Kamala’s Upbringing Would Have Been Quite Troubling to America’s Founders

Barack Hussein Obama infamously pronounced upon winning the election that he planned to “fundamentally transform America.”  The statement is inapposite to President Donald Trump’s vision to “make America great again.” We know to which statement Kamala Harris most identifies. The differing views of America may well be rooted in their varied upbringings, something America’s Founders were quite concerned about when drafting the Constitution.

America’s Founders placed strict requirements in the Constitution to be President to ensure a President’s allegiance to the Constitution and the nation. The President of the United States heads the Executive Branch, is in charge of enforcing the nation’s laws, and is the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military. Imagine the significance of such a position, and the importance of loyalty and fidelity, just a handful of years after having defeated the British military and gaining independence. 

The Founders created two requirements for presidents and vice presidents unique to those positions.  First, unlike any other position, the President must be a “natural born citizen.”  Second, the President must have resided in the U.S. for at least 14 years.

Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has definitively defined what “natural born citizen” means when it comes to qualifying for being President. A genuine dispute remains whether simply being born in the U.S. is sufficient, or whether one must be born to parents who are U.S. citizens, or at least one of whom is.  Depending on the interpretation, Obama may not have qualified, and Harris certainly would not qualify. Considering the Founders concern about the loyalty to the U.S. of the new Commander in Chief coming off the Revolutionary War, it seems odd that they would intend to permit, in one hypothetical, a person born of two British citizens while visiting the U.S. in the late 1790s who then returned to Britain, provided simply that this person have lived in the U.S. for fourteen years prior to running.

Regardless of whether Harris qualifies, the point is that the Founders were concerned about the birth and upbringing of the President and Commander and for particular reasons.  Their concerns were summarized well by former State Governmental Affairs Council Director and author Paul Hollrah who has written extensively on the issue: 

The Founders rightly understood that the most influential factor in a child’s upbringing is the parenting he/she receives as a child, and that the cultural, philosophical, political, and religious influence of a child’s parents fundamentally establishes the direction of his/her future conduct and intellectual development.  Accordingly, what the Founders feared most, and what caused them to limit access to the presidency only to the “natural born,” was the concern that a future president… during his formative years and during the years in which he was developing intellectually… would be exposed to an environment in which he would come to reject the values and the principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution.  In other words, what Hamilton and Jay were saying is that no person who had been exposed to an environment in which they could have been unduly influenced by foreign parentage, owing allegiance to a foreign government or ideology, should ever serve as president or vice president of the United States.

Trump was born in Queens.  His father was born in the Bronx. He was raised in New York. His mother was born in Scotland. Both were U.S. citizens when Trump was born.

Obama was born in Hawaii, the most recent state to join the nation.  He was the first President to be born outside the continental United States.  Only one President before him had even been born outside the eastern or midwestern parts of the country (Nixon). His father was born in Kenya.  His parents met while, interestingly, learning Russian together in 1960 at the University of Hawaii.  His father went back to Kenya in 1964 and wrote about socialism.  He was never a U.S. citizen. Obama’s stepfather was Indonesian, and he was raised in Indonesia from ages six to eleven before returning to Hawaii where he finished high school.

Interestingly, Kamala Harris shares a similar upbringing to Obama, and similar views of America.  She was born in Oakland in the 1960’s.  She was raised in Berkeley, before moving to Montreal, Canada at the age of 12.  She lived there through high school.  Her father was born in Jamaica and her mother in India. Like Barack’s parents, they met while in college, in this case Berkeley. Both were visiting the U.S. under student visas.  They were both Berkeley political activists (some would say radicals). Neither was a citizen at the time of her birth. It is not known if her mother is a citizen today. It appears her father became a citizen many years later.

It should have come as no surprise, based upon his upbringing, that Obama would conduct himself as President as one who seemed more concerned about the affairs of the globe than of the United States, acting more as President of the World.  He kicked off his presidency with the infamous “Apology Tour,” letting the world know that as President, he will be thinking more of them and less of the United States. Most rightly categorize him as a “globalist,” not a nationalist. He was likely the first U.S. president with such a mindset. 

He also was raised with no love or reverence for the U.S. Constitution.  He notably lamented at one time that the Constitution contains only “negative liberties” i.e. those things the government was not permitted to do. This makes the “redistribution of wealth,” more difficult, he explained.  To people like Obama, Harris, and Bernie Sanders, healthcare, housing, and food are “fundamental rights” which the government must provide.  Socialist countries embrace this. For America’s Founders, such mandates go far beyond the proper role of government, which they did not trust and wanted as limited and local as possible.

Kamala’s embrace of a political system antithetical to that put in place by our Founders is also not surprising given her upbringing.  Her support for socialism is well-documented, from backing the Green New Deal to Medicare for all and the end of private insurance to her infamous statement and tweet that “equity” means “we all end up at the same place,” i.e. equality of outcomes. This is a socialist/communist concept, in line with “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Regardless of your individual merit, you get the same reward. 

The Founders’ focus was on the freedom of the individual to live the life he or she chooses with limited interference by government. And government was to be checked and kept small because they believed that power was naturally corrupting (See the level of corruption in socialist countries around the world for evidence they were correct). Kamala wants the government to be used to ensure all individuals “end up in the same place.”  Only an upbringing such as hers could lead to such a viewpoint.

Trump won the nomination and the election in 2016 primarily because he tapped into what concerned people about Obama. “Make America Great Again” calls for going back to the old days when the President’s focus was on making the U.S. great, not the welfare of other countries. His “America First” agenda was a direct rebuke of Obama’s globalist view. And Trump famously told foreign leaders that he was putting the U.S.’s interests first, just as they should put their own country’s interests first.  After four years of Biden-Harris, this message is resonating once again.

It is not clear whether the Founders would have disqualified Harris as a candidate for President. It is quite clear, however, that for all of these reasons her candidacy would have been quite disconcerting.