Posted on 03/11/2011 4:37:00 PM PST by Red Steel
LINCOLN — President Obama won an electoral vote from Nebraska in 2008 but couldn’t seek re-election in the state under a bill heard by lawmakers Thursday.
Legislative Bill 654 would bar Obama’s name from appearing on the Nebraska ballot because his father was not a U.S. citizen.
The measure requires presidential and vice presidential candidates to prove they are eligible for the nation’s highest office before they could be candidates in Nebraska.
LB 654 is among a dozen pieces of legislation introduced around the country in response to questions about Obama’s citizenship.
State Sen. Mark Christensen of Imperial, the bill’s introducer, said LB 654 would “instill confidence in the election process by assuring voters that candidates for the highest offices in the land have been properly vetted by government officials.
“No such process currently exists on the federal or state level,” he said in a statement of intent.
But LB 654 goes further than many other proposals and further than current interpretations of what the Constitution requires.
The U.S. Constitution requires the president to be a “natural-born citizen,” as well as 35 years old and a 14-year U.S. resident.
Christensen’s bill requires that candidates produce documents showing they are U.S. citizens by birth and that both of their parents were U.S. citizens at the time of the candidate’s birth.
Nellie Ristvedt of Crete supported the bill, citing legal sources that define “natural born” as being born on U.S. soil to citizen parents.
By that definition, she said neither GOP candidate John McCain nor Obama were qualifed as candidates. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, although to U.S. citizens.
Ristvedt said “natural born” hasn’t been clearly defined by the courts, which have rejected repeated challenges of Obama’s citizenship.
She said LB 654 would provide the basis for a lawsuit to clarify the term.
“The issue is the rule of law,” she said.
But Sen. Scott Price of Omaha questioned why Nebraska should pass a law so it could be challenged in court, thus forcing the state to bear the expense of fighting a lawsuit.
Richard Hedrick of Lincoln opposed the bill, saying it was unnecessary and designed to pacify the so-called “birthers.”
LB 654 would require presidential candidates to provide certified copies of their birth certificates, a key demand of those who believe Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
The belief persists although Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed that Obama was born in that state and his birth certificate has been made public.
Nebraska is one of at least 12 states where legislation has been introduced this year seeking more documentation of a president’s citizenship. In Iowa, GOP Sen. Kent Sorenson introduced a measure last week to require anyone running for president to produce a birth certificate.
Measures in Montana, Arizona and New Hampshire have failed. Proposals are pending in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Connecticut, Indiana, Tennessee, Georgia and Maine.
Nebraska’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee took no immediate action on the bill.
It is unlikely to find the votes to advance, although Christensen’s legislative aide, Dan Wiles, said the senator would be willing to delay its implementation to the 2016 election to avoid the Obama controversy.
Wiles said the senator doesn’t believe candidates need to have been born to U.S. citizens, but he included that requirement in the bill to provoke discussion.
This article is a minor improvement over the regular schlock that gets posted about the eligibility issue. Did you attend the hearing?
Yes, I testified at the hearing.
Every step the right direction is at least something. I think there’s a lot of pressure against any movement the right direction.
The LJS article butchered the NBC issue but is being forced to make at least some corrections.
Please provide links.
Are the legal sources obscure 18th century legal dictionaries?
It strikes me that the term has never been defined in American law, nor in case law, so essentially you have an interpretation - based on "original intent". And as we know many of the most learned legal scholars and high ranking judges believe that original intent is only one of many factors one uses to interpret the law, along with current community standards, evolution of our understanding of justice, penumbras and emmanations, European and Native American legal traditions and other factors.
So, it's asking a lot for people to toss out a sitting President (or forbid him from running again) based on this hard adherence to a defintion.
After all we violate huge swaths of the Constitution every day: Social Security is clealy unconstitutional based on the Founders Intent. So is Foreign Aid. So is maintaining a standing Army.
Do you favor abolishment of the standing Army?
Most conservatives, and even many birthers are not ever consistent, so it does start to look like an obsession with one facet of a stone with thousands of facets on it.
As the key or demonstration issue I believe it is a very weak one.
I got no reply, and never hear did hear if he corrected himself, until yesterday. Yesterday morning, he quoted Michelle on this topic, and emphasized it a couple of times. “Don't call me a birther,” he says, “but according to his wife Michelle...” As a guess, probably 10,000 people hear him say this, and he'll probably keep repeating it.
So, the concern is spreading.
The sources I provided were Vattel’s “Law of Nations” and Minor v Happersett.
My point in all of this is that the courts are the proper people to tell us what “natural born citizen” means, and this bill would give the courts a case that they could decide. It should be a win-win for anybody interested in having the courts fulfill their Constitutional role of interpreting the Constitution and applying it to particular cases.
This is basic, basic stuff. If even this basic stuff has to be fought for so hard, it tells us where we’re at as a nation.
There are a lot of Constituitonal issues that I haven’t spoken out on because I have not researched them in depth. This one is Constitutionally a no-brainer. The courts should decide this issue.
My particular interest in this issue is from a “rule of law” perspective - probably because I have observed first-hand how badly the laws and rules have been broken by just about every government entity there is, at local, state, and federal levels - and how law enforcement and courts at every level have turned a deaf ear to all the evidence and pleas for an investigation.
Good for you! Eventually the word gets out. That’s why this issue has grown in spite of the puppet media ridiculing anybody who doubts Obama’s claims.
Abercrombie’s statements were a huge red flag to a lot of people who had thought we were crazy to have doubts. The puppet media took Mike Evans’ claims to have “misspoken” at face value and never bothered to check that he DID claim to speak directly to Abercrombie; he recounted their discussion even, in multiple recordings. And they ignore Abercrombie’s statements to the Star Advertiser columnist who then printed the gist of what he had said. He was saying there were people very serious about Obama’s birth certificate not just because of politics but because it could be dangerous in the next election - because he would have trouble if state eligibility bills passed.
The puppet media blew off all that, but the people who were struck by it have not forgotten it. It simmers below the surface.
“BHO said it himself : “The only people that don’t want to disclose the truth, are people with something to hide.”
BHO posting a PICTURE on a website { That includes inviting Factcheck to come and take more PICTURES ( When Hawaiian statute prevents Factcheck from authenticating the alleged document and HDOH can’t disclose information from documents in the vaults by that same statute, and the newspaper announcements do not give a place of birth ! } is not disclosing the truth whilst also fighting to keep plaintiffs from discovering in a court proceeding what exactly BHO’s status is ....... Is not disclosing the truth !”
A Georgia Republican has decided to tweak his presidential birth-certificate bill to delay its implementation until after the 2012 election, the second such bill to be recently changed in the wake of political pressure.
“Issues have been raised,” state Rep. Mark Hatfield, R-Waycross told Reality Check Radio last week (via Jim Galloway). “A lot of people are saying it’s a political bill. So in order to allay concerns about the bill’s potential political nature, I have proposed a substitute, which would move the effective date of this bill to July 1 of 2013.”
What would this itty bitty law hurt ?
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