The New Republic

That couldn't hold up under judicial challenges, could it? The courts have already refused to hear challenges to Obama's citizenship, and now the man is president. No one has "reasonable cause" to exclude the President of the United States from the ballot. It's a terrible law to begin with, at any rate.

- ackyri

April 21, 2010 at 12:39pm

Thus continues conservatives' tireless crusade to disenfranchise those with whom they disagree.

- Fishpeddler

April 21, 2010 at 12:42pm

I think it depends on the administrative practice. If candidates have to submit a notarized copy of their B/C, then that's fine -- and if the admin practice in another state, say Hawaii, is to issue a certain kind of document to meet that request, then I think it would be difficult for AZ to suddenly make other kinds of demands of the HI authorities, which could lead to AZ documents being challenged by HI authorities, for example.

- ironyroad

April 21, 2010 at 12:56pm

The Arizona bill, if passed, will officially bring POWPOW's home in line with Ahmadinejad's Iran.

- icarusr

April 21, 2010 at 1:01pm

The biggest legal issue with this bill is that it purports to grant states the right to set criteria for federal election candidates -- which is unconstitutional, as the Constitution sets specific requirements for eligibility to federal elected office and these clauses have always been interpreted to mean that states cannot add layers or eligibility or require candidates to "prove" their eligibility in ways that go beyond what is already set forth. In any case, it is also debatable that a President actually needs to have been born in the United States in order to be eligible for that office -- he or she just needs to be a "natural born Citizen" or a "Citizen of the United States". Some Arizona Republicans may recall that their senior Senator, who ran for that office in 2008 and whose votes he almost certainly received, was not born in the United States, but in the Panama Canal Zone which was an overseas U.S. territory at the time. No one questioned his eligibility to run for President, since it was widely assumed that the son of two United States citizens born in an overseas territory is a "natural born Citizen" for purposes of this clause. Likewise, the eligibility of George Romney to run for President in 1968 was not widely questioned despite the fact that he was born to two U.S. citizens in Mexico (who actually migrated there to protest the U.S. outlawing polygamy)! So, even if we assume that Barack Obama wasn't born in Hawaii but in Kenya or wherever, his being the son of a U.S. citizen would still likely make him a natural born Citizen for purposes of the Constitution. You have to love the times we live in -- the weirdest law school hypotheticals are now the basis for bills under debate in state legislatures!

- wildboy

April 21, 2010 at 1:22pm

If AZ were to go through with this, would there be any way for the consequences to be so blown out of proportion and distorted so madly that AZ ended up getting bounced from the US? I mean, it wouldn't really be that big a loss, would it?

- cspencef

April 21, 2010 at 1:55pm

Wildboy, I believe the natural born citizen clause doesn't apply to McCain, because of the grandfather provision -- he was a citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. ;)

- Fishpeddler

April 21, 2010 at 2:16pm

fishpeddler, ha. wildboy, there was a law stating that your parent (if only one was a citizen) had to be a citizen and resident of the US at least 5 years after the age of 16. If she were in Kenya at the time she wouldn't have qualified. Now, of course, there is zero evidence that she went to Kenya at the very young age of 18 to have a baby instead of having him in Hawaii, and being that she was attending University classes in Hawaii at the time (without a shred of evidence anywhere that she had even had a passport, much less flew to Kenya) and being that there are hospital records and newspaper records and a certificate of live birth, about the only thing you can say to the birthers are is that they are complete and total assholes.

- blackton

April 21, 2010 at 2:37pm

Wouldn't refusing to accept documentation from another state allow for the strong prospect of a challenge under the full faith and credit clause?

- bayardgb

April 21, 2010 at 3:04pm

"hospital records and newspaper records and a certificate of live birth" All faked by the CIA, of course, just like the way they made up his education at Columbia, or cleaned up all the evidence that 5-year-old Wunderkind agent Barack Hussein Obama arranged for the car crash that killed Paul McCartney in 1966.

- frippo

April 21, 2010 at 3:17pm

I understand that there are going to be nutcases in any country. Bell curves have long tails in a population of 300 Million. What I cannot understand is a political party of long standing, and long bearing legitimate ideas worthy of public debate, can not have the spine to stand up and denounce the nut cases in their own midst, and literally - and I do mean literally here - laugh them off the public stage. The birthers are idiots, but the rest of the Republicans who don't denounce and mock them into irrelevence - are just spineless slugs.

- IowaBeauty

April 21, 2010 at 3:28pm

I agree with Iowa -- the problem isn't Orly Taites and her band of deranged paranoids, it's the GOP.

- ironyroad

April 21, 2010 at 3:43pm