By John White

President Biden was asked recently what he would do if he and Kamala Harris have a fundamental disagreement based on a moral principle. Biden said he’d do what he’d told President Obama earlier: “I’ll develop some disease and say I have to resign.”

Whether Biden was serious or not, his remark raises an important constitutional issue. If he were to resign or die in office, is Harris legally qualified to succeed him?

The answer is: No, she is not.

The Constitution requires the president be a “natural born citizen,” meaning someone who is born in this country of parents who are U.S. citizens. That legal term is different from “citizen,” as shown in Articles 1, 3, and 4 of the Constitution, which say senators and representatives can just be citizens while the president must be a natural born citizen. All other officers of the federal government can be born abroad to U.S. citizens or can even be naturalized citizens themselves.

Why the distinction?

The Framers wanted to assure absolute allegiance, undivided loyalty, and wholehearted attachment to the United States in the officeholder of the presidency. So they used “natural born citizen,” a common legal term defined by Emer de Vattel’s 1758 The Law of Nations. Only the president is required to be a natural born citizen, so there is no question that he or she has competing loyalty, either by law or by personal inclination. That is the constitutional standard.

Alan Treski, author of The Marshall Report’s article on Vattel’s concept of “Natural Born Citizen” in our Constitution, points out that Vattel states in The Law of Nations, Book I, Ch. XIX, at §§ 212-217, the following: "§ 212: Natural-born citizens are those born in the country of parents who are citizens.“ He emphasizes that "parents” and “citizens” are the plural form. In other words, someone qualifies as a “natural born citizen” only if his or her parents are both citizens of the same nation.

According to “Stan” Stanfield in The New American, during the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton, a delegate to the proceedings, tried to get the birth qualification for the office of the presidency to be merely a “citizen,” but his proposal was specifically turned down in favor of the more restrictive requirement of needing to have been born both on the soil and of citizen parents.

The question of legitimacy for the officeholder of the presidency arose during Obama’s run for office. It is well known as the Birth Certificate Controversy and, sometimes, the Birther Conspiracy Theory.

Whatever the name, the questions surrounding it apply to all candidates for the office of the presidency, including Harris.

Various websites say Harris could become president because she was born and raised in Oakland, California. “Multiple fact-checkers, including AP, PolitiFact and Snopes indeed confirmed that” about her birth, the U.S. Sun states. It further notes of her parents: “Donald Harris is Jamaican and Shymala Gopalan Harris was Indian-American-Canadian.” (Donald is still alive; Shymala died in 2009. She was naturalized as a U.S. citizen some years after she began her education here. Before that she lived in Canada.)

And that is the reason Harris is disqualified to become president. Even though she is American by birth, her parents were not. She is not a natural born citizen.

If the Biden-Harris scenario should come to pass, what are the consequences?

If Harris is not constitutionally qualified to serve as president and commander-in-chief, every action taken by her while she occupies the White House will be invalid.

During the Obama birth certificate dispute, Attorney Gary Kreep of the U.S. Justice Foundation said, “If he cannot legally serve as President, every law passed by Congress will be null and void because the Constitution clearly requires that all laws be signed by the President…and, without a legally elected and sworn in President in office, that becomes an impossibility." Kreep added that Obama could be charged with federal crimes, such as making false statements about his passport and impersonating a U.S. citizen, and also with crimes in a number of states where he falsely represented that he was qualified to run for president, as could those who helped him perpetrate the fraud.

The integrity of the Constitution must be upheld. It is fundamental to the rule of law in America. Harris’ eligibility can be determined very quickly and easily by showing that both her parents were naturalized citizens.