Donald Trump has billions of dollars and a very large megaphone.
I am eternally grateful to him for standing up boldly and demanding to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate, as I have been doing for the last two and a half years.
He probably doesn’t need my help, but I offer it here anyway.
He’s right – and the gals on “The View” and Lisa Myers at NBC are dead wrong.
Obama has not revealed his long-form birth certificate to anyone. And people who work in the press should be the first to recognize that rather than making excuses for the occupant of the White House to continue his stonewalling crusade.
It’s a matter of constitutional integrity. It’s a matter of national security.
This charade has gone on much too long – aided and abetted by people like Lisa Myers and Bill O’Reilly.
In a so-called “investigative report” on the “Today” show, Myers tried to trump Trump, by showing, of all things, a document all of America has seen countless times – a “certification of live birth” ostensibly from the state of Hawaii. It is not, of course, Obama’s birth certificate – but a digital short-form document created in 2007. Like Trump said, it is not signed by any doctor or official. It is not a contemporaneous eyewitness document. And it is not reliable as proof of Obama’s birth as he has described.
But it’s even worse that that.
If, indeed, that document is a true and accurate representation of Obama’s actual birth, it should be considered prima facie evidence that he is not constitutionally eligible to be president.
Why?
Because Obama’s parents were in no position to confer “natural born citizenship” upon him regardless of where he may have been born.
Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was a Kenyan visiting student in the U.S. in August 1961. Stanley Ann Dunham was a citizen of the U.S. but too young under the law to confer even ordinary citizenship upon her offspring in August 1961.
And there’s another problem with that document. Hawaii had a long history of handing out those “short-form” certifications of live birth to parents and grandparents as registrations of births that actually took place elsewhere – including other countries.
The Constitution requires presidents and vice presidents to be “natural born citizens” because the founders wanted to ensure no one with divided loyalties could ever become president. Baby Obama would have been born, under his own scenario, as a subject of the United Kingdom, which presided over its Kenyan colony at that time.
That’s why I want to see the birth certificate – the real birth certificate.
I don’t trust Obama to tell the truth about anything. His autobiography is full of falsehoods.
I am supremely confident that his long-form birth certificate will tell a much different story than the short-form impostor he has offered. If it didn’t, there would be no reason for him to conceal it under this kind of pressure and public curiosity.
This is where Donald Trump goes off the rails.
He seems to think it’s a matter of where Obama was born. No, it’s really a matter of who his parents were.
In 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain faced major media scrutiny over the question of constitutional eligibility. Everyone knew McCain was not born in the U.S. So the U.S. Senate held hearings and demanded to see McCain’s long-form birth certificate, which he willingly produced.
The Senate inspected the document and determined that McCain was eligible because both his parents were U.S. citizens, passing a non-binding resolution sponsored by, among others, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
In other words, even if Obama was born in the United States, which has yet to be demonstrated with hard, reliable evidence, it’s still, at best, an open question as to whether he meets the constitutional test. There were no hearings on the issue – non-binding or otherwise. There were no court tests.
Here’s how Supreme Court Justice Morrison Waite spelled this out in 1875 in Minor v. Happersett: “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.”
Here is how Rep. John Bingham explained “natural born citizenship” on the floor of the House March 9, 1866: “I find no fault with the introductory clause [S 61 Bill], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen. …”
Of course, by that definition, Obama would not be eligible.
Then there is the little matter of Obama’s apparent adoption by Ann Dunham’s husband Lolo Soetoro. In most states and jurisdictions in the U.S., when an adoption takes place, the original birth certificate is changed to reflect the adoptive father – in this case, an Indonesian, who promptly moved his stepson to his native country where he lived and was schooled for a number of years.
If that is the case, the certification of live birth we’ve all seen – long before the “investigative” efforts of Lisa Myers – would be something of a fraudulent document.
So, don’t be discouraged, Mr. Trump. You are doing God’s work here. You’re right, and most of my colleagues in the news media are wrong. We have not seen the most essential and primary evidence needed to make a determination as to Barack Obama or Barry Soetoro’s constitutional eligibility to serve in the White House.
Amazingly enough, we still don’t know who this man is.
However, one thing the last two and a half years have established: He certainly has divided loyalties when it comes to the country he supposedly serves.
