After grappling with the legality of the legislation– making sure that it did not hurt the public’s access to any other government records — Gov. Linda Lingle (R-Hawaii) has signed into law a bill that protects state employees from having to answer harassing requests about President Barack Obama’s citizenship.
The new law, Act 100, allows state agencies a limited exemption from Freedom of Information requirements when duplicative requests for information are made by the same person. Although the law covers all agencies, the measure targets people who repeatedly request a copy of Obama’s Hawai’i birth certificate.
That’s still an unwelcome precedent, but according to state employees the requests were just out of control.
EXCLUSIVE: Email From Author Of Arizona Law Reveals Intent To Cast Wide Net Against Latinos
Kris Kobach of the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
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Wonk Room recently obtained an email written by Kris Kobach, a lawyer at the Immigration Reform Law Institute — the group which credits itself with writing the bill — to Arizona state Sen. Russell Pierce (R), urging him to include language that will allow police to use city ordinance violations such as “cars on blocks in the yard” as an excuse to “initiate quieries” in light of the “lawful contact” deletion:
To begin with, Kobach’s correspondence affirms that though the bill was proposed and passed in Arizona, the shots are being called by a small group of lawyers whose office is based in Washington, DC. It also indicates that after vigorously defending his bill and its “lawful contact provision” in the New York Times, Kobach may have had second thoughts about the constitutionality of the bill he prides himself with writing.
More importantly, Kobach is basically admitting to Pearce that by allowing police to use the violation of “any county or municipal ordinance” as a basis for inquiring about a person’s immigration status, the bill will still cast a wide enough net to help offset the effect of omitting the “lawful contact” language which would’ve allowed police to ask just about anyone they encounter about their immigration status. The examples Kobach provides, “cars on blocks in the yard” or “too many occupants of a rental accommodation,” suggest that net will mostly end up being cast over the poor.
Texas bill would require birthplace proof for presidential candidates
FORTH WORTH, Texas — A state lawmaker wants to make sure that any candidate on the presidential ticket from now on can show proof they were born in the United States — or not be allowed on the Texas ballot.
State Rep. Leo Berman this week said he’s planning to file several immigration-related bills once Texas lawmakers get back to work in January, including one that requires presidential and vice presidential candidates to prove their citizenship to the Texas secretary of state before their names are added to the ballot. …
“We’ll do it,” said Berman, a Republican and a former Arlington, Texas, mayor pro tem. “We’ll do it from now on. If he can’t prove citizenship … he won’t have a place on the Texas ballot.”
Last weekend, Berman told a crowd in Tyler, Texas, that he believes “Barack Obama is God’s punishment on us today, but … we are going to make Obama a one-term president,” according to a report in the Tyler Morning Telegraph.
As I’ve said about the Arizona bill, which was shelved in the State Senate this week for lack of votes, I don’t have a problem with a state wanting future presidential and vice presidential candidates to show they meet the the Constitutional requirements of birthplace, age and length of residency, in order to be on the state’s ballot: It can’t hurt.
But as we saw with the Arizona bill, (and can get from Berman’s statement of political intent above in Texas), a certification by the state of birth, the legal authorizing body, would not be enough for these people. Though it would have to be, if the state law were not to violate federal law.
No state officer can legally determine citizenship, either, because that, too, is a federal matter. And what happens if one did? You’re talking lawsuit city here, for one thing, bringing huge costs to taxpayers, both for states who pass such laws and for states who don’t. Bottom line, no state government is ever going to be permitted to hijack a federal election and induce electoral chaos. So any state legislature considering such legislation needs to keep it very, very narrow: birthplace, age and length of residency.
That will never in a million years satisfy the litigious Birthers to whom these bills pander, so, realistically, the current system might just as well serve another couple hundred years.
I am thinking, lately, that state lawmakers might be required to show a mental health certificate before being allowed on the ballot. That would probably do some good.
In 2002, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney set herself on the path to electoral defeat by paying lip service to 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
Now, eight years later, three Georgia legislators are indulging the fantasies of a new contingent of conspiracy theorists who believe in a different cover-up. These conspiracy theorists, or “birthers,” refuse to accept the constitutional eligibility of President Barack Obama, under the hypothesis that he might not have been born in Honolulu, and that he instead may have engaged in a five-decade-long ruse before his secret foreign birth was exposed via fabricated rumors spread by fringe bloggers with no evidence late in the campaign.
The conspiracists’ favored theory is that Obama’s mother left her Honolulu home and traveled halfway around the planet to give birth in the Third World nation of Kenya in 1961. To some people, it is apparently easier to believe that our first African-American president was actually born in Africa than to believe that he was born at the local Honolulu hospital.
