President Obama’s birth certificate (left) has been certified authentic by the Republican governor of Hawaii. His birth announcement (right) appeared in print in 1961. (PHOTO CREDIT: State of Hawaii)
Hawaii's Republican Gov. Linda Lingle - who campaigned for Sen. John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008 - criticized questions about the president's birth.
In a WABC interview before signing the legislation, Lingle said, "...I had my health director, who is a physician by background, go personally view the birth certificate in the birth records of the Department of Health." Lingle added, " … The president was in fact born at Kapi'olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. And that's just a fact."
"It's been established he was born here," the governor continued. "I can understand why people want to make certain that the constitutional requirement of being a, you know, natural born American citizen … but the question has been asked and answered. And I think just we should all move on now."
To us foreigners, of course, the requirement to be a natural born US citizen seems rather silly to begin with. If, hypothetically, the majority of Americans decided they wanted a foreign-born President, why in democracy should they not be allowed one?
ReplyDeleteWe're free to change that, under our constitution, but it's never happened in over 200 years. So I think the only real answer is that we want our Presidents (and Vice-Presidents) to be natural-born citizens.
ReplyDeleteI've read various reasons why that was originally the case.
How is "natural born citizen" defined?
ReplyDeleteIt isn't I'm not aware of any case law on the question. The general consensus is someone who is a citizen by virtue of having been born in the US (or in a US Territory) rather than a citizen by naturalization. It's entirely unclear if someone born overseas to US citizen parents (and who has a US Consular birth record) qualifies at all.
ReplyDeleteJohn McCain was born on a US Army Base in the Panama Canal Zone. Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona three years before it became a state.
The First Congress passed a law in 1790 passed a measure that did define children of citizens “born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States to be natural born.” Acts of the First Congress are often taken as evidence of the Framer's intent by courts as they were largely the same folks who drafted the Constitution and presumably knew what the Constitution meant.
My new favorite post.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
This was floating around back then too, but they wouldn't accept it. It's not a "birth certificate" but a "certificate of life birth" and that wasn't good enough for the crazies.
ReplyDeletehttp://freedomedium.com/2009/07/birth-certificate-vs-certification-of-live-birth/