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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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
“An originalist and strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution in the Scalia and Thomas tradition, as well as precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases … have found that a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ is defined as a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child’s birth,” the document states.
The group then cites six cases including Dred Scott v Sandford. The 1857 ruling came a few years before the 1861 outbreak of the US Civil War over the issue of slavery, stating that enslaved people could not be citizens, meaning that they couldn’t expect to receive any protection from the courts or the federal government. The ruling also said that Congress did not have the power to ban slavery from a federal territory.
I thought this was some kind of op, like someone making a fake Republican org and putting out an unhinged policy paper. Citing Dred Scott is crazy, especially since it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the argument that she’s not a citizen.
I think the argument is that if her ancestors were slaves, then they weren’t citizens, and therefore their descendants could not be citizens because those enslaved ancestors couldn’t give birth to citizens and therefore on and on.
However, the civil rights act of 1866 gave all freed slaves at that time citizenship.
But more importantly, the 14th amendment to the Constitution reversed the answer to the citizenship question in Dred Scott.
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But that’s not what the 14th amendment says, so it should be moot
Surely the paper will protect us
I’m not worried about protecting us, I am describing the logic of the way the system works. If you appoint originalists, literalist, federalist right-wingers to the supreme court, an amendment to the Constitution is part of the Constitution and precedent that predates the amendment cannot be used to countermand the constitution. If it did, then the constitution itself would be undermined and we’d revert to English commonlaw.
That is a pretty unbelievable reach, and even if everything they said was true would be a reason to change those rules.
Not to shill for Kamala
It would just be plainly ridiculous, because it would imply ALL descendants of slaves in the US are not citizens. That’s just absurd. However, if this somehow went somewhere, I’d love to see libs argue with commies about how the sacred democratic institutions of this cursed country are worth anything.