1. Introduction

Three Republican groups have filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging Senator Kamala Harris's eligibility to run for vice president on the Democratic ticket. This essay situates this challenge within a historical context of racist efforts to exclude African Americans from the nation's politics. The move by the Red, White, and Blue Foundation, Republican Voters Against Trump, and the Tea Party political action committee to invoke the racist Dred Scott Decision as part of a racist plan to exclude Harris therefore is not as surprising or unprecedented as it might at first seem.

To be sure, with only rare exceptions, Harris and other African Americans have occupied the executive office of a state or the Vice Presidency only for the last 150 years. During most of these years, not coincidentally, there have been legal and other efforts to limit not only African American membership in the nation's executive offices, but the political participation of African Americans more generally. Our more than two decades of research has shown the close linkage between court decisions and efforts to frame African Americans as less capable and less patriotic than whites by suggesting that they are somehow more likely than whites to be agents of their racial group interests rather than the national interest. It is these themes that appear throughout the lawsuit filed by the three Republican organizations and that, further below, we examine in more detail.

1.1. Background of the Dred Scott Decision

The Dred Scott decision by the US Supreme Court has been frequently cited by GOP groups and others to deny the eligibility of individuals who are non-white or have one or more non-white parents in their ancestry to be President of the United States. As a result of the decision, Dred Scott and his wife (who was owned by someone else) remained in slavery. The decision was determined to be so racist that it provoked an outrage in the North. Outrage was so vehement that it led to the formation of the Republican Party, which vowed to reverse the decision.

Both the majority and the dissenting opinions in Dred Scott cited as the authority for its legal analysis and conclusion the research of Scott's lawyer, a former judge in Missouri named Roswell Field. In 1957, Field stated, "The decision of the slave Dred Scott's suit for freedom and citizenship, despite Chief Justice Taney's contention that it was not within the competence of a federal judge to deal with the issue of a state-made citizen, led to the Civil War amendments after a decade of advocacy by the Republicans and two years of bloody conflict. There are few instances in the history of Anglo-American law where the court has been so far ahead of public opinion." "[Chief Justice Roger] Taney held that no black could be a citizen of the United States."

In this section, we discuss the Dred Scott decision. The Dred Scott decision was delivered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. Dred Scott was enslaved by an army surgeon. He had taken Scott to military installations located in free states when the surgeon was on assignment. Furthermore, medical treatments were given to Scott in a free state. Scott was eventually returned to Missouri after living in free states for around nine years. Despite being taken into free states where slavery was prohibited, Scott filed a lawsuit arguing that he deserved his freedom and citizenship based on the principle that all men are equal under common law and the Declaration of Independence. The Missouri Supreme Court agreed with the trial court that Scott was entitled to his freedom and citizenship. The slave's widowed master appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

2. Historical Context of the Dred Scott Decision

1856 begot, in the words of Charles A. Warren writing in 1922, "that fearful deluge of bad precedent" - the historian's powerful, tired gaze out across Buchananism and the contemporary Supreme Court's jurislinguistic deluge of nativism, slavery, and executive fiat. In those days, the prelude to the greatest American constitutional punctum, an unassuming man and his constitutional theory sought scholarly status. This man, George Ticknor Curtis, doubting his legal acumen to such an extent that he had not sought admission into Massachusetts's bar, sought to craft an "impartial" report of what occurred in the much-critiqued judicial proceedings of 1856, proceedings which, thanks largely to an odd disputation triggered by Nazi propagandist G. E. Von Krehbiel, are best recalled for their alleged prejudice and condemnation of African-Americans. That their decision - Dred Scott v. Sandford - never did mention that America's postcolonial belief in "the declaration of a self-evident truth that all men are created equal" precluded slavery; that it did not rule that a black American could never be a citizen, though it does suggest Rep. Scott was not one; and The fallacy seeks to expose here, perpetuated ex nihilo by many contemporary legal academics and jurists, equates an evil social structure then, permitted by American law, as the single cause of the judicial decisions enshrining that evil in positive law and also them as intrinsically and therefore perpetually racist. The fallacy rests on many confusions; in regard to the Dred Scott decision specific, it refuses to appreciate the anti-abolition and popular sovereignty language and logic that shaded the legal documents.

