Evidence Aside, State Lawmakers Debate ‘Birther’ Bills
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: April 21, 2011
OKLAHOMA CITY — Investigations have concluded that President Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii in 1961, as he has always said.
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Just this week, on the news program “Good Morning America” on ABC,George Stephanopoulos produced a copy of the president’s Certification of Live Birth, causing a potential presidential aspirant, Michele Bachmann, the Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, to say that the issue appeared settled. In 2008, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging that proof.
But the so-called birther controversy stubbornly refuses to go away.
The issue, which has simmered at the fringes of the nation’s political discourse for years, even got a recent burst of attention when it was adopted as a talking point byDonald Trump, a potential Republican presidential candidate.
The result is that what had been a wispy tale of purportedly buried documents and cover-ups designed to hide the president’s supposed birth in Kenya — a tale that has been dismissed by most mainstream members of both political parties — now appears to have legs as the political season lurches toward 2012.
A New York Times/CBS News Poll released Thursday found that 57 percent of adults surveyed nationwide said they thought Mr. Obama was born in the United States, versus 25 percent who said he was born elsewhere.
But digging deeper into the numbers shows striking disparities along party lines and regions of the country. Among Republicans, for instance, 33 percent said they thought Mr. Obama was born in America, while 45 percent said his birth occurred in another country. The nationwide telephone poll, conducted April 15-20 with 1,224 adults and a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, said that majorities in all regions of the nation think the president was born in the United States, but that those majorities were smaller in the South and Midwest than in the Northeast and Far West.
Around the country, the issue has proved to be a sure winner for the conservative base, with bills popping up in more than a dozen state legislatures to force future presidential candidates to prove their citizenship. Those legislatures, though, have been much more reluctant to turn this issue into concrete law.
Birther bills have foundered or fallen dormant in at least five states and are still being debated in more than a half-dozen others. In Arizona, where both legislative chambers passed one such bill, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, vetoed it this week, calling it “a bridge too far.”
But now, Oklahoma, a deeply conservative state, could be the first to put its doubts into law, through a bill that would require all candidates, from town council hopeful on up, to prove that they meet the legal requirements for office. Those requirements vary by office, but presidential aspirants would need to, among things, file certified proof that they were born in the United States. The bill does not specify what documents would need to be filed. A vote was expected by next week.
Supporters of the measure, and others like it from Georgia to Montana, protest that they are not birthers, as doubters of Mr. Obama’s country of birth have been called, sometimes derisively. They say that they simply want to clarify the status of all candidates and that Mr. Obama’s case has only sharpened the issue and illuminated what they call a glaring hole in statutes governing eligibility to run for office.
“It’s not a birther bill, it’s a common-sense bill,” said a lead sponsor, State Senator Rick Brinkley, a Republican from suburbs of Tulsa. “If you’re going to file for office, you should be willing to substantiate that you meet the qualifications.”
In state capitols, the debates have been reframed in the dry language of good government — a simple effort to clear the air, supporters say, for confused voters. And because many of the bills failed this year, supporters are renewing their legislative battle plans for next year, in the heart of a presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, even beyond Mr. Trump, divergent views among Republican governors have heightened a new sense that the debate over the issue remains unresolved. After Ms. Brewer vetoed the Arizona bill, for example, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican, said he would enthusiastically sign a similar bill, should it reach his desk.
Here in Oklahoma, where Mr. Obama won just over a third of the vote in 2008 — one of his worst state losses — Senate Bill 91 passed last month with overwhelming and even bipartisan support. People in both parties said they were confident that the House would do the same by the deadline next week (the bill would have to return to the Senate for a procedural vote). Lawmakers said they assumed that Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, would sign it.
A spokesman said Ms. Fallin would not comment until the bill was on her desk and she had a chance to review it.
Legislators backing credentials bills in other states are closely watching what happens here.
“If one state passes, and the Obama administration basically ignores the requirement and does not qualify for the ballot in that state, that would send a very strong signal that we have a situation in the United States where someone who is not eligible is occupying the White House,” said Mark Hatfield, a Republican state representative in Georgia whose own ballot bill failed to get through. If Oklahoma does not go forward, and an override of Ms. Brewer’s veto in Arizona does not materialize, Mr. Hatfield said, “then other states, including Georgia, have a duty to step up.”
Opponents of the birther bills say they are unnecessary and are designed to score political points more than safeguard democracy, certainly in Mr. Obama’s case.
Still, Democrats in Oklahoma were divided. For example, the minority floor leader in the House, Chuck Hoskin, said he would probably vote yes. Asked in an interview whether he was concerned about embarrassing the leader of his own party, Mr. Hoskin said he thought Mr. Obama’s failure to win over Oklahomans in 2008 was the real embarrassment.
But down the hall, an assistant Democratic floor leader in the House, Al McAffrey, said the bill was the embarrassment. “But this is Oklahoma — we embarrass ourselves all the time,” he said.
Some lawmakers in other states said the fight to clarify the rules, whether sparked by birther talk or not, was overdue. But even some Republicans who have backed certification bills said they had no doubts about the president’s birthplace.
“Barack Obama is a natural citizen, born in Hawaii,” said Mike Kelley, a Republican representative in the Missouri House and a co-sponsor of a candidate certification bill that he said looked doomed for 2011. “I know there are people out there who don’t believe he is — this is about trying to calm those people down.”
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