The ‘birther’ bill and an image of second thoughts
When state Rep. Mark Hatfield, R-Waycross, dropped his bill to require next year presidential candidates to provide hard proof of their birth on U.S. soil, the paperwork contained the signatures of 93 of his House colleagues – 92 of them Republican.
Word of House Speaker David Ralston’s coolness toward the legislation spread through the Capitol on Wednesday. Those concerned with the Port of Savannah made their opinions known.
By the end of Thursday, at least 23 House members had changed their minds, according to my AJC colleague April Hunt – and the above image of blotted out, former supporters.
For a PDF of the above image, click here. For a look at the original, click here.
John Meadows, chairman of the House Rules Committee, which determines what legislation goes to the floor, was the first to remove his name this morning.
- By Jim Galloway, Political Insider
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134 comments Add your comment
Aquagirl
March 4th, 2011
9:07 am
Red, maybe they could address water and transportation issues. Businesses aren’t lured by gridlock in the desert. They also like sane, stable, intelligent employees. When you look at the crazies in the legislature, you really have to wonder “do I want to hire from a pool that elected these morons?”
jconservative
March 4th, 2011
9:14 am
The “birthers”, Obama not an American, etc, and the “9/11 truthers”, 9/11 was a conspiracy by Bush/Cheney, are both cut from the same mold. As a result both live in a world governed by fiction.
The “9/11 truthers” will tell you in an instant that neither they, nor anyone else, has seen proof that 9/11 was not a Bush/Cheney plan executed by the Pentagon. Sure the Pentagon was hit, part of the cover up!
The ‘birthers” will tell you in a minute that they have seen no proof Obama was born in the US.
Oh, almost forgot, Lyndon Johnson had Kennedy shot. That was bigger than the “birthers” and “9/11 truthers” combined.
Living in a world governed by fiction makes almost anything possible.
The puzzling part is that the “birthers” keep voting for the same members of Congress who voted to certify the 2008 election that actually put Obama in the White House.
Private Sector
March 4th, 2011
9:28 am
@ td
“He is a socialist at best and probably leaning more to being a communist.”
Which policy initiative or Bill that he has signed has absolutely shown this. Making the statement void of the facts doesn’t make it true. When there was a populous will to void the huge bonuses to AIG executives because they received TARP funds, the President refused to be a proponent in that debate as contracts are just as sacred in our country as apple pie.
When you throw out baseless claims of socialism and communism while at the same time ignoring that we lost 10 MILLION JOBS in an 8 year span and decreased taxes while borrowing money to fund two wars even LBJ knew we couldnt pay for Veitnam that way.
Do you really care for GA?
March 4th, 2011
9:37 am
Breaking News, national unemployment rate drops to 8.9%, but here in Georgia which has been under GOP rule for several years, it is over 10 %, but of course it is Obama’s fault.
Brandon
March 4th, 2011
9:38 am
td… Got news for ya!! I’m white, and around whites 90% of the time. All I hear is about his color.One of the main things that are said is quote “(I can’t believe they put a black man in the white house). As for being blind, where were you during the bush years? If anyone turned anything third rate it was him.I voted for Obama and will do so again.
Private Sector
March 4th, 2011
9:46 am
Many African-Americans see the ignorance and the thinly-veiled racism of the Birthers when they question Obama’s citizenship. Many African-Americans long for the most basic tribal connection to the continent of Africa. So when you have a President that is only one generation removed from Africa, their is a deep appreciation and affection for this among African-Americans. Many AAs long for that “dual citizenship” status even if only in a cultural status. Even if they are a doctor, lawyer, accountant, soldier, teacher or police officer they know it doesn’t make them less of an American just like the President
td
March 4th, 2011
10:23 am
Brandon
March 4th, 2011
9:38 am
“I voted for Obama and will do so again”
Because he is black or because your personal philosophy is that you believe that government has the responsibility of running the economy and taking care of people (liberal/socialistic)?
ab
March 4th, 2011
10:28 am
Complete waste of our time. We talk about jobs…and the jobless rate just went down…yet we have time for this crap. As I have noted before, if anyone believes the President is not a citizen…have him arrested. Go all the way and ask the Justice dept to arrest an imposter.
Do you have the stones to go all the way?
td
March 4th, 2011
10:29 am
Private Sector
March 4th, 2011
9:28 am
“Which policy initiative or Bill that he has signed has absolutely shown this”
Obama care, bailing out the car industry and then giving the labor unions a large % of the new company stock, increasing all social welfare spending by more than 50%. How many more do you need. Did Bush do socialistic things ABSOLUTELY. He was a patriot on defending us against Islamic terrorism but he was a socialist with TARP, Medicare part D and no child left behind.
