Below The Beltway

Bob Owens has a great post at Pajamas Media taking apart the arguments of those who continue to contend that Barack Obama is ineligible to serve as President:

Obama is ineligible to be president because he was born outside the United States. If he was born outside the United States or U.S. territories, this might indeed have been a legitimate Constitutional issue. The problem with this theory is that no one has been able to provide any credible evidence that Barack Obama was born anywhere other than Hawaii. Claims that he was born in Kenya have been based on fanciful claims woven out of thin air and a faulty translation of a conversation with his grandmother purposefully taken out of context. There is no documentation or testimony to support this claim. None.

Obama’s mother wasn’t old enough to pass along her citizenship to Obama. This contention is based upon a belief that U.S. law stipulates that if only one parent was a citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least 10 years, at least five of which had to be after the age of 16. This was true between 1952 and 1986 — for people born outside of the United States and certain U.S. territories. As Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, a U.S. state, this isn’t remotely an issue.

Because Barack Obama Sr. was a Kenyan national and passed along citizenship rights to Barack Obama Jr., the president-elect could not qualify as a “natural born citizen.” This is the conjecture made in the case dismissed by the Supreme Court this past Monday and is the contention of the case likely to be dismissed out of hand next week. Barack Obama was born in the United States, which makes him a natural born citizen of the United States. Period. Any additional citizenship rights afforded him by other nations are in addition to his rights as a natural born U.S. citizen, and do not function in place of or take away from his U.S. citizenship.

Obama lost his U.S. citizenship when he moved to Indonesia and was adopted by his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. This is based upon the claim that Indonesia doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, and that when Obama was adopted as a minor by Lolo Soetoro, the future president-elect lost his U.S. citizenship. Variations of this theory claim that since there is no evidence that Obama was naturalized after returning to Hawaii, he is an illegal alien and can be deported. But this theory hinges on Indonesian immigration law overriding U.S. citizenship status in the United States, which it very clearly does not. U.S. law is very specific, stating that the only way a U.S. citizen can lose his citizenship is to renounce it following very specific steps:

1. appear in person before a U.S. consular or diplomatic officer;
2. in a foreign country (normally at a U.S. embassy or consulate); and
3. sign an oath of renunciation.

Barack Obama never renounced his U.S. citizenship. Also, as he was a minor when he moved to Indonesia, neither he nor his parents could have renounced it. Period. As far as U.S. law is concerned, Barack Obama never lost his U.S. citizenship even as he gained Indonesian citizenship. Indonesia’s laws on the matter simply don’t apply in this country.

Will this convince the hard-core Obama Proofers, as Owens calls them ?

Of course not, but them, as I’ve said before, they are largely impervious to pesky little things like facts, the law, and reality.