At Last , A Real , Legal Birth Certificate

azmastablasta

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("Cue the music from the classic "At Last" by Etta James.) Yes, there you have it, a 100% certified, legal birth certificate. But not zero's. Been a long time since we had a legitimate one for a President. (Pic @ site)

Romney's birth certificate evokes his father's controversy

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON | Tue May 29, 2012 7:30pm EDT

(Reuters) - Finally, there is definitive proof: The presidential candidate was born in the United States, and his father was not.

Yes, Republican Mitt Romney appears eligible to be president, according to a copy of Romney's birth certificate released to Reuters by his campaign. Willard Mitt Romney, the certificate says, was born in Detroit on March 12, 1947.

His mother, Lenore, was born in Utah and his father, former Michigan governor and one-time Republican presidential candidate George Romney, was born in Mexico.

So on a day when real estate and media mogul Donald Trump was trying to help Mitt Romney by stirring up a new round of questions about whether Democratic President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Romney's own birth record became a reminder that in the 1968 presidential campaign, his father had faced his own "birther" controversy.

Back then, George Romney - who died in 1995 - was a moderate who was challenging eventual President Richard Nixon in the Republican primaries.

Records in a George Romney archive at the University of Michigan describe how questions about his eligibility to be president surfaced almost as soon as he began his short-lived campaign.

In many ways, they appear to echo today's complaints that Trump and some other conservative "birthers" have made about Obama while questioning whether Obama - whose father was from Kenya and mother was from Kansas - was born in Hawaii.

In George Romney's case, most of the questions were raised initially by Democrats who cited the Constitution's requirement that only a "natural born citizen" can be president.

As early as February 1967 - a year before the first 1968 presidential primary - some newspapers were raising questions as to whether George Romney's place of birth disqualified him from the presidency.

By May 1967, U.S. congressman Emmanuel Celler, a Democrat who chaired the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, was expressing "serious doubts" about George Romney's eligibility.

The next month, another Democratic congressman inserted a lengthy treatise into the Congressional Record in which a government lawyer - writing in a "personal capacity" - argued that George Romney was ineligible for the White House because he was born outside U.S. territory.

DEJA VU

In what today might seem like deja vu, eminent legal authorities soon were queuing up to argue in favor of George Romney's eligibility.

The New York Law Journal published a lengthy argument by a senior partner from Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Manhattan's elite law firms, arguing that the fact that both of George Romney's parents were U.S. citizens clearly established him as a "natural born citizen" who was eligible to be president.

George Romney himself was unequivocal.

"I am a natural born citizen. My parents were American citizens. I was a citizen at birth," he said, according to a typewritten statement found in his archives.

At one point, the Congressional Research Service - an arm of the Library of Congress that is supposed to provide authoritative but impartial research for elected members - advised that its analysts agreed with George Romney, according to a congressional source.

In a paper in November aimed at clarifying presidential eligibility, the Congressional Research Service declared that the practical, legal meaning of "natural born citizen" would "most likely include" not only anyone born on U.S. soil but anyone born overseas of at least one parent who was a U.S. citizen.

ROMNEY'S DANCE WITH TRUMP

Mitt Romney has tried to avoid getting caught up in Trump's focus on Obama's birthplace.

"Governor Romney has said repeatedly that he believes President Obama was born in the United States," said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to Romney.

However, the presumed Republican nominee has not distanced himself from Trump, creating what some analysts said seems to be a quiet endorsement of Trump's efforts to raise questions about Obama among voters.

Michael Cohen, special counsel to Trump, said that Trump and Romney never talk about issues Trump has raised elsewhere regarding Obama's birth certificate. Instead they talk about jobs, the economy and other matters of public policy.

Asked whether Trump sees any double standard in going after Obama when Romney's father faced similar questions about his presidential eligibility, Cohen told Reuters: "I don't think (Trump) has ever thought about Mitt Romney's father's birth certificate."

Cohen said Trump recently revived the issue of Obama's birthplace because journalists asked him about the issue after a right-wing website published an old blurb for an Obama book that suggested that Obama was born in Kenya. The literary agent who wrote the blurb subsequently said it was written in error.

Cohen said Trump believes "the president of the United States should be the single most transparent human being on this planet. This president lacks that transparency."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/2...E84S1GF20120529
 
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The same issues were raised over John McCain's birth in Panama.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/politics/11mccain.html

Quote:A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue

In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”

The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.

“It’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy,” Professor Chin said. “But this is the constitutional text that we have.”

Several legal experts said that Professor Chin’s analysis was careful and plausible. But they added that nothing was very likely to follow from it.