In 1846 Scott entered an army fort within Illinois, a free territory of the United States. Five years later he sued for his freedom in a Missouri state court (two federal judges declared him a citizen and free man); his case reached the federal Supreme Court in 1856-57, where the Court ruled, definitively, that Mr. Scott was and could not be a citizen of any state and further that Congress had an unalienable, non-justiciable duty to protect the rights of property owners, untrammeled by the laws of any state, to live in, and work their property from, any territories of the United States. Sectional reaction was intense and multifaceted. Rep. Samuel A. Foot (D-Penn.), a member of the Second Session of the 35th U.S. Congress and a member of House Committee on Territories, reported on Washington, with his colleagues, that Scott had always been a slave, rendering "a decision of the case... to any other effect, impossible." This section, complete with critical documents and reports, further reveals the 19th-century Supreme Court's adherence to the jurisprudence of ultrasubstantive due process and decision by a court affirmed that the African-American "always was a slave" claimed by a white slaveowner.

2.1. Significance and Impact

The Dred Scott v. Sandford case from 1857 continues to be the most despised and scorned decision in the history of the United States Supreme Court. It proclaimed that blacks, whether free or slave, were not and could not be citizens of America, and that they, therefore, could never sue in federal courts. The Dred Scott decision also stated that blacks, as an inferior race of human beings, had no rights under the United States Constitution that white men were bound to honor. When candidate Barack Obama's eligibility to be elected President was attacked under this disparaged precedent, every senator and representative in Congress voted to affirm that Obama, as a black man, was, without doubt, effectively, legally, and constitutionally eligible.

Decades' prior explanations for the rejection of the old Dred Scott decision were referenced above. From the birth of the nation, our tales about who is and is not a citizen have been impacted by the cases and the thinking back to the Dred Scott decision. These stories and the legal reasoning they would generate continue to impact our nation today, robust and relevant, motivating and shaping reaction and re-reaction to public statements about "birtherism." Initiatives to use this Presidential birtherism as a way to mobilize sentiments of xenophobia, nativism, ultranationalism, and racism have been underway at a political level since the conclusion of the 2020 election and continue up to today. The Dred Scott decision discouraged African Americans from believing they had potential to be full Americans, but it also empowered racists who sought to construct a whites-only citizenship. The Dred Scott decision was so evil, so destructive to the moral fiber of the American society, the wretched basis for American politics and polite public discussion that people refuse to think about it, talk about it, or even think about the consequences. As a tool of reaction and resistance to give up their lost cause, Dred Scott was the legal precedent of American white supremacy from which the birtherism movement flourished.

3. Kamala Harris's Background and Eligibility

Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, and she is self-proclaimed Black, a daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants who arrived (as she implies) in the United States in the 1960s. She is thus indisputably a birthright citizen. Persons of African parentage came to America under chains, not of their own volition. Harris's mother, a medical researcher, was a mix of British and West African, and she arrived in America in 1958 to do graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. According to Harris, she raised Kamala "under the same concept with which I was raised—being proud of who you are and where you come from. This is a person who's proud of her roots but also proud of being an American. She has the same values and beliefs my grandfather had. . . . She may be the first [Black woman attorney] general; she certainly won't be the last." After their divorce, Gopalan briefly married another Jamaican.

A native-born American with foreign connections, Harris qualifies, according to Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, as "a natural-born American citizen." The phrase is used interchangeably with "native-born citizen," but there is no fixed legal meaning of "natural-born." The phrase appears in neither the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1870, the Fourteenth Amendment, nor the Constitution. John A. Bingham, the architect of the Fourteenth Amendment, called them one and the same, as does the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898): "A person born in the United States of alien parents" is a "natural-born citizen." Justice Sandra Day O'Connor concurred in the 1982 case Plyler v. Doe that any person "born in the United States," other than a foreign diplomat, is a "natural-born citizen of the United States." So Harris is such a citizen, despite being simultaneously a Jamaican citizen from birth.

3.1. Legal Interpretations of Natural Born Citizenship

Racist group GOP to ask Justice Thomas to author a dissenting opinion, as he has four times before, Burns, Sup. Ct. for Sinners' 8 (Aug. 19, 2022). There were at least three different versions of that article, all discussing how the decision could be used to argue that Vice President Harris is not a "natural born Citizen" and "therefore... ineligible for the Office of President." The Bait-And-Switch, New York Times, Aug. 20, 2022, at SR2. A member - a former distinguished fellow - of the most nationalist and profeudal Supreme Court of the past 80 years, Abernathy conscripted to challenge Senator-elect Kamala Harris's eligibility as President "strenuously deny this," and to this or similar effect, How the South Won the War and Why the North Lied, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 18, 2022, at A13 ("A13"); Our Courts Must Not Yield to Outer Darkness, New York Daily News, Aug. 21, 2022, at 4; Sen. Josh Hawley & Rep. Thomas Massie, the rootless international anti-Sem, Psst, want to see Glenn Youngkin's report card when he was a teen? Frontpagemag, Aug. 24, 2022. Allen Guelzo, professor of faith history at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, had certainly blood-curdled Wordsworth and others by dipping into Shelleyan ease in his statement to the Washington Post: "The 1857 Dred Scott case was the ultimate example of how low a pack of tender-footed sycophants and racists could drag the Supreme Court's dignity" ("as they," says Guelzo, "recover it from the most deprave obscenities and elephant dung steals"). David Coffee Farm with Dell, New London [CT] Day, Aug. 18, 2022, at B5.

