By Joseph Farah
Posted: June 16, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
© 2009
Since I began my quixotic campaign to uncover Barack Obama's birth certificate, many have asked me about the president's possible motives for hiding it with such tenacity and diligence.
I think there are many plausible motives:
Perhaps something in that birth certificate, if it indeed exists, would contradict assertions Obama has made about his life's story. These might even involve his true parental heritage. Without a real birth certificate, no one really knows who his parents were. So it is ridiculous even to speculate about whether citizenship could be conferred upon him by his mother, when we don't know for sure who his mother is.
Perhaps it reveals a foreign birth, as Hawaii allowed for in 1961 while still issuing the "certification of live birth" we have seen posted on his website.
Or perhaps it will show just what Obama has claimed all along – a birth in Hawaii to two officially non-citizen parents, for the purpose of establishing "natural born citizenship" under the Constitution.
What do I mean by that last possibility?
Well, as you know, in 2008, the Senate of the United States held hearings to determine if one of the presidential candidates fulfilled the requirement of being a "natural born citizen." It wasn't Barack Obama. It was John McCain, who was born on a U.S. military base overseas to two U.S. citizens.
On April 10 of last year, two senators, both Democrats, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, introduced a resolution into upper house expressing a sense of the Senate that McCain was indeed a "natural born citizen."
It's interesting what Leahy had to say on the subject: "Because he was born to American citizens (emphasis added), there is no doubt in my mind that Senator McCain is a natural born citizen. I expect that this will be a unanimous resolution of the U.S. Senate."
And, indeed it was. It was also, interestingly, the only such hearing held by the Congress on the subject of "natural born citizenship" and its application to the 2008 presidential race. Why was that interesting? Because everyone involved in this process knew – or should have known – that the life story told by Barack Obama would raise far more doubts about his eligibility than McCain's.
Notice Leahy did not say one parent citizen would qualify a child for "natural born citizenship." He indicted it would take two to tango.
He did so again at a Judiciary Committee hearing April 3, when he asked then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, a former federal judge, if he had any doubts about McCain's eligibility to serve as president.
"My assumption and my understanding is that if you are born of American parents, you are naturally a natural-born American citizen," Chertoff responded – again underlining the fact that both parents would need to be citizens.
And what did Leahy say to that? "That is mine, too."
By the way, Obama voted for this resolution, so he obviously agrees with the definition of what constitutes a "natural born citizen" – the offspring of two U.S. citizens. [CONTINUE READING]
RELATED STORY:
Obama claims to have a real birth certificate ~ By Joseph Farah
Posts
Let me try this one out on people who insist that both parents must be US citizens for someone to be eligible to be president.
ReplyDeleteAre you requiring PROOF that both parents were US citizens at the time of birth?
If no, then why demand proof of even Obama's place of birth?
So let's assume yes.
Then what does this require a future president to show to prove that she or he had parents who were citizens? The birth certificate or naturalization papers of both parents, of course.
Could it be just their passports? No because they are granted to naturalized citizens. But naturalized parents are okay under this theory, you may reply. No, because you have to prove that they were naturalized before the time of birth.
So, for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that both were allegedly born in the USA.
To get their birth certificates, what does that require? Well, a mother may be 30 years old or less when the child is born, but a father could be 60 or more years old. The candidate can run for the office at 35, but she or he could be as old as 70 or more.
So, it may be that to find the candidate's father's birth certificate, the candidate has to find a birth certificate that is 100 or 120 or even more years old.
This may be difficult, if not impossible.
Now, we are assuming in this that the father on the birth certificate of the candidate is really the father of the candidate. But is that necessarily the case?
Frankly, no. I've seen some research that shows that in about 20% of cases where DNA is used to prove paternity, the father that was thought to be the father really wasn't. That's probably too high for an estimate of the situation in the general population, but say 10%.
Would you accept the father on the birth certificate is really the father with a 10% chance of error? Some would say no.
If no, then the task of proving that the father was a US citizen gets even tougher. The candidate has to take a DNA test and provide DNA samples of the man he thinks was his father (dig them up if necessary) and then have the DNA tested and then do the birth certificate search 100 years back or more to prove that the father was really a citizen.
And, you know, I wouldn't mind doing all this, if the Constitution had really said "you have to have two US parents to be eligible to be president." But it didn't. It didn't say it in the document itself or in the Federalist Papers, and John Jay said "a natural born citizen," but he didn't say that that meant two US parents. As a lawyer, he was probably referring to British common law, in which a natural born subject is merely someone born in Britain.