A bill to require presidential candidates to show their birth certificates to get on the state’s ballot has been set aside at the Arizona Legislature.
With lawmakers working toward adjournment of their annual session, the sponsor of the bill used to resurrect the proposal said Thursday it wouldn’t get a Senate vote because some fellow Republicans don’t support it.
The bill is an outgrowth from some Obama critics’ doubts over whether he was born in the United States. Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed Obama’s citizenship, and his Hawaiian birth certificate has been made public, along with newspaper birth notices.
The House narrowly approved the measure last week, sending it to the Senate. …
Senate President Bob Burns, R-Peoria, said he hadn’t made a decision on whether to keep the bill from being considered, but he acknowledged telling a supporter of the bill that he questioned whether the Legislature needed “the controversy it would create.”
Although a supporter of the bill, Republican Senator Jack Harper says he “personally believes Obama has demonstrated he was born in the United States.” Harper left a bit of salve for wounded Birfers by tacking the birth-certificate provision onto another bill of his. But if the votes aren’t there now, I don’t see why they will be when Harper’s other bill comes up.
The Arizona Secretary of State had opposed the bill all along.
It’s all Obama’s fault, so Hispanics should register Republican. Bwahaha.
“That said, and even though we are taking a stance against Jan Brewer and Russell Pearce’s law, we are ultimately holding President Obama accountable. Obama promised Hispanics that he would pass immigration reform within 90 days of his Presidency. Had Obama carried out his promises to Hispanics last year, the Hispanic community would not be experiencing the crisis we are experiencing right now. There has been recent criticism over our Senator John McCain because John McCain probably feels he cannot win the primary elections due to his previous stances on championing immigration reform and the consistent untrue attacks by Hayworth. It is understandable on why McCain believes he is in the fight of his life. For the record, Senator McCain has taken action in the past while Obama has not. McCain’s valuable experience contributed to Americans winning the Iraq war. The problem is this: There are more Latinos registered as Democrats in the State of Arizona that cannot vote for McCain in the primary elections and McCain wants to win. How can these hypocritical democrat leaders lay blame to the McCain when at the very least McCain has action to back his words? Why aren’t Democrat leaders holding Obama’s feet to the fire? Hispanics are more aligned with Republican values because of our social conservative values and our belief in the Creator; and if Hispanics want to make a real change to help change the face of our Party to bring it back to the Party of Abraham Lincoln, then I call upon all Latinos (Democrat and Independent) to register themselves as Republicans in order to bring it back to those roots.
Republican state Rep. Judy Burges, sponsor of the Grand Canyon State’s bill requiring more proof of citizenship from presidential candidates, gives an interview to WorldNetDaily — the far-right site that’s simultaneously on top of this, uh, “story,” and mind-bendingly obscure about its use of quotes. For example:
[T]he sponsor has told WND she’s concerned the GOP leadership will end up protecting President Obama’s secrets.
That’s some accusation! It’s pregnant with implications, such as whether Burges is using this legislation as a backdoor way of getting one of the holy grails of the Obama conspiracyverse, the president’s college records. Alas, no quote. But this might be more important:
[T]he state legislative session is scheduled to conclude this week, and next year’s legislature may not have the same components that are willing to look at the facts about Obama’s eligibility.
This is what happened in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where legislation petered out before the end of the legislative session. In a good Republican year, Burges might get more Republican colleagues in the legislature ready to back her up. But 2011 will be a year of jockeying for the GOP primary, and the state’s senior senator may still be Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has made no secret of how much he loathes it when his party engages on this issue.
Unless Gov. Lingle vetoes, which seems a doubtful prospect.
Hawaii legislators have passed a measure allowing a state agency to ignore repeated requests from a person or organization for President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The measure approved Tuesday by the state Legislature would carve an exemption in the state’s public records law and allow officials to ignore all kinds of duplicative requests, including those for Obama’s birth certificate.
Hawaii Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino has issued two statements since 2008 saying she had seen vital records proving Obama is a natural-born American citizen. Obama was born in Honolulu to a Kenyan father and an American mother.
But state officials say they still get between 10 and 20 e-mails each week seeking verification of Obama’s birth.
Report Title: Information Practices; Vexatious Requests
4/27/2010 H Passed Final Reading as amended in CD 1 with Representative(s) Berg, Brower, Finnegan, Hanohano, M. Lee, Marumoto, Morita, Rhoads, Takai, Ward voting no (10) and none excused (0).
