Despite “Mootness” Ruling, Presidential Eligibility Question Remains, Plaintiff Says

by Sharon Rondeau

(Apr. 16, 2025) — In a Substack post on Tuesday, the plaintiff in a case challenging Kamala Harris’s constitutional eligibility to serve as president reported the issuance of an opinion from the New York Court of Appeals pending since November.

Last August, former attorney, New York State registered voter and plaintiff Montgomery Blair Sibley sued Co-Executive Director of the New York Board of Elections and New York’s Chief Election Official Kristen Zebrowski Stavisky in her official capacity for preemptively placing Harris’s name on the 2024 presidential ballot.

For nearly four years prior to the November 5 election, Harris served as Joe Biden’s vice president, a position which, following the passage of the 12th Amendment in 1804, requires the same eligibility criteria as the presidency.

Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution reads:

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.

Over more than a century, debate has taken place over the precise meaning of “natural born Citizen,” a term of art the Founders left undefined.

“The Chief Election Official will breach her duty and deprive Sibley of his Article II, §1 right to vote for a President who is a ‘natural born Citizen’ if she permits Kamala Iyer Harris to appear on the New York November 5, 2024, ballot for President of the United States,” Sibley wrote in his complaint. “In that event, Sibley will have no material choice for President as Kamala Iyer Harris is ineligible for the office of the President. Sibley would then be reduced to no meaningful choice between major party candidates. In that case, a fraud will have been perpetrated upon both Sibley and the electorate.”

He contended Harris to be “ineligible to be President as neither of her parents were U.S. Citizens at the time of her birth.”

Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, CA in 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, hailed from India and attended the University of California at Berkeley for her PhD at the age of 19. Harris’s father, Donald Jasper Harris, was a Jamaican citizen who, like his future wife, came to the United States and attended Berkeley on a student visa and became an economics professor at Stanford University.

Donald Harris naturalized as an American in 1981, according to records obtained by the late Robert C. Laity and reported by the Twitter/X account @KamalaKancel. There is no evidence Harris’s mother ever became a U.S. citizen prior to her passing in 2009.

Sibley’s position agrees with that expressed in August 2020 in Newsweek by then-professor of law at Chapman University School of Law John C. Eastman.

Harris lost the November 5 election to Donald J. Trump, who garnered a majority of both electoral and popular votes in the wake of his third presidential campaign.

On April 10 the State of New York Court of Appeals wrote in Sibley’s case “that the appeal is dismissed, without costs, Upon the ground that the issues presented have become moot;” and “that the motion for leave to appeal was dismissed upon the ground that the issues presented have become moot.”

“I have responded by filing a Motion to Reargue,” Sibley wrote on his Substack Tuesday. “In that motion I ask the Court to invoke the ‘capable of repetition yet evading review’ doctrine. This is the doctrine that allowed the Supreme Court to take up the case of Roe v Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 125 (1973) which held that pregnancy ‒ just like the quadrennial United States Presidential election cycle ‒ “provides a classic justification for a conclusion of nonmootness.”

“…in 2028 there will be another Presidential primary season followed by an election,” he continued. “It is likely that a candidate will appear of such parentage that they may not be a ‘natural born Citizen’. Hence, it is far better that this ‘natural born Citizen’ issue be decided when it will not determine an up-coming election as opposed to a court removing a major party candidate from the ballot during Presidential Primary season or shortly before an election.”

Should a similar subsequent opinion from the same court issue, Sibley wrote, he intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.