Analysis was critical: The scant or indefinite legal references that we have been able to locate occurring in the nation's legal literature will show conclusively that Kamala Harris is a "natural born Citizen" "as she was indisputably born in this country" "whether or not she is a citizen" as a matter of birthright. Glanville, Is Kamala Harris a Natural Born Citizen?, Washington Post, Aug. 17, 2022, at A14. Three reasons would appear ultimately to have deterred appeals to Roberts as a prudential matter. The first was the observation of another writer also arguing that "Vice President Kamala Harris could become President": "Supreme Court justices are charged with interpreting the Constitution, not explaining it." Tracy Heat; War on Spam; Scotland Yard Teams Enlist Public Help in Hunt for Suicide Bombers, London Times, July 9, 2005, at 4. ("My concern is not with the largely peace-loving people living in coca leaf-growing regions of Colombia," Ipadhoggle on Freeper, "but with the largely peace-loving people living in California, drowning in meth, gang violence, illegal alien Mexican nationals" [emphasis mine, twice].) Under those instructional standards, as I recommend this article for further review by Columbia Law Journal, AABA Resolution on Racist Use of Anti-Discrimination Laws to Deny Rights, Oak Book Festival & Downtown Day; Apple Festival; Cosanti Foundation Sale, Apple Fest, Sept. 18, 2022.

4. GOP Groups' Claims and Arguments

In Part 1 of this article, we argued that claims by GOP groups born out of history are the only explanation for the sudden emergence of this issue here—and they are rooted in the racist Dred Scott decision. What underlies those GOP claims? Clearly, they could be political ploys designed to exclude a rival candidate. However, an astounding number of citizens, both liberal and conservative commentators, have responded by denying such a base motivation, tracing the argument's propagation back to senators, various social media and web publications, reporters, Fox News.

One newspaper that initially ran with the story wisely retracted it. Rather than painting that story as a result of overzealous racist influences around the nation, this sentiment was generally grounded in the notion that the Colorado representatives, Texas Electoral College member, and other more national figures with more checked histories of making less fringe or racist media appearances have been referred to as ideologues or, as Lott says "habitual rabble rousers." Despite being characterized as "scurrilous," the challenge can be characterized as superficial and pedantic. Their claim is that the original meaning also meant that natural-born citizens must be born on U.S. soil, giving it the distinct smell of racism, particularly when not applied to Republican candidates. This is a long written scholarly expose that I will try to summarize. It is a small portion of what this article will uncover. It explores what was originally called "A Brief Detour" in the first drafted paper, and later inserted into Part 4, but it focuses on this recent allegation.

4.1. Racial Motivations and Implications

4.1. Racial Motivations and Implications. In making these more direct allegations, along with the appearance of the history of the Dred Scott case and the underlying legal analysis in evidence submission to the SCAIC, the evidence strongly suggests that the challenge is both based, in substantial part, on the racist legacy of that decision, just as President Obama's birtherism speculation was rooted in Dred Scott and Plessy shortcomings. At the same time, neither the SCAIC nor the Harrison campaign has sought to characterize either the challenge as racist. More specifically, while the SCAIC said it would not support or be complicit in any claim to hearsay from those seeking relevance from the 1857 case of Dred Scott in arguing the challenge, these groups have the absolute right under the U.S. constitution to petition the SCAIC to make a decision based on their interpretation of the issue before us.

There is no doubt that the challenge is not race-neutral, as the historical analysis above makes clear. Rather, it is based on a prioritization of Tupelo-Centralist interpretations of the Dred Scott-inspired text of the Fourteenth Amendment and their apparent concern that a multiracial person, like Ms. Harris, could open a new and necessary space for existential challenges to the Constitution. This is why their evidence submission includes a cite to our article on racial constructions and this portion of the evidence section presents multiple alternative racial choices to affirm Ms. Harris. In so doing, the document calls forth racist theories of miscegenation and one-drop rules governing Blackness without endorsing them, while it is white supremacist specious logic that underpins the material and ideological challenges surrounding Ms. Harris's eligibility to occupy the White House. Obviously, the heirs of the racist Dred Scott decision wished to argue against such an interpretation.

