The Honolulu Star-Advertiser has proposed a novel solution to those seeking verification of Barack Obama’s birth in Hawaii. They’ve suggested putting the President’s original long-form birth certificate on public display and charging admission. They wrote:
Whether or not anyone thinks that will work, another strategy might raise a lot more money for the state’s hungry coffers: Have the original placed under glass, and then charge a fat fee for someone to view it — in person, just like the Book of Kells in Dublin.
I like it. Maybe Obama would like to make some money for his home state. It would make Birthers put their money where their mouths are. Take the pilgrimage to the Aloha State and buy a ticket.
Of course it would still be called a fake,
Of course, the Book of Kells isn’t a private record for a living person, so it is entirely different…
Different in what way? What is your point?
I would bet a dollar to a doughnut that not one of them would spend their hard earned cash to go there and find out they are wrong because the last thing they want to know is the truth, and they’re not going to pay their money for the truth they don’t want
Of course they aren’t going to spend their own cash. That’s what the PayPal buttons on all of the birther websites are for. 😀
For people who like to fashion themselves as patriots in the mold of the Founders, very few of them have shown themselves to be willing to do much more than rant from behind keyboards.
Not sure why they think this would work – even if George Washington himself, along with Jesus Christ, vouched for the authenticity of the document, they’d say it was forged.
Or, if accepted, they’d say that the certificate proves he’s not natural born since it lists a non-citizen father.
(I have often wondered about the doublethink where the same people insist they want the birth certificate because they want to see if he has a non-citizen father…when he freely admits having such! It’s like arguing in court that you want proof of something despite your opponent being willing to stipulate it to you. At least the ones that say “Kenya!” have a reason to want it…the Vattelists don’t need it at all!)
What would be amusing would be watching Borderraven lumber off the plane in Honolulu and then promptly stroke out once he realized that most of the people around him weren’t white.
> the Vattelists don’t need it at all
No birther “needs” it. They’re not interested in the truth, they’ll just keep asking for more documents in the desperate hope that somehow, somewhere there is something “dirty” that would affect his chances at re-election.
They still believe there is a “smoking gun” somewhere, such as a totally different father (which they hope to be able to spin either into a “he lied about everything” broad attack or a more sinister “yeah, his father was American, but a devout Muslim Marxist” or suchlike), alien doctor or transgender mother or I-dunno-what.
Funny thing is that those who actually believe that would swap a birther H-bomb (legal ineligiblity) for a birther fluffball (a black-sheep parent with little smear potential). And they don’t even realize it.
> very few of them have shown themselves to be willing to do much more than rant from behind keyboards
And happy about it we should be. We don’t need a gun-totin’ birther heading for Washington to “put the issue to rest”. Remember, as always, one looney is enough (as we’ve experienced in Germany 20 years ago when people laid fire to immigrants’ homes).
That is exactly what Orly is trying to do. She goes around the country to gun shows, trying to incite a lone wolf.
Ariz. lawmakers don’t vote on citizenship bill
The bill’s sponsors say the goal is to force a court to rule that a child born in the U.S. is a citizen only if either parent is a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant.
PHOENIX — The Arizona lawmaker who proposed a challenge to automatic U.S. citizenship for children of illegal immigrants called off a scheduled vote on his measure Monday because he didn’t have enough votes to get it out of committee.
But Republican Sen. Ron Gould of Lake Havasu City said he doesn’t believe his bill is dead. Calling off a vote in committee doesn’t prevent lawmakers from bringing up their proposals for a vote again.
Gould hopes the measure would prompt a court interpretation on an element of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to people born in the U.S. who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of this country. Supporters of the bill the amendment doesn’t apply to the children of illegal immigrants because such families don’t owe sole allegiance to the U.S.
The bill’s sponsors say the goal is to force a court to rule that a child born in the U.S. is a citizen only if either parent is a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant. Similar proposals have been introduced by lawmakers in Indiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma and South Dakota. The South Dakota measure was rejected by a committee Monday.