Georgia Politicians Back off of Birther-inspired Bill « Front and Center
March 4th, 2011
10:46 am
[...] Georgia Legislature to require proof of a presidential candidate’s citizenship seems to be losing sponsors: When state Rep. Mark Hatfield, R-Waycross, dropped his bill to require next year presidential [...]
Brandon
March 4th, 2011
10:54 am
td.. NEITHER
deegee
March 4th, 2011
10:58 am
td, after all that has transpired over the last 2 1/2 years, who could fantasize about a President, Congress, or the Fed running the economy? The banks control the economy; not liberals, not conservatives, not government. The banks are in control.
The fallout of the mortgage mess is that there are fewer smaller banks. The collapse of some large banks like Bear Stearns has created a greater monopoly among the large banks. FinReg does nothing about “too big to fail.”
Banks profits are healthy, bank bonuses are healthy yet they are not lending because the interest rate is too low. They are investing in commodities and now we consumers are paying inflated prices for food. If you think that government has any chance in hell of running this economy, think again.
td
March 4th, 2011
11:20 am
deegee
March 4th, 2011
10:58 am
I agree with 95% of what you said. There is a some corporate and other entities that work along with the banks to control everything.
Last Man Standing
March 4th, 2011
12:33 pm
Do you really care for GA?:
If you believe the BS put out there by the Obamalamadingdong propoganda agents with the regard to the national jobless rate, have I got a deal for you!
Last Man Standing
March 4th, 2011
12:43 pm
TrishaDishaWarEagle:
I enjoy reading your posts but I do have a question for you. Is it really necessary for you to be so polite to these flaming liberals? Can’t you treat them with the disrespect they so evidently deserve?
flintrock70
March 4th, 2011
2:15 pm
@td
Gov’t does create jobs. Fixing transportation problems, water problems and our educational system makes GA more attractive to business. No one wants to open up shop with traffic jams, dirty water and dumb employees.
Government cannot snap it’s fingers and jobs appear, but you can do things to help out. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink is the saying I’m sure you or one of your Faux News pundits would say about me statement, but you at least gotta lead the dang horse or else there’s no chance.
EP
March 4th, 2011
2:17 pm
Last Man Standing
Didn’t you mama teach you, you get more flies with honey than vinegar? Lack of civility goes both ways, we should all try it. Problems get solved faster if we would quit being so partisan and listen.
TrishaDishaWarEagle
March 4th, 2011
2:32 pm
Last man Standing..
I Used to treat the leftist slime the way i truly feel about them..had a blast watching one choke on a blowpop at school once..In the end I gave her the heimlich..I have never forgiven myself.
TrishaDishaWarEagle
March 4th, 2011
2:33 pm
It’s also quite laughable the lies people try to spread about AU, like a civil engineering grad not understanding rebar and sheer stress..but then again, GT grads had to learn to lie, they went to school in a GHETTO and had to learn how to handle the panhandling obama voters..
Last Man Standing
March 4th, 2011
3:07 pm
EP:
“Problems get solved faster if we would quit being so partisan and listen.”
I know, for I have learned. I was pretty much aware of the way of things before I REALLY learned. I have now been taught by the likes of Barny Frank, Nancy Pelosi and B. Hussein Obamalamadingding. I intend to be no more partisan than they are, to tell no more lies about the opposition than they have, to claim no more undue credit than they have and to accept no more responsibility for my actions than they have accepted for their actions. Further, I will scream racism at every opportunity whenever a white person is discriminated against by word or deed.
Thank y’all for teaching me!
Last Man Standing
March 4th, 2011
7:00 pm
Private Sector:
“Many African-Americans long for the most basic tribal connection to the continent of Africa”
Well, let me be the first to tell them that ships and airliners depart every day for Africa. I am so past being tired of this hyphenated American crap. If they want to be Africans, go there. If you want to be an American, stay here. Just make up your minds! The very vast majority of people who incoreectly call themselves African-Americans have never seen Africa and know little about it. They, in many cases, would not like it there as there aren’t “entitlement” programs in great numbers. They are also very good at killing each other off. But maybe it is revenge these people want? Maybe they would like to punish the tribes that captured them and sold them as slaves?
Z
March 4th, 2011
7:26 pm
Here we have 94 Georgia Law Makers that must have been born under a rock, all of them. I don’t believe they are Americans born in the United States under a U.S. rock..nope these fools are not American. No one that thinks like these 94 can be Americans, we just don’t raise people this stupid, or do we.
San
March 4th, 2011
7:47 pm
Thank you for listing this list of the 94 Georgia legislator fools..I hope all Georgia voters make a copy of this list and remember this group of fools are NOT smart enough to make laws and be our legislators. I’ve made a copy and will let all my friends know what a group of ignorant fools we have as legislators and by them signing this document proves it. Save it to your computer and when it comes time to vote, you will have all the info you need to make the right choices, next go around..everyone of them should be recalled, or resign. They are a disgrace to Georgia.
