The whole birther thing made me wonder who among us could stand up to that level of scrutiny? Its funny in an insane sort of way because by their reasoning every single person is a potential manchurian candidate or android replica.
I mean there are people who fall through the cracks so to speak to the level they don’t have birth certificates:
Its obvious they are part of an outlandish and overly complicated plot, no doubt they will run for office in the years to come.
It’s actually a bit scary to realize how vulnerable nearly all of us are to “SLAPP” lawsuits. (Strategic Lawsuits Against Prominent Persons.) If Orly Taitz decided that you were her “special friend” and started filing suit after suit after suit against you, could you survive it? It costs money to respond to a lawsuit, even an insane one.
It’s the “chilling effect” of the cliché; remember the guy in England who said rude things about Chiropractic, and, even though he won his suit, had to pay incredible sums for his defense. Fred Phelps specializes in suing the hell out of people who have little ability to respond without being disproportionately harmed.
(Would we even dare to have this discussion using our real names and home addresses?)
Well, John McCain, obviously. I never heard a peep from them about him, so they’re evidently satisfied with the credentials of his birth.
Apart from him, I’m not sure.
Even though he was born in Panama and technically was not a natural born citizen at birth. (The status of being a citizen since birth was established retroactively).
Most readers of this forum probably already know this, but I thought I’m mention it just in case.
Not knowing the details of his parents or the law at the time of his birth, however both of his parents were US citizens so a few details being satisfied he qualified for a CRBA which does make him a natural born citizen.
Being born to a US citizen confers citizenship at birth, therefore natural born.
That is assumed but has not yet been definitively established.
For all intents and purposes it means someone who is a US citizen by birth, as opposed to by naturalization. You can disagree with it but thats how it is interpreted in the modern USA.
Here is a long and exhaustive article on the issue.
No, it doesn’t. It is not that simple.
At the present time, if both a child’s parents are US citizens, and the child is not born in the US, then the child is a US citizen if at least one of the parents has had residency in the US at any time. Summer vacations to visit grandparents don’t count as residency, but a semester at college apparently would.
If one parent is a US citizen and the other is not, and the child is not born in the US, then the child is a US citizen if the citizen parent has lived in the US for at least five years, including at least two after his or her fourteenth birthday.
But that’s now. The residency requirements were longer when Obama was born - the only part of the argument the birthers get right - and when McCain was born the rules were not well-defined at all. The citizenship status of children born to two US citizens but not in US territory was, at the time, unclear. The law was later changed and those born in McCain’s situation were declared to be citizens, but someone with an ax to grind could make a case that McCain doesn’t qualify as being natural-born, since his citizenship at birth was unclear.
Personally, I would find that pretty silly. I’d argue that the point of the “natural-born citizen” requirement was to ensure that the President had a real connection to and background in the United States, not to eliminate people with an obvious connection to the country who maybe weren’t, technically, citizens at birth due to a bureaucratic snafu. But somebody who wanted to make trouble would find the raw materials there.
That’s all very well but I’ve got a piece of paper from the US State Department, handed to me at the US Embassy in London when I registered my daughter’s birth three years ago, that agrees with me. Basically it just caveats the issue by pointing out that it has not been tested in a court of law.
As I said certain conditions must be met, but with TWO US citizen parents what are the chances at least one would not meet the residency requirement.
Random anecdote; my late father was born in a small town in east Texas in 1925 and did not get a birth certificate. When WWII came–he turned 18 in July 1943-- he wanted to become a Navy pilot, but his age could not be verified because of no birth certificate. As he told it, they had to get a letter from someone (besides his mother) who could verify when he was born. The letter didn’t come in time and he didn’t get into flight school. (And frankly, stayed pissed about it for pretty much the rest of his life.)
People sometimes forget that only a generation or two ago, we were not awash in information. I sometimes think about how even people my age (I’m 63) only have small, black and white photos of our infancy, but the children of my generation have full-color movies/videos of their births. And, of course, today every activity and thought of one’s life is documented publicly. (If one chooses; I don’t.)
grude, the point being made about McCain is that even though his NBC status was clarified statutorily a posteriori, there was never a concerted effort to challenge the validity thereof. It was just accepted that it was all kosher after minimal explanation without repeated raising of hypotheticals (except in threads like these).
As you state in your own OP, the matter is that Birther “questions” about Obama’s status are made in bad faith because of who he is. Heck, the latest Birther gambit is to claim that a citizen-at-birth is NOT the same as a NBC but that you must also have* both *parents be citizens.
I’m not sure what the OP means by “stand up” to Birther scrutiny. Does it mean afford the legal help to stop them from destroying your life, or does it mean establish that you’re a citizen?