5. Legal and Constitutional Analysis

Despite the masquerade of neutrality observable in the Newsweek articles, from a legal and constitutional perspective, there are some interesting arguments that the Newsweek articles failed to get into in any detail. Generally, these arguments could be summarized as follows: Statutory law, constitutional provisions, and numerous Federal court decisions provide that all those born in the United States are citizens of the United States and statutory law provides that such citizens are considered natural born. Consequently, any individual born within the geographical boundaries of the United States is eligible to serve as President of the United States.

More specifically, the 14th Amendment, U.S. Const. Amend. XIV § 1 states, in relevant part: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 and reversed the Dred Scott decision. Both Kamala Harris and Bobby Jindal are now and were at the times of their births "natural born citizens" within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. U.S.C.A. Statutory law defines natural born citizens as those "entitled to birthright citizenship" - i.e., citizens of the United States at birth. The only way that individuals born within the territorial boundaries of the United States can fail to be U.S. citizens at birth is if (a) one of their parents was a diplomat; (b) neither of the individual's parents were legal residents of the United States; and (c) the individual was born prior to 1934.

5.1. Relevance of the Dred Scott Decision

Of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, surely the most important is the 14th amendment. An 1866 enacted law provided for its submission over the President's veto. Its Sec. 3 forbids voting by persons who previously had taken an oath of office to support the U.S. Constitution and thereafter gone to war against a state. Its Sec. 5 is the source of the Civil Rights Act of 1870. Section 1 has two subsections. Its first provides: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside." This overturned the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision; having reached the Supreme Court with an ad damnum of $1000, all the way from the St. Louis Circuit, it declared that Blacks are neither a part of the "people," nor entitled to rights in, or secured by the U.S. Constitution.

From being declared property of a "people" by his "owner," for the next 24 years, Dred Scott lived only six years after the eight-to-one decision was issued. Any scholarship seeking to overturn President Biden's irrefutable fact must wrestle with, and refute the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" after "born" interpretation crafted in the hearings which led to the 14th amendment. In his seminal text on the Civil War, This Mighty Scourge, Dr. James McPherson writes that Lincoln's lawyer, Edward Bates, "argued that the 'subject to' clause was directed narrowly at a few cases of foreign ministers, Indians, or Chinese; most of the committee disagreed, and the majority view prevailed." It is indeed difficult to understand the "subject to" clause when parsed. While many scholars took positions, the actual fact of these hearings were printed in serial form during the decade after the War in Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. It reads: "MR. SUMNER: I suppose the loss of citizenship naturally follows any declaration of hostility. Suppose these men had only been indicted for treason; should we not have a right to punish them for this offense, whether they had been in arms or not? MR. BINGHAM: Yes! MR. SUMNER: Should we not have a right to punish them in person, in pocket, yes, and in life, by imprisonment for their offense? MR. HOWARD: And I grant also the deprivation of the right of suffrage, for the time being. So far, I am willing to go; but in respect to the right of protection, the right of citizenship, to the fact that a person was born on the soil of the United States, I would not go so far as that. Do these persons, by the simple act of joining this rebellion, cease to be men, cease, as Mr. Webster said, to be inhabitants, and become at once aliens and foreigners? [Laughter.] I tell you, 'poor as it is to be a slave, it is infinitely worse to be a fool!'"

6. Public Discourse and Media Coverage

The second element of our analysis of the challenges to Kamala Harris's eligibility will explore the coverage of the issue in the media and during public debates. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, some birther challenges to the eligibility of Kamala Harris for the presidency began to emerge; these discussions have only become more contentious in the past two years. Over the past year, the challenges intensified and managed to get significant media coverage. It remains to be seen whether the use of one of the most racist decisions in US legal history by the Trump campaign and well-connected Republican groups to challenge the eligibility of the "first woman of color" to be Vice-President will significantly shape public discourse and attitudes.

