Tabloid update: "Where Obama was really born!"

America Wants To Know was in the supermarket checkout line yesterday when the Globe tabloid once again jumped from the rack and landed on the conveyor belt, right on top of the Rice Krispies.

"Where Obama Was Really Born!" the cover shouted. A red arrow pointed to a picture of a building with an ambulance parked in front of it. "In this hospital 8,000 miles from the U.S. -- New shocking charge! Is his inauguration against the law?"

An older woman in the checkout line ahead of us smiled at the tabloid cover and shook her head. She leaned in with the slightest twinkle in her eyes. "He's a foreigner," she whispered.

Well, as they say at the Treasury Department, we have to try something.

Inside, the Globe reports that "the Internet is abuzz with shocking charges that three different people have gotten their hands on a Kenyan birth certificate for Obama."

The document supposedly says the president-elect was born on August 4, 1961, at Coast Province General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya, not in Honolulu, Hawaii, as the Obama team keeps insisting.

The Globe talked to Dr. Christopher Mwanga, an administrator at the Mombasa hospital, who said they can find no record of the birth of a baby on August 4, 1961, by the name of Barack Hussein Obama. "We can neither prove that he was born here nor disprove it," Dr. Mwanga said.

The Globe also mentions that Obama's paternal grandmother has reportedly spoken of being in the delivery room when the president-elect was born. In Kenya.

America Wants To Know does not happen to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

Why not, you ask?

Because Bill Clinton has made more than one trip to Africa, and if there was a birth certificate with Obama's name on it anywhere on that continent, he would have found it and given it to Fox News six months ago.

And because if the State Department had a passport file showing that Obama's mother was out of the country in 1961, Dick Cheney would have given it to Robert Novak three months ago.

So we're skeptical of skeptics who think the president-elect is foreign-born, but the question is an interesting one nonetheless.

Hypothetically, what would happen if someone got elected president and then was revealed to be foreign-born and ineligible to be president?

Nobody really knows.

The Constitution says in Article II, Section 1, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

But the Constitution isn't self-enforcing.

Probably the House of Representatives would have to vote on an article of impeachment and send the president to the Senate to stand trial.

Of course, if public opinion doesn't favor impeachment, that wouldn't happen.

Some citizen or organization or state government might be able to file a lawsuit seeking to have the president removed from office. Eventually the U.S. Supreme Court might issue an opinion declaring the president constitutionally ineligible to serve, but the Court has no enforcement mechanism for its decisions. If the president refuses to resign and the Congress won't impeach him and the public doesn't care, well, in all likelihood nothing would happen.

Except that Arnold Schwarzenegger would sue under the Equal Protection Clause and demand to be eligible to run for president.

The "natural born Citizen" requirement is surprisingly fuzzy in definition. There was a question some time ago about Senator John McCain's eligibility to run for president, because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone while his father, a military officer, was stationed there.

Instead of laughing off the question, Senator McCain hired former Solicitor General Ted Olson to research the matter for him. And far from dismissing the matter as frivolous, Mr. Olson told the New York Times that while he didn't have much doubt about it, "he still needed to finish his research."

It appears that the meaning of the "natural born Citizen" clause has never been settled. New York Times reporter Carl Hulse put it this way: "Lawyers who have examined the topic say there is not just confusion about the provision itself, but uncertainty about who would have the legal standing to challenge a candidate on such grounds, what form a challenge could take and whether it would have to wait until after the election or could be made at any time."

Hypothetically, if the president-elect was lying about his age and had actually been born in Hawaii before it became a state, there could be an interesting debate over whether he was a "natural born" citizen or not.

Being born in Kenya would be something else entirely.

Hypothetically.


Copyright 2009

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