All Republicans ever do is recycle their greatest hits, so of course birtherism is back! Via Media Matters:
It’s 2024, so everyone reading this knows exactly what the deal is with birthers. We know that the Constitution requires anyone running for president to be a “natural born Citizen,” and that Vice President Kamala Harris, having been born in Oakland, California, surely qualifies.
Birtherism must be understood not as a wild conspiracy theory about where Kamala Harris and Barack Obama were born, but rather as a slur against their status as Americans. There are no good-faith legal questions about whether or not Kamala Harris is a natural born citizen, just like there were no good-faith questions about where Barack Obama’s mother gave birth to him. We all know the deal. MAGA pundits are pushing birtherism against Harris now — like they did to Obama before her — in order to signal to their audience that people like Harris and Obama are somehow less American. Regardless of your politics, these claims deserve nothing more than absolute contempt.
The biggest name currently spreading this is Trump associate Tom Fitton. You may remember that Fitton, the Judicial Watch president who is not a lawyer, reportedly advised former President Donald Trump to keep secretive government documents that the former president had stored on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. (Ironically, in 2009 — years before Trump picked up birtherism and used it to help take over GOP politics — Fitton was one of the few right-wing voices who spoke dismissively about birtherism against Obama, saying he had not “seen any credible evidence Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen eligible for the presidency.”)