“No court will get close to it, and everyone else is on board, so there’s a constitutional consensus, the merits of arguments such as this one aside,” said Peter J. Spiro, an authority on the law of citizenship at Temple University.

Mr. McCain has dismissed any suggestion that he does not meet the citizenship test.

In April, the Senate approved a nonbinding resolution declaring that Mr. McCain is eligible to be president. Its sponsors said the nation’s founders would have never intended to deny the presidency to the offspring of military personnel stationed out of the country.

A lawsuit challenging Mr. McCain’s qualifications is pending in the Federal District Court in Concord, N.H.

There are, Professor Chin argued in his analysis, only two ways to become a natural-born citizen. One, specified in the Constitution, is to be born in the United States. The other way is to be covered by a law enacted by Congress at the time of one’s birth.

Professor Chin wrote that simply being born in the Canal Zone did not satisfy the 14th Amendment, which says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

A series of early-20th-century decisions known as the Insular Cases, he wrote, ruled that unincorporated territories acquired by the United States were not part of the nation for constitutional purposes. The Insular Cases did not directly address the Canal Zone. But the zone was generally considered an unincorporated territory before it was returned to Panama in 1999, and some people born in the Canal Zone when it was under American jurisdiction have been deported from the United States or convicted of being here illegally.

The second way Mr. McCain could have, and ultimately did, become a citizen was by statute, Professor Chin wrote. In Rogers v. Bellei in 1971, the Supreme Court said Congress had broad authority to decide whether and when children born to American citizens abroad are citizens.

At the time of Mr. McCain’s birth, the relevant law granted citizenship to any child born to an American parent “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” Professor Chin said the term “limits and jurisdiction” left a crucial gap. The Canal Zone was beyond the limits of the United States but not beyond its jurisdiction, and thus the law did not apply to Mr. McCain.

In 1937, Congress addressed the problem, enacting a law that granted citizenship to people born in the Canal Zone after 1904. That made Mr. McCain a citizen, but not one who was naturally born, Professor Chin said, because the citizenship was conferred after his birth.

In his paper and in an interview, Professor Chin, a registered Democrat, said he had no political motive in raising the question.

In March, Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard and an adviser to Senator Barack Obama, prepared a memorandum on these questions with Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general in the Bush administration. The memorandum concluded that Mr. McCain is a natural-born citizen based on the place of his birth, the citizenship of his parents and their service to the country.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Olson, whose firm represents Mr. McCain in the New Hampshire lawsuit, said Congress could not have intended to leave the gap described by Professor Chin. The 1937 law, Mr. Olson said, was not a fix but a way to clarify what Congress had meant all along.

Professor Tribe agreed. Reading the “limits and jurisdiction” clause as Professor Chin does, Professor Tribe said, “is to attribute a crazy design to Congress” that “would create an irrational gap.”

Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman, said the campaign concurred and was confident Mr. McCain is eligible to serve.

In the motion to dismiss the New Hampshire suit, Mr. McCain’s lawyers said an individual citizen like the plaintiff, a Nashua man named Fred Hollander, lacks proof of direct injury and cannot sue.

Daniel P. Tokaji, an election law expert at Ohio State University, agreed. “It is awfully unlikely that a federal court would say that an individual voter has standing,” he said. “It is questionable whether anyone would have standing to raise that claim. You’d have to think a federal court would look for every possible way to avoid deciding the issue.”
 
Actually NO we aren't HB. The fact is both John McCain and George Romney were born to two American citizens, with a parent serving Active Duty in the US Military. Defending the virtues and values upon which this coutnry was founded, not following religious and political beliefs that are trying to tear it down, with only one US Citizen as a resident. Even Obama's mother has MANY questions in her background.
 
Originally Posted By: HunterBear71So, we're all good with a Certificate of Live Birth?

Now that you brought it up, HB. No, I'm not! Not for political reasons, although you probably will not believe that. Let me relate a tale of woe regarding birth certificates for you.

Recently my wife and I needed to obtain passports. Should be simple enough, I have had numerous background checks for security clearance in the military, to purchase a firearm, to obtain a maritime license, etc.; most of which required a birth certificate, which I willingly provided.

Now the rub! Our original birth certificates are not acceptable for the purpose of obtaining a passport! I will not go into the boring details but let it suffice to say that we spent all of one day and the better part of another obtaining the required certified birth certificates.

I really feel that it is not too much to ask the President of the United States to provide a simple birth certificate to prove eligibility to lead this country when the rest of us have to get certified BC's just to step across a border, but hey, that's just me.

Sure glad the real one has come forth so we can put this issue to rest.

Copyofbirthcertificate.jpg


Regards,
hm
 
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