Davos in the Desert, a civic organization in Arizona, held a daylong virtual seminar last week addressing how Democrats are destroying democracy.
The event, titled Defending Democracy, featured numerous national experts, including GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman.
The legal scholar spoke about whether Kamala Harris is ineligible to be president due to the natural-born citizen requirement of the 14th Amendment, whether that amendment applies to illegal immigrants, and how the Democrats are scheming to invoke its Section 3 to prevent Trump from taking office if he wins the presidential election.
Eastman (pictured here) said a pivotal case regarding U.S. citizenship was U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, where the Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that a Chinese man whose parents were Chinese was a U.S. citizen since he was born in the U.S. “This court decision has often been misconstrued as … [anybody] born here on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen, no matter the circumstances of their parents, no matter whether they’re here temporarily or permanently, no matter whether they’re here legally or illegally, no matter here whether they came, legally and then overstate the visa and where the head of time of the birth,” Eastman said.
He added, “Because of their status when they were born, or, more precisely, their parents’ status, has nothing to do with whether they were born on U.S. soil. The dispute is whether they were born subject to the jurisdiction. And that phrase is ambiguous, and we should acknowledge that ambiguity when trying to explore what the people that drafted it meant. The 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause provides that all persons born … on the U.S. soil, part or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. I emphasize that word ‘and’ in the middle because it’s critically important. There are two elements required for constitutional citizenship, or 14th Amendment citizenship — birthright citizenship if you will — you gotta be born on United States soil and you have to be subject to the jurisdiction.”
Eastman noted how Congress discussed, while considering the adoption of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, that the law did not establish citizenship for Native Americans. “The primary sponsor of the bill in the Senate and the drafter of the language in the Senate both responded that no, they would not be [citizens] because they owe their allegiance to a different sovereign, their tribes, and therefore they are not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States. And this clause will therefore not mandate that they have citizenship,” he said.
The 1866 Civil Rights Act specifically excluded Native Americans. “That all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States,” it said.
However, the 14th Amendment was adopted two years later in 1868 and dropped the provision excluding Native Americans.
“That’s critical with the 1866 Civil Rights Act that this provision was intended to constitutionalize that language — made it a little bit more clear, all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power are citizens of the United States,” Eastman said. “The reason that language was changed is not to create a broader grant of citizenship, as some people explained, but because it did not extend to Native Americans, who were not foreign powers, but domestic powers. And so they got rid of the language in the Civil Rights Act — it created some confusion about that, and just said, now persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction are citizens.”
Eastman said interpretation of the law began changing in the 1960s.
“It was the immigration laws in this country in 1965, and that changed a whole lot of things, including requirements for passport eligibility, for which you have to be a citizen. And the form for passport eligibility used to say if you were born on U.S. soil, you had to describe the status of your parents at birth in order to apply for the passport. Why would that be necessary? If you were merely being born here it meant that you were — it was necessary because at that point, the passport office understood that subject to the jurisdiction meant subject to the complete jurisdiction, and if your parents were here merely as temporary visitors that did not mean automatic citizenship.”
Eastman added, “The form changed in 1967 in the wake of the 1965 immigration amendment; asking the status of the parents at birth was dropped. I don’t know why it was dropped. We don’t find anything in the record describing why it was dropped.”
Discussing illegal immigrants, Eastman said, “Those who are born here to parents who are not lawfully present in the United States are not automatic citizens under the 14th Amendment, because their parents retain their allegiance to whichever country of origin they have come here from, come here illegally from, whether Mexico or Russia or China or wherever, or France or Great Britain or wherever. If they’re here illegally, they retain that allegiance. One exception is those that are refugees, and are no longer having any allegiance to their home country.”
In recent years, the courts have decided that “anchor babies,” the children born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrants, are U.S. citizens.
Also, Eastman discussed how the Democrats intend to weaponize the 14th Amendment against Trump.
“Shifting gears to a provision of the 14th Amendment, Section 3. This is the one that disqualified the opposition leaders after the Civil War from holding office unless Congress [allowed them. This] basically gave them a reprieve to claim that what occurred on January 6 was the equivalent of the Civil War and insurrection, and therefore that anybody in favor of election challenges, and therefore was somehow caught up in this grand insurrection conspiracy, is ineligible for offices for federal government or state government,” he said.
“They tried to do that by excluding President Trump from the ballot in Colorado and the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously said ‘Colorado, you can’t do that,’ but it did say how this clause gets interpreted, first and foremost, a question for Congress,” he continued. “If Congress wants to read the Section for January 6 as an insurrection and describe it as such, the people that were involved in it would open a door for mischief in Congress that the court should not have opened, but deciding insurrection is within the meaning of the 14th Amendment is, I think, utter nonsense.”
Eastman said regarding Harris’s eligibility for president (and vice president), “I didn’t know at the time what the status of her parents was, but it seemed there was enough information out there that it seemed worth raising questions about. I subsequently have been informed by a number of people that her parents were here on temporary student visas. …[and she overstayed her visa] If that’s true, that means that Kamala’s mother … was now here unlawfully. In other words, she was in no different a circumstance, and both than folks that had entered unlawfully in the first place.”
Eastman said that Harris was born more than 60 days after her mother’s education in the U.S. ended.
“The conditions of those student visas were that they expired 60 days after the conclusion of the studies, and that meant, if you stayed longer than the 60 days, you were now no longer here lawfully, preferred pursuant to that student visa, but you had overstayed the visa, and you were now here unlawfully,” the legal scholar said.
He said her Jamaican father was in the U.S. under the same circumstances.
Although there were similar objections to former President Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president, some coming from Trump and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the challenges went nowhere in the courts.
During his talk, Smith blasted the Democrats’ disdain for election laws in Arizona.
“Our legislatures should not be able to restrict our rights to full and unrestricted transparency in our elections,” he said. “But that’s exactly what they’ve done. … In Arizona’s 2022 election, Maricopa County, fourth largest county in the country, failed to conduct statutorily required Logic & Accuracy testing. They falsely certified the data, and then they immediately installed and used uncertified software on those categories — that results are, you know, everybody’s aware of, they had rampant failures that would sabotage machinery at their vote centers. … And yet, no criminal referral, despite the fact they violated again black letter law in the state of Arizona.”
He discussed the recent sentencing of former Mesa County Clerk & Recorder Tina Peters.
“In Colorado, Tina Peters was just convicted and sentenced [to prison],” he said. “Among the absurd counts clerk Peters was convicted of … were violating the rules of the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State himself — and this falls under selective enforcement — has repeatedly violated internal rules, and I know because I provided sworn data in accordance with our state law to the secretary or to the attorney general and to multiple district attorneys, and they have done nothing, even though the statute in Colorado requires them.”
“It says shall investigate … they have refused. I could cite hundreds of counts of the secretary of state in Colorado violating her own rules in state and federal statutes, storing election records of thousands of Colorado voting system components, installing contested, uncertified software, also [falsely] certifying voting system compliance,” he said.
Other topics addressed in the seminar included lawfare, J6 political prisoners, and contamination of the judiciary. The full seminar can be purchased for $25.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on X / Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris.