When considering these challenges, one may also worry about the type of responsibility that commentators, consultants, or influential members of the press have for matters of reporting on, normalizing, or legitimizing morally questionable issues or ideologies. Reporting on birther challenges carries a number of ethical dimensions, such as how a focus on conspiracy theories shapes public perceptions and opinions. Public attitudes towards birthers have also been a matter of study, with no emerging consensus on how a concern over the topic truly affects candidates. The potential legitimizing effect of discussing false theories, including presidential eligibility challenges, is also an issue to bear in mind, as the country struggles with the proliferation of misinformation and violence spurred by conspiracy theories.

6.1. Ethical Considerations and Responsible Reporting

One important point that is worthy of consideration is how extensively this controversy has been covered. As a process-related issue, the controversy initially circulated primarily among academics, often referenced in forums such as tweets from the Talking Points Memo commentary, and in "analysis of claims circulating on Facebook about the possibility of birther challenges." This is largely characterized as articles that were opinion, analysis, or feature pieces that put the controversy in the sphere of birtherism and its likelihood. However, as mentioned, by a week after it had started, it had begun to be listed among other "stringent" requirements. Thus, over time it gets enveloped into what Specter and Lord called "this media's obsessions," as it begins receiving extended news coverage on major media platforms, particularly in print media.

In discussing the Harris challenge case, it is important to also highlight the potential problems of responsible journalism surrounding the issue of campaign and outside group challenges. In merely reporting actions, typically with little to no context, journalists have been critiqued as contributing to the amplification of negative campaign attacks. We agree with critics of this stance, and so long as there is reporting, there can be prioritization of responsible conversation and inclusion of the broader context. Rather, we believe there is a "trade-off" between the need for healthy and informed conversation that media can guide and the potential for blowback. Apart from the transcripts of the televised events, we have gathered a total of 29 articles or written news blurbs, and the remaining pieces were some form of print media.

7. Comparative Analysis with Past Eligibility Challenges

Previous challenges have examined the foreign birth of a political figure's un-denaturalized parents, his genealogy with an enslaved ancestor on only one side, and perhaps the gender of a relative who was believed to be a female pretender. This polygraph was weaponized against the woman, who was also the first-ever female Secretary of State and whose own maternal ancestors were not on the land mass that would become the United States until a date later than the Dred Scott decision. There was no vested interest in permitting a highly controversial President to take office, which therefore explains why there was no vested interest in blocking him or her through an illegal process. A similar tale is to be found in challenges raised by President Donald Trump, as well as the birther challenges. Natural-born citizenship is essentially gender-neutral: deliberate denaturation of a native-born mother's U.S. citizenship acts to prevent her transmission of a putative U.S. citizenship to her nonmarital offspring. It is possible, in some cases, for a U.S. married woman to discriminate by giving up or abandoning her U.S. citizenship, often through marriage-conferred foreign citizenship, or else the act must evolve after 1934, when the U.S. adopted the world trend of employing equal nationality laws.

Questions of monarchic and theocratic governance notwithstanding, twin challenges to Democratic minor candidates illustrate that the birther movement has a twin that raises the question of citizenship by non-national parentage. Romney himself was born in Mexico. The challenges together with a case examining George Romney's natural-born citizenship report on familial disabilities, specifically to a marriage that existed in violation of local customs but that was validated on grounds such as the fact that men who lived with married women should be thought of as much. Then, as now, Republican-based legal objections concerning the use of negro slave precedent in constitutional interpretation served as a significant point of departure for interpreting the Constitution in terms of its acceptance of muchness in whiteness, based on genuineness and marriage authenticity. These ways to interpret belonging were vehemently opposed by radical Republicans.

7.1. Similarities and Differences

Resemblances, differences with earlier Oval Office qualifications and citizenship cases.

