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This Wikipedia article is informative, however obviously biased: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born_citizen" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Keith, I think the point you missed, which I clearly did not make effectively, is that a person born on foreign soil is not a natural born citizen of the United States, regardless of the citizenship status of his parents. He may be a naturalized citizen, or otherwise a US Citizen, distinct from a natural born citizen.

Keith B wrote:

brentkhack wrote:That would automatically make Jr. a citizen too, no matter who the father was or where he was from.

It would not make him a "NATURAL BORN CITIZEN".

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE.

And of course Wikipedia,the encyclopedia written by whomever pleases to write it on the Internet, is a very reliable source of the most thoroughly vetted information. Or maybe it is not.

jimlongley wrote: Why, instead, don't you prove that no Hawaiian official has ever said that bambam was born in Hawaii?

It is fundamentally impossible to prove that anything doesn't exist or did not happen.

However it should be absolutely possible to prove that some affirmative thing did indeed happen, or at least to agree that no such proof exists.

By the way, I don't have a dog in this hunt. It is my personal opinion that BHO does not have any valid proof that he was born in the USA but the majority of people have successfully painted anyone who thinks it matters as some kind of fringe conspiracy theorists. Winning in the courts is irrelevant if you have already conceded defeat in the court of public opinion and unfortunately that is where we are right now.

FWIW all of these people who are not so steadfast about the requirements for the president to be a natural born citizen are not likely to agree to any hardline interpretation of the 2A either. By hardline I mean, it means what it says. Remember when we start throwing out anything in the constitution, it becomes a slippery slope, you might as well throw the whole thing out. If there is no way to bring a lawsuit or some other remedy to address whatever challenge there might be to a candidate's eligibility, then there is no teeth or meaning to the requirement to the begin with. The law is not a meaningful law if there is no punishment or verdict to be determined.

Either way it's too late to do anything about it.

Kythas wrote: The fact is, anyone born on US soil is a US citizen - hence, all the illegals who come here from Mexico to have anchor babies. Hawaii was US soil at the time Obama was born - therefore, he is a natural born US citizen and meets the Constitutional requirements to hold the office of President.

Without dealing with the other errors in your post, the charge is not that Obama, being born in Hawaii, is somehow not a natural born citizen. The charge is that Obama was not in fact born in Hawaii, but in Kenya, to non-American parents. Obama's relatives have made this claim (and yet either been silenced or retracted the claim) and one person who could have validated the claim independent of any other proof died a short while ago in Hawaii.

And sorry, Jim, but this is not a ruse thought up by Obama. In fact this whole debate is certainly not any benefit to Obama. And the fact that so many people even here on this forum cannot understand the difference between a Natural Born citizen and a Naturalized Citizen is why I say that the public at large, including probably the majority of this forum's membership, would see this distinction as splitting hairs or some wacky technicality which is why it was not pursued seriously by the mainstream of Obama's political enemies before the election.

And by the way, the reason Reagan et. al. did not have to produce proof of their citizenship is because they did not have a grandmother who reported that they were present at their birth in a foreign country to foreign parents. The fact is that this is a valid question that Obama refuses to answer. Now I don't blame him for refusing to answer, but I do blame the courts for not compelling him to answer and I frankly blame the Bush Justice Dept. for not investigating this claim and putting a lid on it when there was a chance. It's not like Bush was trying to preserve some political capital. He was a lame duck. No reason at all not to go vet this accusation that Obama was not born in the USA and either confirm Obama's legitimacy in the election or press charges of election fraud.

LaUser wrote: So, do any of the people who say his birth certificate is flawed have proof of that or are they just spreading rumors and hate because they do not like the fact he got elected.

Obama does not have to put up, the accusers do. Forcing the accused to prove their innocence is not what this country is about.

That was the whole purpose of the subpoena requiring Obama to provide the birth certificate. It is a state document, and it is the necessary and obvious evidence to either confirm or deny the accusation. So yes, the accusers have a valid cause to make an accusation.

But the thing is this is a lawsuit, and not a criminal matter. The state is not bringing charges against Obama. I actually think they should. Unfortunately there is a very flawed history of bringing charges against a sitting president, which is why this matter needed to be resolved prior to the election. There was perfectly valid cause to question Obama's eligibility to become president and it is incumbent on the Justice Department to investigate these questions and bring charges against Obama for election fraud before the election occurs. This lawsuit was brought about a long, long time before Obama was the Democrat nominee. But the DOJ sat on their hands as did the courts all the way up and the reason why is because nobody wanted to go on record as opposing the candidacy of the first viable black presidential candidate over an issue that the general public would perceive as a technicality.

Right2Carry wrote: I wouldn't think it would be a problem for the POTUS to produce his instead of hiding it.

This is the most important point and for all of you who think this is not a legitimate issue I say make the man put up or shut up. If there's nothing to hide, then they wouldn't be hiding it. The fact that it has been so difficult to get the birth certificate issue nailed down invites the speculation that Obama does not have a the legitimate proof that he was a natural born citizen of the USA. If he had it, he sure as heck would have already put this issue to rest by presenting it. Either that or he's a complete fool.

Look, to be fair, GWB was never going to set the world on fire with leadership on the economy. His instinct was to not add more regulation or impediments to business and to make minor suggestions at lowering taxes but he didn't really provide leadership in terms of really reducing spending. The Democrats took control of congress and Bush was not going to spend his dwindling political capital to oppose the Dems spending spree when he had a war to try and win before his time was going to run out and someone without the will to win it was going to inevitably take his place.

