Mark Meadows Pushes Back On Birther Claims About Kamala Harris
During an interview with CNN on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pushed back on recent suggestions that Kamala Harris may not be qualified to be vice president due to her Jamaican and Indian heritage, The Hill reported.
“This is not something that we’re going to pursue,” he said. “Actually, Jake, you and a number in the media, you all have spent more time on it than anybody in the White House was talking about this.”
The comment from Meadows echoed Donald Trump, who said during a press conference on Saturday that the claim is not something the administration is going to be following up on.
“I know nothing about it, but it’s not something that bothers me. I just don’t know about it, but it’s not something we will be pursuing.”
As The Inquisitr reported, the president noted that the theory was first floated by conservative law professor John Eastman. When pressed to reject the theory, Trump did not provide a direct answer.
According to Meadows, he is more concerned with Harris’ radical left-wing ideas and proposals.
“I’m more concerned with Kamala Harris’s liberal ideas coming from San Francisco to the rest of America than I am whether she was – where she was born or anything else.”
Eastman promoted the theory in an op-ed for Newsweek, which the publication later apologized for, Business Insider reported. An editor’s note from global editor-in-chief Nancy Cooper and opinion editor Josh Hammer acknowledged that the piece was being used by some figures as a “tool” to perpetuate xenophobia and racism.
According to the note, the piece was never intended to fuel the “racist lie of Birtherism,” which refers to the hypothesis that Trump attempted to use to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama. The editors’ comments allegedly came after receiving pressure from the publication’s staffers.
Eastman’s op-ed suggested that Harris maybe not be eligible to be vice president. In particular, he pointed to the 12th Amendment, Article II of the U.S. Constitution, and the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.
But as many noted, Harris was born in California and is a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment. Although Harris’ parents were immigrants, her father as a Jamaican national and her mother was an Indian national at the time of her birth.
The turn of events echoed Trump’s claim that Obama may not be eligible to be president, despite his birth certificate stating that he was born in the U.S.