If the former, most people probably could because for most people an Orly Taitz couldn’t hurt you for the simple reason that you have nothing in the pot to be hurt. If there were a Canadian Orly Taitz challenging my claim to have been born in Kingston, Ontario, I’m not sure why I would care. It’s doubtful her short and angry-judge-lecture-filled trip through the legal system would have any effect on my life because there’s not a lot in my life that hinges on whether or not I’m naturalized or Canadian by birth, and there is almost nobody who gives a flying crap. I quite honestly don’t know if my employer actually has documented evidence that I am a citizen of Canada; I don’t think they ever thought to ask. So why would I expend any substantial amount of money defending myself from a claim that would go nowhere and do nothing?
The second question is a bit more interesting in that I think, by definition, you cannot defeat a Birther argument. Birthers have two a priori truths:
Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States of America.
Anything that can be observed by a human being supports #1.
The Birther position, by definition, cannot be refuted, because all refutation is evidence of the Birther position. So a conversation concerning my citizenship would proceed exactly according to the way it has concerning Barack Obama:
ORLY: Rick was not born in Canada.
ME: Sure I was.
ORLY: Show us the birth certificate.
ME: Here you go.
ORLY: This a short form birth certificate, it doesn’t count.
ME: Um, really? It counted for everyone else. Okay, here’s my baptismal certificate.
ORLY: Doesn’t prove you were born here.
ME: Okay, dammit, I went down to the hospital and stood around for eight hours, here’s the original.
ORLY: This is fake.
ME: Here is the newspaper accouncement of my birth printed in the local paper.
ORLY: This was phoned in to the newspaper from your real place of birth in Sweden.
ME: Here are my passport, my driver’s license, eyewitness accounts from people who saw me as an infant in the hospital, and a notarized statement from the world’s leading speech analyst demonstrating that my accent proves I was raised in Canada.
ORLY: Issued based on your fake birth certificate, irrelevant, faked, you moved here from Sweden immediately after birth.
How could I win this argument? I couldn’t against Orly. I could convince a third party, but not a Birther.
It was a source of much amusement in my household when my mom finally found my birth certificate this year - it’s a “Certificate of Live Birth”, you know.
My birth certificate does not reflect my legal name. When my mom remarried(I was 7), my stepdad adopted me.
McCain’s problem was not the citizenship or residency of his parents. His problem was that an oversight in the law did not make children born in Panama (and only Panama) United States citizens under any circumstances.
At the time he was born in 1936, the law bestowing citizenship on children born outside the United States had the phrase “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” The Panama Canal Zone was unique in that it was out of the limits of the United States, but not out of the jurisdiction of the United States.
Congress realized its error and in 1937 inserted a special section into the law that applied only to Panama. This section in fact made it easier to become a citizen if you were born in Panama than anywhere else in the world and it granted retroactive citizenship to children who met the requirements going back to 1904.
McCain was not a citizen when he was born. He became a citizen by an act of Congress that granted him and others retroactive citizenship. Whether this makes him a “natural born” citizen is unknown.
And this was the point of my thread, if by some bizarre circumstance a random person became the target of birthers they would not be able to prove their citizenship no matter what going by birther logic.
Nothing matters, everything is a forgery and a fraud, no authority is sufficient to authenticate them. Any material evidence of correct age is part of the plan, any testimony false, evidence sufficient to put someone in prison for life would not satisfy a birther.
As are the birth certificates for all of my three children.
My wife’s birth certificate looks official, but there’s a typo on it. There’s a notarized affadavit signed by her mother correcting the typo, but that just opens up a whole can o’mess. Who knows what other sloppiness or deliberate misrepresentation is there?
On the other hand, I not only have a certified copy of my “certificate of birth” but I also have a certified photostat (you can feel the raised seal and everything) of the page from the county registrar’s book with my original birth record.
I guess that proves which of us is a REAL American.
Even with video, you couldn’t.
“Here’s a video of my birth.”
“Fake. Hospitals don’t look any different in Sweden. The voices en were probably dubbed in.”
“The obstetrician is a Canadian citizen. Look at the video, and look at these newspaper articles in the Globe and Mail. Same person.”
“Fake. How can you tell for up that the same person when he/she is wearing a mask?”
“Right after I was born, a nurse held up that day’s Globe and Mail.”
“Could have been printed in Sweden. They can do that now.”
I had to order a new copy of DH’s for some family tree stuff, and except for the date and saying Washington instead of Hawaii, it looks exactly like the one Obama originally released during the election.
I had no idea I’d married a Kenyan Muslim terrorist! 