For one thing, the Constitution’s equal protection clause forbids the government from differentiating between anyone in the United States — including illegal aliens — on the basis of race. The new law, on its face, doesn’t make racial distinctions, but its supporters haven’t articulated any other grounds for suspecting that someone is an unlawful resident. It is, therefore, vulnerable to the argument that it essentially criminalizes walking while Hispanic. …
The law seems to require that officers demand documentation from suspected aliens based on mere hunches – a clear violation of the Constitution.
There are other problems. Even assuming that an officer reasonably suspects that a person is in the country illegally, what happens next? The law doesn’t specify. If a person — for example, a park jogger — lacks what the officer regards as proper identification, is the officer supposed to arrest the person? Or detain him or her while checking the person’s immigration status with the federal government? Do Arizonans need to worry about being held in the back of a squad car because they forgot to bring their license with them on a quick trip to the grocery store?
The uncertainty surrounding these questions brings SB 1070 directly into the crosshairs of what’s called the “void for vagueness” doctrine, a legal principle that requires a certain specificity in criminal statutes. The Arizona law, in failing to provide clear guidelines either to citizens or officers, creates a risk that policemen will, in the words of the Supreme Court, conduct “standardless sweep[s],” bound only by “their personal predilections.” …
The most likely outcome of the legal challenges to SB 1070 may be that the bill survives, shorn of its most offensive parts. This is obviously a good result for civil libertarians, but it’s also good news for their frequent adversary, police officers. In requiring officers to check immigration status but providing them no clear guidelines on when or how to do so, SB 1070 places policemen on the razor’s edge of violating Arizona law on the one hand and infringing on constitutional rights on the other. The “reasonable suspicion” provision is probably one that Arizona’s police officers are perfectly happy to do without.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon told the Arizona Republic that the City Council will consider an item tomorrow that would direct their city attorney “to prepare a lawsuit asking for an injunction on this law and challenging it on constitutional grounds.” He also called the new law “unconstitutional” and “unenforceable.”
On Fox News this morning, Gordon said the new law “doesn’t make the state any safer.” If anything, Gordon said, “it actually makes it less safe.”
That’s because police officers may be caught up in enforcing the new law, Gordon said, and, fearing lawsuits over failing to enforce the law or in unfairly enforcing it since there’s no functional definition of “reasonable suspicion,” may have less time to focus on violent crime and the drug trade.
Meanwhile, this driver has the right idea, ridicule this awful law into the grave:
The beauty of AZ twin laws, is that not only Obama will not be re-elected, but he can be arrested as an illegal alien and deported back to Kenya.
That is, after he is criminally prosecuted and serves time for the Social Security fraud.
And we know how often she gets what she wants.
Meanwhile, John McCain has spoken out against the new state law:
The state House on Wednesday voted 31-29 to pass the legislation that would require all presidential hopefuls seeking access to Arizona’s ballot to provide to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office proof that the candidate is a natural-born citizen, proof of the candidate’s age and proof that the candidate meets the Constitution’s residency requirement of 14 years. The term “birthers” refers to the fringe political-conspiracy theorists who allege, despite evidence to the contrary, that Obama was born in Africa and not Hawaii. If Obama is not a natural-born citizen, he is ineligible to be president under the Constitution. …
McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, sided with critics of the bill who question whether Arizona could legally impose a birth-certificate requirement on presidential contenders.
“I think that Secretary of State Ken Bennett, whose responsibilities these are, is correct and that the parameters for candidates for elected federal office are set by federal law and not by state law,” McCain said Friday at a news conference in downtown Phoenix.
I’ve been turned off CNN for several months now, but I regret not having seen Anderson Cooper’s “Keeping Them Honest” segment of April 21, with the ignorant Arizona State Rep. Cecil Ash about the Birfer Bill. Watch him say “I don’t know” many, many times.
Arizona House gives nod to ‘birther bill’: Secretary of state isn’t sure it’s constitutional …
Democrats criticized Burges’ amendment, saying presidential candidates already have to prove their citizenship.
“Republicans continue to take Arizona down the wrong track by wasting taxpayers’ time on frivolous legislation instead of working on important issues like health care for kids and seniors and education,” said Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix. …
Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett said creating state-level requirements for a federal office could violate the U.S. Constitution.
“While everyone has an interest in ensuring that only eligible citizens run for president, there are obvious issues with states implementing what could become a patchwork of different tests for a presidential candidate to prove his/her citizenship,” Bennett’s spokesman, Matthew Benson, wrote in an e-mail.