An accompanying proposal is an interstate compact that defines who is a U.S. citizen and asks states to issue separate birth certificates for those who are U.S. citizens and those who are not. Such a compact would have to be approved by Congress, but they do not require the president’s signature.
Opponents of the bill — and constitutional scholars — predict such state efforts will be declared unconstitutional. Opponents say the proposal is mean-spirited toward immigrants and won’t make a dent in the state’s immigration woes.
The Arizona Senate judiciary committee heard three hours of testimony from legal scholars, immigrant rights activists and business lobbyists on Monday.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41462336/ns/us_news-life#
What is up with Arizon passing all these bills just to have them struck down in court? The state has a billion dollar deficit, but their legislators keep passing bills that anyone with a passing knowledge of law could tell them will never make it past the courts.
From the MSNBC article
I’m curious, how does one get to be a law professor, opinine on Constitutional law and make such an outrageous lie…?
We start with WKA, (Supreme Court) follow up with Ankeny (State) and the whole range of the rest of the legal rulings…….
Quite simple….he also has political asperations (ran for California Attny Gen. as a Republican), and when pandering to the base, it’s ok to say a white lie, if it’s what they really want to hear.
Well, Eastman is an idiot. He cherry-picks a few quotes out of context and essentially tries re-writes the amendment. Anyway, the Arizona law appears to try to distinguish itself from Wong Kim Ark. The holding of Wong Kim Ark was dealing with legal, resident aliens. Hence, the bill I saw tries to exclude illegal or non-resident aliens. There was dicta in Plyler v. Doe stating Wong Kim Ark should apply to resident, illegal aliens, but they will argue that such is just dicta. Still, there is nothing in the language or the history of the adoption of the clause that would allow an honest court to distinguish illegal or non-resident aliens but we’ve seen the court do worse.
Isn’t there some UN requirement that there be no stateless persons?
Well I sent the good purfesser a nice email asking if his comment had been taken out of context or wrongly attributed considering WKA, Ankeny et-al.
I wonder if I will get a reply….so exciting.
No. There is a Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, but there are many UN members, the US included, that are not parties.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does state that everyone has a right to a nationality, but this does not amount to the creation of enforceable rights in every country. (Additionally, the ability of anyone to enforce their right to have a nationality would not affect the handful of cases where people are stateless by choice.)
Cases of statelessness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness#Cases_of_statelessness
“A slightly tragicomic portrayal of this condition is the film “The Terminal” (2004), in which a man is forced to live in an airport due to his unrecognized citizenship status (his homeland had a military coup while he was in transit and the US government refused to recognize its new government). This story is said to be inspired in part by the real-life story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who spent almost two decades in the Charles de Gaulle Airport, originally due to conflicts with French law (he refused to claim being an Iranian refugee) plus also the fact he was not welcome in his countries of origin (Iran and Belgium) nor his destination (the United Kingdom). He was eventually granted and served with French immigration documents, but subsequently refused to leave the building.”
I think the draft of the Arizona law had a provision for statelessness, but I can’t find it at the moment.
That’s important in Orly’s case.
The UK’s current nationality law could well be used as a model for some of these bills.
When the British Nationality Act 1981 came into force in 1983, the UK departed with its tradition of acquisition of citizenship by jus soli that had long been the law. It went even further than the bills being proposed in several states and said that someone born in the UK henceforth to two foreign parents would not acquire British citizenship unless at least one parent held settled status (permanent residence) at the time of the birth.
As there are cases where foreign parents without settled status in the UK would be unable to transmit their citizenship, an important proviso was included. All children who would otherwise not be entitled to any nationality at birth would become British.
Of course, whereas the the aforementioned provisions of the British Nationality Act 1981 can be used as a model for a silly bill, they cannot be a model for a statute that is meant to be upheld by the courts. Whereas the main principle of the British constitution is Parliamentary sovereignty, the US Constitution entrenches jus soli and this cannot be changed absent a constitutional amendment.