Donald Trump is a Red Corvette

by Joseph DeMaio, ©2024

(Sep. 24, 2024) — As we approach one of the most consequential elections since the founding of the Republic, perhaps a brief, very brief refresher course in some of the fundamentals is in order.  Yes, faithful P&E readers, foremost among those fundamentals is the issue of whether Kamala Devi Harris is even eligible under the Constitution to serve as President.

Your humble servant has long-posited here at The P&E, that, in fact, she is not a “natural born Citizen (“nbC”) as understood and intended by the Framers of the Constitution’s “Eligibility Clause,” Art. 2, 1, Cl. 5, and thus is also a usurper of the vice-presidency under the 12^th Amendment.

But as we now enter the “home-stretch” in the presidential “Oval Office Derby,” the Harris campaign claims that the Cackle Queen is “too busy to answer questions.” Seriously!? Moreover, if she is not even asked important and relevant questions, so much the better from her perspective. The narrative seems clearly to be: if she won’t answer (or be challenged to answer) basic questions about her past, her future policies or anything else relating to her bona fides and fitness for the office, the electorate will remain blissfully unaware of her truly collectivist and socialistic plans to complete the “fundamental transformation” of the republic promised by Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. back in 2008. 

And, hey, with the endorsement of Taylor (“the-depth-of-my-intellect-is-best-measured-with-a-micrometer”) Swift in their back pocket, why worry? 

The answer is brutally simple: all Americans, not just the voting electorate, should worry that an ineligible, unqualified and incompetent individual may end up in the Oval Office, never any more than a few feet away from the nuclear missile launch codes… at a time in history – thanks to the incompetence of the Biden-Harris administration – where we are now closer to a nuclear World War III than at any time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

But I digress:  To reiterate, the single most important question lurking in the back of the room during the current political festivities — and yet to be even asked by a profoundly indifferent and “eagerly uninformed” Fourth Estate — is the basis upon which Harris claims constitutional eligibility to serve as president.  

If her answer is that she was born in Oakland, and that fact alone is purportedly sufficient to establish her status as a “natural born Citizen,” and thus “close enough for government work,” there is ample historical evidence and Supreme Court precedent undermining that response, at least for anyone willing to examine it.  And there, of course, is the problem.  

Once more, and to reiterate: under the 14th Amendment and existing Supreme Court rulings, anyone born here who is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States — their parents’ foreign citizenship aside — becomes a “native-born citizen” of the nation.  But a “native-born citizen” under that amendment is not synonymous with a “natural born Citizen” as contemplated by the Founders under Article 2, § 1, Clause 5 (the “Eligibility Clause”) of the original and still existing…, by a thread, post-Biden-Harris regime…, Constitution. 

That restriction provides: “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.”

Based on Founder John Jay’s understanding of the term, and consistent with the definition found in § 212, Book 1, Ch. 19 of Emer de Vattel’s 1758 Treatise, “The Law of Nations,” (“§ 212”) a persuasive case is made for the conclusion that the Framers of the Constitution understood, in the “nomenclature of the day,” that an “nbC” was a person born within the geographic boundaries of the United States to two parents, both of whom were at the time of the birth already U.S. citizens.

This conclusion is supported by the Supreme Court’s decision in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S 162 (1875) as well as, while not cited therein, the Supreme Court’s prior decision in The Venus 12 U.S. 253 (1814), where (12 U.S. at 289) de Vattel and the definition found in § 212 is specifically, in so many words, quoted.

Accordingly, because neither of Kamala Harris’s parents were U.S. citizens when she was born in Oakland in 1964, she does not meet the § 212 nbC definition most likely intended by the Framers to govern the restriction.  And yet, the Fourth Estate – now primarily morphed into the mere stenographic pool for the Democrats, ignores these facts.

In conclusion, recall that while all “natural born Citizens” are also “native-born citizens,” not all “native-born citizens” are “natural born Citizens.” Think Euler diagrams.

More simply, think by analogy: “All Corvettes are Chevrolets, but not all Chevrolets are Corvettes.  Trump is a red Corvette. Harris is a 4-cylinder powder-blue Chevy Malibu masquerading as a Corvette. Memo to Harris and the American electorate as general election day nears: running for President is not a Halloween costume party.

As the Republic enters its 236^th year as that “shining city on a hill” described by President Reagan, what makes better sense as the race for domestic as well as global peace, prosperity and stability continues: competing in a powder-blue Malibu…, or a red Corvette?