It appears that HB2441, which would have required proof of “natural born citizenship” for presidential candidates, has been withdrawn in the Arizona State House of Representatives. As of February 11, according to the Tucson Weekly, the bill was awaiting a hearing by the House Judiciary Committee. The withdrawal is dated 02/22/10 by that committee.
Whether this means withdrawn permanently, or if it can be reintroduced in amended form, or it takes some other legislative path, I am not entirely sure. But I hope it is good and done and that other such proposals in other states meet the same fate. An article in the Seattle Times doesn’t mention the withdrawal at all:
Nearly half of the Arizona Legislature wants to force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to state officials if he runs for re-election.
A state House committee on Tuesday approved the measure sponsored by 40 of the state’s 90 legislators. It would require presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the requirements to be president.
All 40 co-sponsors are Republicans, comprising 75 percent of the GOP caucus. Two of them have since resigned to run for Congress.
A significant problem with any proposed legislation of this sort in the states lies in the third part of this Arizona bill:
C. The secretary of state shall review the affidavit and other documents submitted by the national political party committee and, if the secretary of state has reasonable cause to believe that the candidate does not meet the citizenship, age and residency requirements prescribed by law, the secretary of state shall not place that candidate’s name on the ballot.
The bill requires that the national political party provide an affidavit and “shall append to the affidavit documents that prove that the candidate is a natural born citizen…” The legal authority for certification of anyone’s birthplace is the state in which the birth occurred and the legal documentation of that birth is the certification the state provides as prima facie proof. If a secretary of another state decides that is not sufficient to prove national born citizenship, it opens their own state’s legal procedures to challenge by any other state, for one thing, induces a chaotic approach in state to state interaction, and violates federal law, but that’s the least of it.
Arizona, in this case, would be vulnerable to lawsuits, not only from candidates and political parties and other states and the federal government, over rejection of legal documents, but from deranged Birthers who may not accept the subjective reasoning of the secretary of state behind acceptance of a candidate’s submitted documents. This expensive proposition should surely concern state officials and Arizona taxpayers.
Secretaries of state have no jurisdiction over federal law, as pointed out by state Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in January in the Arizona Capitol Times. It is never going to be within the job description of individual state officers to determine a federal matter like this, because the act is ministerial, or ordered by specific federal law. It would take a Constitutional amendment to change that. States may only verify what is actually in the Constitution. They can’t just redesign Constitutional requirements in their own heads and conclude that one of their state officials is competent, qualified, and legitimately mandated to decide a federal issue like citizenship. This act, if it goes forward, may be tied up knots in the courts, possibly for years.
There is nothing wrong, to my mind, with a state requiring a certified copy of a birth certificate, by the way, to verify age and place of birth, but that should end the matter. Common sense, however, did not stop more than three dozen Arizona state legislators from co-sponsoring a bill they had to know can go nowhere. Rather than be truthful with their constituents, they chose to pander to Birthers. That’s a real shame. But some of them are Birthers themselves, and that is even worse.
Burges’ bill, if it becomes law, would put the Secretary of State in the position of having to determine whether the individual circumstances of a candidate’s life disqualify him or her from being on the Arizona ballot.
The two-term lawmaker said her concerns remain about having a president whose citizenship — and, by her reckoning, loyalty — is not clear.
“We want to make sure that we have candidates that are going to stand up for the United States of America,” Burges said.
Think about it: Do we want elected officials deciding for us who is American enough? Think about it hard. Because, if we give them this power, one day, they may be coming for you.
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UPDATE: The Arizona Daily Star has a story this morning. The bill goes next for a full vote in the House.
PHOENIX — The House Government Committee voted Tuesday to require presidential contenders to prove to Arizona’s secretary of state they’re “natural born citizens” to get their names on the ballot. …
Matt Benson, lobbyist for Secretary of State Ken Bennett, said there are all sorts of problems with HB 2441 which now goes to the full House.
First, he said it likely would bring a challenge that Arizona was illegally imposing its own standards on candidates for federal offices. Benson noted that federal courts previously struck down an attempt by Arizona to limit the terms of members of Congress.
Burges responded that 10 other states are considering similar proposals. “So it’s not just Arizona,” she said.
Benson pointed out, though, that what Burges wants isn’t a simple matter of someone coming up with a birth certificate. It requires the secretary of state to examine documents proving eligibility and refuse to list that person on the ballot if there is “reasonable cause to believe the candidate does not meet the citizenship, age and residency requirements prescribed by law.”
He said that provides no clear guideline for his agency to determine if, for example, a copy of a birth certificate is legally sufficient.
