Just the Facts, Ed

From HotAir, Illustration by Chris Muir of Day by Day.

This comic pair of images was posted within hours of President Obama quipping about his birth certificate being plastered to his head. (courtesy Sad Hill News)

Blogger of the year Ed Morrissey starts today’s “Obamateurism of the Day” with the following statement:

I’m actually sympathetic to Barack Obama when it comes to the Birthers. 

Let’s take a look at his reasons why, and compare that to just the facts. 

First, it is a fact that the Constitution specifies eligibility requirements for the President (and Vice-President) in Article II Section 1, and it specifies in Section 3 of the 20th Amendment that

Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

Congress has a Constitutional duty to determine whether or not the President and Vice President have qualified to hold the office. 

I.E., the Legislative branch has a Constitutional duty and obligation to qualify the candidates/holders of the top two offices in the Executive branch.

It is a fact that Constitution requires that the President and Vice President be natural born citizens.

It is a fact that many of the founders read and referenced the works of Emmerich de Vattel.  It is a fact that Emmerich de Vattel’s work “THE LAW OF NATIONS OR PRINCIPLES OF THE LAW OF NATURE APPLIED TO THE CONDUCT AND AFFAIRS OF NATIONS AND SOVEREIGNS” was checked out from the New York Society Library by George Washington. It is a fact that that work says:

natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens

It is a fact that the “birth narrative” presented by Barack Hussein Obama does not meet this definition of “natural born citizen”.  Not because of birth location, but because his father was not a U.S. Citizen. 

It is a fact that section 1 of the 14th Amendment begins:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Birth on U.S. soil may make one a citizen of the United States, but it does not make one a natural born citizen unless their parents (both) were United States citizens at the time of the child’s birth. 

It is a fact that the 14th Amendment does not define “natural born citizen”.

It is a fact that two different U.S. Supreme Court decisions that came after the ratification of the 14th Amendment said that the Constitution does not define “natural born citizen”.  So for anyone to just assume that a person born a citizen under the 14th Amendment is automatically a “natural born citizen” is to willfully overlook the doubts that the Supreme Court itself acknowledged:

The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts.

–  Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874)

The Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, does NOT say who shall be natural born citizens.  The 14th Amendment does not contradict or change the definition of natural born citizen as defined by Natural Law and explained by Vattel.

The Congress debated whether or not John McCain should be considered a natural born citizen.  The congress should have had (but did not have) the same debate over whether Barack Hussein Obama should be considered a natural born citizen.  If they didn’t want to do so, they should have asked the Supreme Court to do so.  The Supreme Court has never ruled on/clarified the meaning of the the Constitutional phrase “natural born citizen”.  This is a legitimate question, and is not a “birther” issue, it’s a Constitutional issue.

But even if Ed thinks it’s just a “birther” issue, let’s look at what he believes, vs. the facts.

Ed says:

I’m actually sympathetic to Barack Obama when it comes to the Birthers. The President published a perfectly acceptable certification of live birth, with which any American can get a passport, a driver’s license, or any other kind of official documentation he or she needs, in response to an unrelated question during the 2008 campaign.

The fact is:

What Obama “published” was a URL with some .JPG images. That is NOT “a perfectly acceptable certification of live birth”. No American can use what Obama “published”, i.e. a URL, to get a passport, a driver’s license, or any other kind of official documentation. You must produce the hard copy document, not a URL, for inspection. The fact is that neither Barack Hussein Obama II nor Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. have ever provided any hard copy document to members of Congress to inspect and perform their constitutional duty under Section 3 of the 20th Amendment.

—

Ed says:

Furthermore, the state of Hawaii has twice confirmed that Obama was born in Honolulu

The fact is:

The state of Hawaii has NEVER released a news release saying “Obama was born in Honolulu”. Dr. Fukino’s first news release did not even say “Obama was born in Hawaii”, although that didn’t stop the Associated Press and Governor Lingle from falsely claiming it did. CNN edited Governor Lingle’s words to conceal her lie and create their own lie. And Ed obviously believes the lie that claimed the first news release said things that it absolutely did not say.

Dr. Fukino did not release a news release saying “Obama was born in Hawaii” until AFTER THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES SAID SO FIRST!

Dr. Fukino has never verified that Obama’s “birth narrative” is true.

At different points in time, the media reported two different Honolulu hospitals as the location of Obama’s birth. They can’t both be true. Without documentary evidence, why should we blindly believe that either is true?

—

Ed says:

and contemporaneous birth announcements also provide confirmation.

The fact is:

The microfilm for the “contemporaneous birth announcements” appears to have been tampered with. And newspaper birth announcements are not acceptable documentation for an I-9 form, so why should we be asked to accept them for a President?

—

Ed says:

Whether one likes Obama or not, he was clearly born in the US and therefore eligible for office.

The fact is:

There have been no vital records released from the State of Hawaii for Barack Hussein Obama. And regardless of where Obama was born, the assumption that “born in the US and therefore eligible for office” completely overlooks the question of whether his alien father, who Obama admits passed British subjecthood on to him at birth, making Obama a natural born subject of Great Britain, makes him other than a natural born citizen of the United States and therefore ineligible to hold the office. Would our founders have wanted a natural born subject of Great Britain, born after the ratification of the Constitution, to be eligible to be Commander-in-Chief?

—

Ed says:

However, the birther contretemps suits Obama, because it allows the media to dismiss all of his critics by painting them with the Birther brush (which is why so many of us are frustrated and disgusted by the small coterie of people who continue to indulge it). Obama could put an end to it at any time by simply releasing his original birth certificate from Hawaii, which only he can authorize. Why doesn’t he do it? Because the Birther movement suits his purposes.

The fact is:

Obama himself said:

The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.

If we take him at his word, then the only reason he does not want to release his vital records from the State of Hawaii is because he has something to hide.

Obama has never released his vital records from the State of Hawaii to Congress. Congress has a Constitutional duty to ask for them and inspect them.

—

Ed says:

Er, he hasn’t spent any time with a birth certificate plastered to his forehead, and purposefully so. We understand why, and it makes some strategic sense in the most cynical manner possible. It allows Obama to nurture that microscopic collection of fools to distract attention from his own failures. But if one plays that game, then one gives up the right to whine about it later.

The fact is:

Obama hasn’t spent any time with his hard copy birth certificate plastered ANYWHERE. At a minimum, it should be sent under seal directly from the State of Hawaii to Congress.

—

Several links to back up the statements I made above can be found in the earlier post:

Obama’s Eligibility: It’s a Matter of Faith

—

UPDATE:

Ed says:

Update: As Twitter follower RobRob points out, this was also a non-sequitur response to a question about Obama’s faith. He’s trying a little too hard with the Birther dodge these days.

Ed is right about this being a “Birther dodge”, but there’s more here than Ed realizes. Ed may not realize that Barack Hussein Obama took Shahada. Barack knows what that means to the Muslim world, and he’s hoping that the Christian and Jewish world doesn’t figure it out.

Obama is trying to piggy-back off the success he has had in getting people like Ed Morrissey to laugh at “birthers”, and Obama is now trying to get those same people to laugh at those who point out that Obama, with his own mouth, voluntarily confessed the Islamic confession of faith, in Arabic. By doing so, he was telling the Muslim world that he is a Muslim, while he simultaneously tells the Christian world, “I am a Christian”. You can’t be both at the same time. And only one of the two religions condones lying.