in California makes you at best a NATIVE-born citizen (anchor baby?) under the prevailing view of the 14th Amendment. Lest you think that I have Republican bias I would also point out that presidential wannabes Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio also fail to meet this higher standard of citizenship. Their campaigns were fraudulent and in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution.
He reported that his letter received no response.
Early last month, Wilmott wrote Harris a second letter asking about her parents’ naturalization or absence thereof:
The letter concluded with, “I look forward to your prompt response.”
“I personally don’t think she is a viable candidate and will not run,” Wilmott told us, “but I do think she’s being looked at as a vice-presidential candidate, and she’s not eligible.”
The 12th Amendment states that the vice president must possess the same qualifications as the president.
Regarding political operatives’ consideration of constitutional requirements, Wilmott remarked, “At the end of the day, they don’t care about the Constitution; they care about their self-serving aspirations and being in the limelight. If Harris is paying attention, she knows the whole history and that the same situation could come up again. The reason the ‘birther’ issue has never been put to rest is that we know we’re right and we have the Constitution on our side.”
Since 2008, anyone questioning Obama’s eligibility has been called a “birther” or a “racist.” On Friday, the lead investigator of the “long-form” image posted at whitehouse.gov, Mike Zullo, announced that two intelligence-community professionals informed him that “it’s been an open secret” in Washington, DC that “Obama could never satisfy the constitutional requirement of being born on American soil.”
Of his July 2 letter, Wilmott said, “I sent it ‘snail mail’ to all six district offices and waited a month. On the very day of the one-month anniversary, I got a letter in the mail, and it was absolutely a typical response from a politician, thanking me for writing about ‘the state of our nation.’”
“It says nothing about what I asked her,” Wilmott observed.
“It’s an absolute insult that these people feel they can fire off a form letter and completely ignore what was written to them,” he further said. “So I picked up the phone and called her LA office and spoke with a man who was rather indignant when I told him I wanted to know if Senator Harris’s parents were ever U.S. citizens. ‘Well, that’s private,’ he said, and I said, ‘Why is it private that I know whether or not her parents are citizen or not? After all, if she’s being touted as a candidate for President of the United States, I know that she has to be a natural born Citizen, and for me, that means her parents must have been American citizens at the time of her birth. Just because Obama got away with it doesn’t mean we have to sit on the sidelines and watch this continually go on.’ And he said, ‘Well, sir, Obama was born in the United states,’ and I said, ‘So what? That doesn’t make him a natural born Citizen.’ He said, ‘Sir, he was born in Hawaii,’ and I said, ‘That, sir, does not make him a natural born Citizen; perhaps a native-born citizen but not a natural born Citizen.’
“He kept cutting me off and I said, ‘I want to speak with your supervisor,’ and he said, ‘I’ll have him call you.’ I said ‘Yeah, right…’ and he said, ‘I’ll have him call you.’”
“I never heard from him,” Wilmott said.
“If the Wikipedia article is correct, I know that her parents had not been in the country long enough to have been U.S. citizens at the time of her birth,” he continued. Further, he speculated that “if she runs, I think she’s going to play the ‘gender’ card and ‘race’ card, and I don’t think that does anybody any good. Those have not worked out well for us.”
Editor’s Note: This article originally misstated the 25th Amendment as requiring the vice president to possess the same qualifications at the president when it is, in fact, the 12th Amendment which contains that language.
Written by Sharon Rondeau for The Post & Email ~ August 19, 2018