A question on the minds of pollsters for months has been whether presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would pull votes from Donald Trump or Joe Biden in the 2024 election. RFK Jr. answered that question himself when he announced that his vice-presidential running mate is a far-left communist named Nicole Shanahan. There’s no possible way a Trump supporter could vote for RFK now. That means that the Democrat Party suddenly has its knives out for Kennedy and his running mate, and they are already digging up dirt on Shanahan. Like the fact that she might not be eligible to run for vice president.
When he announced Shanahan was his running mate, Kennedy described her as “a daughter of immigrants.” That caused some of the people at the DNC and the Biden campaign to perk their ears up immediately.
Don’t forget, the Democrats were the original “birthers”, and they are vicious about it. Republicans were not the ones who originally pointed out that Barack Obama was a homosexual who was born in Kenya. That was Hillary Clinton.
When it became clear that Hillary was losing to Obama in the 2008 Democrat primary, her campaign unearthed all the dirt that Obama was not a natural born US citizen and was therefore ineligible to be president. Obama also turned around and tried to use the strategy against John McCain that year, since McCain had been born on a military base in Panama. That strategy didn’t work, obviously, because the people who are really running the country these days just ignore the Constitution when they feel like it.
Since RFK Jr. and Shanahan now represent a very real threat to Joe Biden’s election chances, Shanahan is going to get the birther treatment.
According to Shanahan’s own origin story, as she has recounted it to reporters, her mother was a Chinese immigrant who “had only been in the United States for two years when I was born.” She says that her mother did not speak any English and that she worked as a maid so they could survive. That’s a problem for Shanahan’s eligibility to run for vice president.
If her mother had only been in the US as a legal immigrant for two years at the time of her birth, she (the mother) would not have been eligible for US citizenship for three more years. Under the rules of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, she would have been required to be able to read, write, and speak English to become a US citizen as well.
Both the president and vice president must be “natural born Citizens” under Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution. While the Founding Fathers never defined the term, most constitutional scholars believe the intention was for presidents and vice presidents to have a strong allegiance to America, not only through birth but also through having parents who were already American citizens.
Shanahan’s dad was an American, but it sounds like her mother was not at the time of her birth, and it’s unclear if the two ever got married. Americans have been arguing over the term “natural born Citizen” for years now, especially as increasing numbers of foreigners are running to rule over us. For example, neither Nikki Haley nor Vivek Ramaswamy should have been allowed to run in the Republican primary against Donald Trump. Both of them are technically anchor babies and not natural born citizens.
The Supreme Court has never been asked to weigh in on defining the term. With Joe Biden’s election chances looking thinner by the day, however, don’t be surprised if the DNC steps in with a lawsuit challenging Nicole Shanahan’s eligibility.