[EL] ELB News and Commentary 1/7/16

[Richard Winger]

I'm going to get myself in big trouble on this list for saying this, but what the heck.
The evidence that President Obama was born in Hawaii is not rock-solid.  People say he had a birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper, but sometimes those notices are run when the family has lots of friends in Honolulu and still the birth was elsewhere.
I have a copy of a notarized affidavit from Timothy Lee Adams, who says he was a Hawaii government employee and he knows that there is no full birth certificate for the president in the records of the Hawaii Department of Health.  State employees also know that neither the Queens Medical Center nor the Kapi'olani Medical Center in Honolulu have any birth records for him.
If there were a full birth certificate, one would think President Obama would ask the Hawaii Department of Health to let anyone see it.  The Hawaii Department of Health always refuses to allow public access because they say they are protecting the President's privacy.
I like President Obama very much.
In the past I have been very into genealogy and I was embarked on a mission to learn all the descendants of one pair of my great-great-grandparents.  For 10 years I enjoyed this hobby.  I probably obtained 2,000 birth, marriage, and death records for relatives (my great-great-grandparents had at least 12,000 descendants at the time I was working on this).  Also I worked for Social Security for 17 years and SSA has uses for birth and marriage and death certificates and other evidence of those events.  These life experiences taught me about these records.

It also seems undisputed that President Obama's social security number was assigned in Connecticut (a state where he had not set foot at the time; he was a minor when he got his card), and that the same number had previously been assigned to a man born in 1890.
I would never have written this e-mail normally, but since the subject has come up on this list, I dared.
 Richard Winger 415-922-9779 PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
 

      From: RuthAlice Anderson <ruthalice.anderson at comcast.net>
 To: law-election at uci.edu 
 Sent: Thursday, January 7, 2016 3:53 PM
 Subject: Re: [EL] ELB News and Commentary 1/7/16
   
Regarding Muller’s article on Cruz’s eligibility, while I personally believe he is eligible and would be happy to have an amendment allowing naturalized citizens such as Arnold Schwartzeneggar also be allowed to run (as was once a popular idea on the right before he lost his luster).
I am baffled that so much was made of Obama’s eligibility while so little is made of Cruz’s situation. After all, no one disputes Obama’s mother was an American citizen. Meanwhile, many asserted he was born in Kenya so therefore ineligible, but why would Kenya be more disqualifying than Canada? 
The argument defending his eligibility was that he was born in Hawaii, hence all the birth certificate nonsense. 
The plurality of opinion at that time seemed to be if Obama were not born in Hawaii, if his birth certificate was fake, then he would be ineligible. That was presented as given in the media. So what has changed in eight years?





 
Derek Muller: Who Decides If Ted Cruz is Eligible to Be President?
  Posted on  January 7, 2016 10:27 am by Rick Hasen  Here’s a deep dive guest post from Derek Muller: 
Earlier this week, Donald Trump suggested that Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace could be a problem in the event he became the Republican presidential nominee. He followed that up with a call for Mr. Cruz to seek a declaratory judgment in court that he is a “natural born Citizen” and eligible to serve as president.There is little dispute on the facts. Mr. Cruz was born to a Cuban father and an American mother in Canada. Aaron Blake at the Washington Post helpfully compilessome of the historical disputes about natural-born citizens, including recent commentary by Neal Katyal and Paul Clement in the Harvard Law Review Forum, On the Meaning of “Natural Born Citizen.”This is a dispute on the merits—Mr. Trump now suggesting that Mr. Cruz is not eligible, Mr. Cruz insisting that he is eligible, and a question as to who is right. Consensus suggests Mr. Cruz is eligible, and the consensus offers quite a strong argument, but it is certainly not unanimous.But there is an even deeper question that is often unexamined in this dispute—who gets to decide whether Mr. Cruz is eligible? A court? Professor Dan Tokaji has many thoughts on the most pressing barrier to such challenges, justiciability. 
Continue reading → 
 
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