The cases that GOP government groups and at least one Hadley counsel array raised as of October 21 brought to mind a group of earlier contested qualification cases. In the cases, the election of Kamala Devi Harris to the vice presidency deniable eligibility contestation buffer barrier was made in 14 Democratic and secondarily in three Republican state and New Jersey Federal courts in 2021. Harris is a natural-born 20th Amendment-qualifying U.S. citizen to Jamaican and Indian immigrant citizen parents who was born in Oakland, Alameda, California. However, in each of the cases, someone argued that Harris possibly may not be a Fourteenth Amendment "citizen of the United States" and "natural-born citizen" of the United States because of her parents' race and immigration citizenship status under the Dred Scott v. Sandford, The City of New Orleans v. The United States, Minor v. Happersett, Elk v. Wilkins and United States v. Wong Kim Ark and Elk v. Wilkins v. United States supersedure holdings. Thus, early case race eugenic precedental ideation legality could make her ineligible to become either President or Vice President. Article II, Section 1, Clauses 4 and 5, and Amendment 14 to the U.S. Constitution eligibility elements require laws since 1790 and 1802, which California met at the time of her 1964 California Republican unprofessional actions to make her an American of the United States as United States citizenship obtained at birth. Also mentioned was this false allegation about Harris in candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Delineated next is why both Kamala Harris and earlier reported presidential candidates and/or possible presidential candidates were not constitutionally ineligible to run. These political events did and did not resemble in a lot of ways the events occurring in the 1880s when white women increasingly ran for president. In a nutshell, after the Civil War and through the early 1880s, political party reports increasingly mentioned these gender proto-discord belief-based hypothetical presidency ineligibility constitutional concerns. Political party hypothesizes reported that because the Supreme Court in its 7-2 holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford argued that only white males would be eligible for the presidency, then women candidates like Victoria Louisa Carlton alone would be constitutionally eligible to become president of the pseudo-first or actual United States. Also, political party reporters included a ton of Man Defenses or masculist opposition in their articles written to defend the misogynist party hypothetical mentioners.

8. Conclusion

VIII. Conclusion – Character, Absence, and Imagination

In June 2020, Rumor Control published a report where 46 percent of its interviewees characterized the GOP activists who engaged in claims that Kamala Harris could not serve as President as "celebrity-seekers" or "liars" who sought "cheap attention." A majority of the Rumor Control panel framed their actions as those of partisans who "will do and say anything to make their party look better than the other side." The evidence of GOP groups deploying the racial natural-birth and dual-citizenship arguments underscores the need to reframe these "birther" challenges through a lens of American white imagination rather than a dichotomous "logic" of the birther-nonbirther label. The elitist-identity crisis model of birtherism repeatedly treats the phenomenon as either an "epistemic crisis" or as a depiction of racism, demagoguery, and conspiracy theory. This logic is arguably more reductive and less-discriminating than the "thermioparadigm" in one of the more elitist birther books under study. This book uses the second law of thermodynamics to describe disconcerting moments of racial integration within its dehumanizing and biological smoky city lights narrative.

The minute details of the Dred Scott James G. Blaine argument may seem esoteric, but they have significant and chilling implications for twenty-first-century American political society. GOP voices for the full story of Dred Scott weave appeals to the racist judicial precedent into a narrative of "justice" and "jusmocracy." By adapting history without doing so, this agitprop is turning back the clock to a time that they claim was struck by a show, it's a president, who, there is "good evidence" to support the "technical argument" against its legalization. These GOP voices were dualists in their reliance on "authentic" texts and exclusions regarding "our set" and that of the "dangers" from 2021. Even a select few modern Republicans knew full well that they were deploying the Dred Scott Decision, they might argue, they simply did not care.

8.1. Implications for American Politics and Society

This essay has set forth evidence suggesting that claims challenging Kamala Harris's eligibility for the presidency are fake and are being engineered to suggest that the African-Jamaican-Indian American woman who has spent her life in numerous public service jobs - a Caucasian sheriff has praised as having a "double-barreled barrel, pointed at bigotry and injustice" - has been somehow un-American and so ineligible for the office of the presidency. And these claims (issued by at least 42 Republican, Local, State, and National GOP Officials in 18 US States) rely on white racist custom meted out to the 1860 and 1861 Dred Scott Decision. The natural reading of the prose in these papers makes the point in two ways: first, by daily comparing Kamala Harris to Land in 1860 Missouri - their "home," and second, by naming Vice President Harris "Kamala Harris," without the "ounce" of respect accorded US officials, a custom also meted out to Frederick Douglass. Could a nonofficial, one claimant argued, not have a first name?

The conclusion might be shaped in two ways. First, and despite a broad oppositional social movement and a Democratic Party that from top to bottom took Kamala Harris's eligibility for granted - and one able to refer to contemporary vice presidential eligibility claims certified by the 2016 Republican Party as "false" if not "bogus" - the eligibility claims are able to pose a significant problem for us. Second, the exclusion from the presidency sought by these candidates is not simply a marker of their white racism, but the intractable racism of the United States. White racism is not only a part of the political landscape. It marks the nation's God Complex. According to tradition, the first act of the nation was to send armies, among other things, against the title dullest white man of a body of Africans-born-in-America as two territory holders who "may venture or settle" where they "will." The intractable white racism behind the eligibility challenges suggests that the terrain of change in our lifetime lies in the slow and relentless transformation of the United States itself, a transformation that white people in this country have consistently and consistently resisted using its most egregiously murderous means.