EP
March 4th, 2011
11:23 pm
td
You seem to have most of your facts straight, but remember that it was the previous administration that bailed out the car companies, not this one. If you disagree, look it up.
Private Sector
March 5th, 2011
3:08 am
@ LMS…
I enjoy reading your posts. Although your rants are incoherent, stereotypical and devoid of facts, I find it refreshing that you are at the very least arrogant in your ignorance. Its truly difficult to pull both off. So when you say African-Americans wouldn’t enjoy Africa because of the lack of entitlement programs tells me that you know very little about Africa or your own race that depends on Public Assistance in greater numbers than African-Americans.
Making generalizations of race based on left vs right politics coupled with your faux view of the world makes me feel bad for you
Private Sector
March 5th, 2011
3:14 am
@ EP
Of course facts like that get in the way and also the fact that the TARP legislation came under the previous administration. So if you allow those facts to get in the way its hard to label the President a socialist, communist and a fascist. Although I still haven’t figured out how he can be all of these given the most simplest definition of each
Crimson Crush
March 5th, 2011
4:20 am
Trisha … when you gave your reasons for not caring where the comrade in chief was actually born I must say that has always been my take on the situation as well .
Sort of surprising to find myself agreeing on anything with a Barner lately . Although now that I think about it Auburn is the home for the Von Mises Institute . The place can’t be all bad ( right now Google is getting hit up by some left wing chucklehead trying to figure out what a Mises is
)
If a video surfaced of his Obama’s mother spitting him out sitting astraddle of the Empire State Building I wouldn’t give a rat’s a** about it . The man and and ALL of his comrades of every color are a plague on the nation and for that matter Western civilization itself … where , when or even how one of them was born is irrelevant to me at this point . They all need to go …
And before some left wing clown yanks the oh so predictable race card out of their backside I would work day and night without pay for 8 years as the Whitehouse chewing gum scraper if a man like a Thomas Sowell or a Herman Cain were ever elected to the office ….
Gannon, Haggard, and Mehlman
March 5th, 2011
8:50 am
TrishaDisha @ 2:33pm
I am no GT grad (Univ. of Illiois) and I have photos of near beam failures due to lack of “understanding” by an Auburn grad. But never mind, you are a birther apologist and that is all I need to know.
Crimson Crush
March 5th, 2011
10:52 pm
Trisha posted at the very beginning of the comment section that it was irrelevant if the man was born on the corner of 32nd and Broadway . To her he was a train wreck in motion for the nation and as such questions about his legitimacy as to whether he was or wasn’t born in the US weren’t worth wasting time over .
For the terminally dense she spelled it out in nice clean letters at the end of her very first comments on this article about the TRUE importance of Comrade in Chief’s “birth” place …
” no matter WHERE he was born..thats why I never became a birther..”
Somehow though the fact she dares criticize the socialist messiah at all means she is somehow (in your mind) just a “birther” apologist . That is … according to you …. “all … you … need …to … know”.
Stated like it really is … that is all you are capable of “knowing” .
On the even more COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT side issue of AU engineers competence compared I guess to that of Obama . ( (WTF … does it really matter what your opinion is on that when the nation is swirling down a toilet ? )
If you have an entire scrapbook of supposed “photos” of AU engineering grads ( and Trisha with AU stamped on her forehead ) funneling beer on a job site it doesn’t make that Obama any better for the nation . File that in the “who give’s a rat’s a** ? ” section as well .
TrishaDishaWarEagle
March 5th, 2011
11:19 pm
Crap, I thought I burned that photo!
I am a member of the Von Mises Society, and when I bring up the Austrian school of economics with my liberal colleagues, they start making “throw another shrimp on the barbie!” jokes. it’s so sad, I don’t know where to begin to correct them..
….Courtseys to Crimson Crush
hypocrites
March 6th, 2011
3:01 pm
“GT grads had to learn to lie, they went to school in a GHETTO and had to learn how to handle the panhandling obama voters..”
this basically explains everything you need to know about Trisha
“I am a member of the Von Mises Society, and when I bring up the Austrian school of economics with my liberal colleagues, they start making “throw another shrimp on the barbie!” jokes. it’s so sad, I don’t know where to begin to correct them..”
trisha. your cats don’t speak to you. cats are not colleagues. go see a doctor
alberteinstein
March 6th, 2011
11:20 pm
Poor Trish went to a football program and now thinks she’s educated. No wonder she & td get along so well. I doubt Harvard cares what she thinks. The foolish prattle of the ignorant is an endless source of amazement to me. Trish, do ya think Henry Kissinger is a buddy of Castro? Ever here of a guy named Mansfield who teaches there? There are plenty of liberal faculty at Harvard, but the place has been and is a center for planning and recruitment of intelligence and foreign policy types, many of whom are to the right of Attila the Hun. Harvard, Yale, Georgetown and to some extent Princeton are the major sources of those kin of people. And Trish, that lame old Austrian economics drivel has been skewered by every significant economist from Samuelson to Friedman. Read also Krugman and Sachs. If it had any serious defenders left they were discredited by the events of 2008, caused by the excessively laissez-faire policies of credulous and ideology driven federal administrations. BTW, thank God I’m not a Harvard person, but that would be a lot better than being an Auburn grad.
