Article IV Section 1 Clause 1:
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.
Hawaii cannot ask Arizona to prove its need to see the documents. Full faith and credit requires Hawaii to comply.
It's the second sentence that intrigues me.
And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
If I'm reading this right, Congress could in effect define Natural Born Citizen itself by establishing the documents that it accepts as proof of qualifying for President.
This could get interesting.
Congress could pass a law that says that candidates for President must provide proof of natural-born citizenship. Such proof will consist of all of the following:
1. The candidates original hospital long-form birth certificate.
2. Each parent's original hospital long-form birth certificate, OR, US Naturalization certificate.
That should pass Constitutional muster unless someone challenges the need for the parents' documents. If that happens, the requirement for the candidate's birth document would remain.
Congress can fix this without the Court.
-PJ
Yes, they can, and the HHS inspector general’s report says that they not only CAN but also SHOULD. It would be worth everybody’s time to read that report. It’s at http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-07-99-00570.pdf
Kind of a central point of that report/recommendation is that birth certificates were never meant for determining eligibility for various benefits or positions. States can and should require more than just a birth certificate to verify eligibility. Even if the birth certificate is genuine (according to that report half of the state registrars said somebody within the vital records system had engaged in birth certificate fraud) - but especially if there are any signs of tampering. And EVERY document known to exist for Obama has tell-tale signs of tampering, as I noted in the last post I posted before this.
Read the report; everybody should read the report. It’s long but worth it.
And it should also be noted that to this point the HDOH has actually disclosed nothing official that even claims to confirm that Obama was born in Hawaii, except a deceptive, carefully-worded announcement by HDOH Director Fukino in July 2009 - which Deputy AG Jill Nagamine then claimed was based on the birth index, which I have proven on my blog to contain legally non-valid records. We know it was carefully-worded because when asked to clarify what was meant, Janice Okubo said she could not stray from that wording AT ALL.
Obama already voted for a law in 2005 that establishes a formal protocol by which states verifying the birth records to other states. This is what Arizona is asking for and what Hawaii is refusing to provide. Their lack of cooperation is very telling.
Twentieth Amendment, Section 3 already does this. In this instance, Congress simply ignored their duty to uphold the Constitution.