There is absolutely no doubt that the economic meltdown has accelerated dramatically since Obama won the election, and especially it has nose-dived since the inauguration. If you can't see that they you are completely blind to reality. But it all started with 9/11, and this country has been on a slow, steady economic decline ever since. It was not just 9/11 that caused it, but that was a definite point of inflection. Eventually the lug nuts got loose enough that the wheels started to fall off, and that's where we are now. Unfortunately for Obama, the wheels were still on, barely, in November 2008. It wouldn't matter if Ronald Reagan were to have time traveled from 1982 to 2008 and run against Obama to victory, whoever was to become the president under these economic conditions was destined to preside over an economic collapse. The Democrats are going to pay the price for this victory.

Kind of like I said before. Sometimes when you win, you really lose. In this case, the Dems may have won the election, but what they have really done is volunteered to take the heat when the economy finishes imploding on their watch. Nobody can fix this now. It's a setup for failure. Couldn't happen to a cleaner, more articulate President.

Well, the citizenship thing is indeed a clear cut issue, either he is a natural born citizen or he is not. However, it is tilting at windmills because there is absolutely no way that the Supreme Court are going to invalidate the election of the first black president over his citizenship status. Nobody in America has the political will to do that. Whomever does will be labeled as a racist and trying to find some minor technicality to throw a black man out of the white house.

This is a case of lose-lose. Either we lose by giving up and concede that Obama doesn't have to prove his citizenship status, or we lose by winning, demonstrating that he is not a natural-born citizen, and then he still doesn't get thrown out of the white house and we all look like a bunch of racists. Better to lose by concession in this case.

The problem, Jim, is that the other presidents you mention were not issued a court order to provide a birth certificate during the time while they were campaigning, and then refused to provide it. Certainly if there was a question of whether Abraham Lincoln was eligible to run for president, and a court heard the argument and ordered him to provide proof, then it would be a valid comparison, and maybe he would not have been able to produce it either. But the fact remains that Obama was not born in the 1800s, he was born in the latter half of the 20th century and if in fact there is a vault birth certificate that could silence the claim that he is ineligible to be president, then he should have provided it. If there is no such proof, then I think it is a perfectly valid, not "weak" as you say, argument. If we can trash the requirements for presidents to be eligible according to the Constitution then what is to prevent provably foreign-born Americans (such as Schwartzenneger) from running?

Look, either we are going to believe and stand by what the Constitution says, or not. Maybe you think birth certificates are not valid means of establishing that one is a natural-born citizen, and I can see your point. But Obama just ignored the court order and did not offer any proof that would silence the critics. The court that ordered Obama to produce the document obviously thought it was a valid request.

The reason that the birth certificate thing is worth pursuing is that it is a black and white provable case based on the law, while all of these dotted-line, gray-area guilt by association things are flimsy and theoretical, and not illegal.

However I think that whoever is president right now doesn't matter. The economy is on the ropes and there is nothing Obama can do to fix it. The efforts of the Democrats in congress will not fix it. Obama and the whole Democrat party will be blamed for it and we will prove it starting in about 20 months and then absolutely put a fork in it in November of 2012. Obama and the Dems controlling the congress during the worst economic situation in a generation is the best thing that could possibly happen for the future of the Republican party. So rather than tilting at windmills, I personally think we need to just sit back and let it implode on its own. It won't be long before the Dems in congress are going to begin to throw Obama under the bus themselves.

Purplehood wrote: As the resident-liberal on this board, I have to take exception to this statement.

Well you are completely wrong. Are you really suggesting somehow Bush rigged the election when he beat John Kerry in 2004? He won by a 3% margin. Even if you gave all of Nader's votes to Kerry, Bush still won decisively. Or are you still sore over Al Gore's failure to complete a selective recount in FL in 2000?

I guess I'm old school, I think the Constitution actually means something and we need to abide by it. Due to his refusal to provide the necessary birth certificate, I do think Obama's election is a fraud. It would be so easy to prove he was a natural born citizen, and yet he simply refuses. If he refuses to comply with this provision of the Constitution it is not likely that he will take the rest of it seriously.

The problem is that the majority of the public, and even those on this board, do not think that this provision of the Constitution has any value or merit. Most people don't even understand the difference between a "Natural Born" citizen and a "Naturalized" citizen. We've been through this many times on this forum but you can't teach someone whose mind is already made up I guess.

In reality, there is no precedent for what to do about a man who is elected president and then later found to have been ineligible. This would be the first time. The natural thing to do is not to make Nancy Pelosi the president. The rational thing to do is throw out the election results, some body of the government would have to appoint an interim President (perhaps even GWB, the last man to fairly win a valid election), and then hold a new special election in which Obama would be ineligible to run.

This birth certificate thing would not be any big deal if Obama had not steadfastly refused to provide it, even when ordered by the court to do so. Now of course, if he were ordered by the court to provide the birth certificate right now, and then he refused, he may be found in contempt of court and that would be an impeachable offense. But if we learned anything in the last decade it should be that the American people have a lot more tolerance for crooked and immoral presidents than they do for impeachment hearings and investigations.

And I will close with this. The last thing you want is for the Republicans to be remembered for trying to impeach the first black president over something the public regards as a minor technicality. Either let Obama ruin the Democrat party by leading it off a cliff, or let the Democrats lead a charge to have him impeached for whatever reason, but really, we have to stay out of this fight.