Carol
March 8th, 2011
6:05 pm
Why do any state need a bill passed to say that the Secretary of State needs to do her job to validate that any Presidential candidate is 35 years old and a natural born citizen according to Art. II, Sect. I of the Constitution? Shouldn’t they have been seeing proper documentation every election?..Guess not, huh? ..and obviously all of them like the majority of you are ignorant of the fact that just because Obama’s mother was an American citizen or the fact that he was or was not born on American soil makes absolutely no difference…you idiots are not aware that the term “natural born citizen” as it applies and is italicized in Art II, Sect I of the Constitution has never been amended nor ever defined as anything other than Vattel’s Nation of Laws definition as an American soil born child of TWO citizen parents ” “the land of the father’s is the land of the child’s.. In Obama’s case that would be .KENYA…whether or not he was born in America by his American mother.”
OBAMA IS THE ONLY PRESIDENT TO EVER HOLD OFFICE THAT HAD A FATHER THAT WAS NEVER AN AMERICAN CITIZEN.
Guess the intent of this Constitutional law by our founding fathers and all letters to and from George Washington is of little importance to any of you just as long as we don’t appear to be smeared as being backwoods racists.”
alberteinstein
March 9th, 2011
8:39 am
Carol:
Stop spouting birther lies. You are making a fool of yourself. I am so depresed by the number of birthers and truthers spewing garbage that I despair for the future of the country. Vattel has never been American Law. The Supreme Court has ruled on this many times. There are specific acts of Congress defining what it means to be a native Amenrican citizen who qualifies for the presidency. They were meant to stop this kind of baloney. From Cornell Law Library (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode08/usc_sec_08_00001401—-000-.html):
TITLE 8 > CHAPTER 12 > SUBCHAPTER III > Part I > § 1401
Prev | Next
§ 1401. Nationals and citizens of United States at birth
How Current is This?
The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth:
(a) a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof;
(b) a person born in the United States to a member of an Indian, Eskimo, Aleutian, or other aboriginal tribe: Provided, That the granting of citizenship under this subsection shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of such person to tribal or other property;
(c) a person born outside of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents both of whom are citizens of the United States and one of whom has had a residence in the United States or one of its outlying possessions, prior to the birth of such person;
(d) a person born outside of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is a citizen of the United States who has been physically present in the United States or one of its outlying possessions for a continuous period of one year prior to the birth of such person, and the other of whom is a national, but not a citizen of the United States;
(e) a person born in an outlying possession of the United States of parents one of whom is a citizen of the United States who has been physically present in the United States or one of its outlying possessions for a continuous period of one year at any time prior to the birth of such person;
(f) a person of unknown parentage found in the United States while under the age of five years, until shown, prior to his attaining the age of twenty-one years, not to have been born in the United States;
(g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years: Provided, That any periods of honorable service in the Armed Forces of the United States, or periods of employment with the United States Government or with an international organization as that term is defined in section 288 of title 22 by such citizen parent, or any periods during which such citizen parent is physically present abroad as the dependent unmarried son or daughter and a member of the household of a person
(A) honorably serving with the Armed Forces of the United States, or
(B) employed by the United States Government or an international organization as defined in section 288 of title 22, may be included in order to satisfy the physical-presence requirement of this paragraph. This proviso shall be applicable to persons born on or after December 24, 1952, to the same extent as if it had become effective in its present form on that date; and
(h) a person born before noon (Eastern Standard Time) May 24, 1934, outside the limits and jurisdiction of the United States of an alien father and a mother who is a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, had resided in the United States.
The landmark Supreme Court decision United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) reads in part:
“It thus clearly appears that by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, and the jurisdiction of the English sovereign; and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born. III. The same rule was in force in all the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the constitution as originally established.” Vattel is toast.
See also Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325 (1939) and Schneider v. Rusk, 377 U.S. 163 (1964).
Any bill passed by Georgia which attempts to amend federal law will only further embarrass us. Don’t like Obama? Vote against him. If you object to being portrayed as a backwoods racist, stop acting like one.