Her citizenship is not in doubt (well, by anyone sane), but the law in effect at the time had a requirement that a woman actually have lived in the U.S. for several years in order for American citizenship to be automatically granted to her child. I’m not sure offhand what the point of this requirement was, perhaps to fend off this republic-destroying disaster:
[ul][li]A married couple with a young daughter goes completely mad and rejects freedom and all the blessed virtues of America, and leaves the country.[/li][li]The daughter grows up immersed in some foreign heathen culture and has a child with some foreign heathen man.[/li][li]The child then tries to get into the blessed territory of the United States, claiming citizenship by virtue of his mother’s, but because of the foresight of legislators (praise Jehovah and the Continental Congress), he can be kept at bay and not become a communist infiltrator dedicated to raping every apple pie and bald eagle in sight.[/ul][/li]
…or something like that. As I understand it, if Barack had been born outside the U.S., his mother’s age and situation might have disqualified his claim for citizenship.
The link gives more info that your quote and the post before yours makes the key point.
I quoted only what was needed to answer the question, and provided the link so people could go there if they wanted to read more.
The post above mine and my post are simulposts.
Have you pilfered Sarah Palin’s box of crazy?
No worries. She’s got plenty to spare.
As I understand it, the laws are structured the way they are to prevent generations of “U.S. citizens” being born abroad who have never set foot in the U.S., whose parents have never set foot in the U.S., etc. Even today, a child born to a citizen and a non-citizen doesn’t gain citizenship unless the citizen parent resided in the U.S. for five years, of which two were after the age of fourteen.
Well, I happen to have my actual “Certificate of Live Birth” one of those negative white on black weird copies they made. It’s all creased and old. It’s also worthless, everyone (like the State dept for my passport) demands one of the certificates like Obama has.
Nor does the hospital where I was born have any copies of the original- as is usual, they were transmitted into the County many years later, and the original paper copies were destroyed.
Many Hospitals have gone out of business or destroyed their records after so many years. It’s surprising we have as much on Obama as we have.
However, the Birthers are still crazy. Even if it was proven Obama wasn’t a “Natural Born Citizen” it’s too late now. They’d have to Impeach and Remove him, which ain’t happening.
And the law likely had a codicil for parents who are not yet 21.
One birther claim I’ve heard is that young Barack’s grandparents asked the newspaper to run the announcement. Now, it’s true that some newspapers do allow in-town grandparents to place birth announcements in the paper for the out-of-town births of grandchildren. However, there are still two problems with this argument.
First, the two Honolulu papers have stated that their birth announcements do not come from the families concerned, but from official state records of births in the area, and that this has been their policy since before the 1960s. So if Mr and Mrs Dunham had contacted the paper asking for such an announcement to be placed, they would have been turned down.
Second, those out-of-town birth announcements are pretty easy to spot. The one my parents asked to have placed in their local newspaper at the birth of the elder junior flodnak, for instance, read something like “LASTNAME, flodnak, and fella bilong missus flodnak, a son, at Big Regional Hospital, Trondheim, Norway, on Saturday. Ms Lastname is the daughter of Mom and Dad Lastname, Streetname Drive, Suburban Township.” (Some details have been changed to protect the innocent.) In other words, they indicate the place of birth, and then give the child’s connection to the local area. The announcements in the Honolulu papers for Baby Barack’s birth don’t do that, they just give a local address for his parents.
I’d wager your hospital has a record of your mother’s entire chart, as well as a number of other records showing her admission and discharge (assuming you had a hospital birth). Those people in Medical Records don’t like to throw away anything.
You are getting no argument from me that Officials like Official Documents.
I am speaking to what is persuasive for finding out what actually happened, not what is required to be Official.
It’s not surprising at all to have (or not have) an Official Birth Certificate from 50 years ago. It would also not be surprising for a hosptial Medical Records department (now usually called Health Information Management, or HIMS) to have records from 50 years ago. They might or might not. Things do get tossed on occasion but more often they are carefully saved, and in years gone by paper was transferred to microfiche before it was destroyed. So it’s a simple thing to know and not the stuff of controversy in a conspiracy: either his birth hospital has records from that era, or they do not. These are things like admission registries, separate birth registries, log books of admissions, discharges and procedures, and of course papers related to the actual medical care of a woman giving birth (her hospital chart). It wouldn’t even have to be her actual medical chart; at the time every hospital kept a log book of who came into the hospital, and what it was for, and a log book of every delivery and so on. Because they flow from one day or month or year to the next, they don’t typically get thrown away. In any case, it’s easy to check if they did.
All of those things are much much more persuasive to get at what really happened than is an Official Document, regardless of which other Clerk in another Official Passport Office finds Official. Such an Official document is really a clerk’s summary of information given to them. It carries no particular weight for what is true.
The most cogent theory that I’ve heard is that (assuming that it was fraudulent), the effort to establish his birth in Hawaii was done in order to gain a perceived advantage in any potential custody fight, should Obama’s father have attempted to take him to Kenya. As noted above, because of his mother’s age and years abroad, he may not have automatically qualified otherwise, if (the assumption goes) he was born in Kenya.
Let’s remember that there is a difference between “citizen” and “natural born citizen.” Citizenship is defined by Congress and confers all of the benefits that we ordinarily think of as citizenship. “Natural born citizen” is a term that appears only in the Constitution and applies only to eligibility for President. And nobody has the slightest idea what it means, because there’s never been occasion for a dispute over it.
You’re from New Guinea?
No, silly. Uzbekistan.
Honestly, this one is easy.
I live in Phoenix. If Mrs Cad squeezes out a baby while vacationing in Seattle, would I print the announcement in the Seattle PI or the Arizona Register? I may even print it in the LA Times since I have so many friends and family there.
Like I said, they do not have any such records for me. That particular “Hospital company” has gone out of business.
What records are hospitals required to keep, and for how long?
I know that where I am, in Alberta, doctors and hospitals are only required to keep patient records for ten years (or if for a child, until they are age 18 or for ten years, whichever is longer). After ten years the records do not need to be archived or microfilmed, they can be shredded. Some places might keep the records longer than that, but they are not required to do so.
Once I needed to get a copy of some important records from the hospital where I was born, but luckily I needed them when I was 17. Now that I am 30, they might not have them anymore.
In Illinois, as a practical matter, about 24 years from birth. 21 years to adulthood and a few more to get sued for.
However many–perhaps most–hospitals never throw any records away.
The legal requirement is one thing; what they actually do is another. It’s also a very easy matter to find out if a given hospital has their records for a given year.