Nikki Haley, the daughter of two non-citizens, is patently ineligible to serve as President or Vice President under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution
The following analysis is a detailed response to critiques of an article I wrote earlier this month that garnered national attention, and was even Truthed by President Trump, shedding light on Nikki Haley’s ineligibility to serve as President or Vice President under the Constitution. My article was published originally on my Substack and American Greatness, and was titled “The Constitution Absolutely Prohibits Nikki Haley From Being President Or Vice President.”
As A Threshold Matter, Nikki Haley, The Daughter Of Two Non-Citizens, Must Provie Proof That Her Parents Were Lawful Residents When She Was Born
As we head into the New Hampshire Republican primary, the presidential field has consolidated around three major candidates: Donald Trump, the frontrunner by wide margins, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis. With Vivek Ramaswamy’s distant fourth place finish in Iowa and subsequent endorsement of the 45th President, Trump’s edge in New Hampshire looks insurmountable. Recent polling suggests that he commands an outright majority of all New Hampshire GOP voters, meaning that even if all the remaining candidates dropped out and rallied around a single challenger to Trump, their collective effort would still fail – without, perhaps, outside help from Democrats and Independents. With recent reports that Ron DeSantis’ War Room has been dissolved, and all the staff being laid off in the aftermath of Iowa’s disaster, it seems to have proven true Nikki Haley’s post-Iowa declaration that the Republican Primary has now become “a two person race.”
That is, unless the Constitution has any say.
If the only two remaining viable candidates are, in fact, Trump and Haley, it should actually just be a one-person race. That is because of the two, Donald Trump is the only candidate still running who qualifies as a natural-born citizen under the Constitution’s Eligibility Clause in Article II, Section 1. Unlike Nikki Haley, President Trump’s two parents were both citizens at the time he was born on American soil, in Queens, New York, in 1946. His father was a citizen by birthright, his mother was naturalized – and completed the naturalization process years before Trump’s birth. Therefore, he meets the Constitutional standard for eligibility.
Nikki Haley, on the other hand, is a much different story. Nikki Haley was born “Nimarata Randhawa” in Bamberg, South Carolina, in 1972. But at the time of her birth, neither one of her parents were American citizens. As recently unearthed by investigative journalist Laura Loomer, both “Haley’s parents were Indian immigrants who did not become U.S. citizens until after her birth in 1972. Her father, Ajit Randhawa, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1978, Haley’s office said. Her mother, Raj Randhawa, became a U.S. citizen in 2003, a year before Haley won a seat in the S.C. House.”
Loomer’s report further states her inability to confirm whether Haley’s parents actually ever went through the naturalization process to receive citizenship. This, on its own, is quite worrying. But even if one or both of Haley’s parents ultimately did become naturalized citizens subsequent to Haley’s birth, Haley has never demonstrated proof that her parents were lawful residents at the time she was born.
Critically, nobody seems to have answers as to whether Ajit and Raj Randhawa were lawfully permitted to reside in the United States at the time of Haley’s birth at all! Even if they were, what was the status of their lawful residence? Were they here on student visas? Some kind of employment visa? Whatever might have been the 1972-equivalent of an H-1B, something else? Nobody has answers to these critical questions.
Unless proven otherwise, one cannot be at fault for asking – based on the alarmingly scant information available on a leading presidential candidate – whether Haley’s parents were unlawfully residing as illegal aliens? This would make Nikki Haley a so-called “anchor baby,” flouting the letter and spirit of the Constitution in the most obnoxious way possible.
The onus of proof of citizenship must be placed squarely on Haley’s campaign. If the question ever gets litigated, any objective court should make a determination of the lawfulness of Haley’s parent’s residency status based on the laws of 1972, and not attempt to make equivocations between the generally understood meaning of citizenship some fifty years ago, and its commonly understood meaning today: one that recklessly (and suicidally) confers citizenship upon anyone who makes it to these shores, including the anchor babies of illegal aliens. The Biden regime’s interpretation of citizenship would have been abhorrent to the framers of the Constitution, all our Founding Fathers, and nearly every generation in American history up until five minutes ago, who toiled long and hard for the privileges and immunities of citizenship. Simply because that longstanding precedent is ignored and mocked with impunity today does not make it right, nor does it abnegate the urgency to enforce our laws. In fact, the opposite is true: we should be enforcing our laws more vigilantly than ever, given the direness of the situation.
Article II, Section 1 Of The Constitution Requires That In Order To Meet The High Constitutional Threshold For Eligibility, The Qualifier’s Parents Must Have Both Been Citizens At The Time Of His Or Her Birth
American citizenship is a privilege, not a right. This was so long and well understood by our Founding Fathers that it became simple common sense, not something they contemplated would ever need to be spelled out in painstaking detail.
All that said, however, the relevant question is one of Presidential Eligibility, not birthright citizenship – and that term’s constitutional relationship to “natural-born” citizenship. In short, citizenship and the question of birthright, although an important issue on its own, especially today with our unprecedented illegal alien crisis, is an entirely separate question from Presidential Eligibility, which is the rightful domain of Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution, not the Fourteenth Amendment.