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 platform and policy document of the NFRA, a 90-year-old conservative political organization that once counted former president Ronald Reagan as a member, argues that the U.S. Constitution 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 document further states that “an originalist and strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution in the tradition of [conservative Supreme Court jurists Antonin] Scalia and [Clarence] Thomas, and “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 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.
The NFRA’s platform document argued that “Several states, candidates, and major political parties have ignored this fundamental Presidential qualification, including candidates Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Kamala Harris whose parents were not American citizens at the time of their birth.”
“It is the will of this convention that only candidates who meet the natural born-citizenship standard, interpreted through an originalist and strict constructionist standard, be placed on the 2024 Republican presidential primary ballots,” the document states.
Andrew Fleischman, an Atlanta defense attorney and legal pundit, brought attention to the NFRA’s birther stance on Harris with a recent post on X:
NFRA President Alex Johnson downplayed his organization’s reliance on the Dred Scott case to support its position that Harris is not qualified to be president in a statement to The Independent this week.
“The media’s suggestion that referencing a court case in a 30+ page document equates to endorsing every aspect of the case is inherently dishonest and misleading,” he stated. “We firmly believe that faux Democrat Ms. Harris should never hold office for any of the many reasons people choose to highlight, including her party’s tactics on dividing people by race and class. … These policies have historically resulted in widespread suffering, economic collapse and the erosion of individual freedoms. The Democrat Party preys on the ignorance of voters.”