Republican group cites notorious Dred Scott ruling as reason Kamala Harris can’t be president

The National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) has cited the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which stated that enslaved people weren’t citizens, to argue that Vice President Kamala Harris is ineligible to run for president according to the Constitution.

The group also challenged the right of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley to appear on Republican primary ballots.

The Republican group’s platform and policy document noted that “The Constitutional qualifications of Presidential eligibility” states that “No person except a natural born Citizen, shall be eligible, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The same document included former President Donald Trump’s running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance on a list of preferred candidates for vice president.

The document and the citing of the Dred Scott decision were initially noted by lawyer Andrew Fleischman on X, formerly Twitter. 

The group goes on to argue in the document that a natural-born citizen has to be born in the US to parents who are citizens when the child is born, pointing to the thinking of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

“An originalist and strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution in the Scalia and Thomas tradition, as well as precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases… have found that a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ is defined as a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child’s birth,” the document states.

The group then cites six cases including Dred Scott v Sandford. The 1857 ruling came a few years before the 1861 outbreak of the US Civil War over the