Legal News

Obama?s Citizenship Again Questioned And Then Answered

By Dionne Searcey

Associated Press

This 1960’s era photo shows Obama with his mother Stanley Ann Dunham. The Kansas-born mother, the Kenyan-born father, Barack Obama Sr., met at the University of Hawaii. They married, and Barack was born on Aug. 4, 1961. Photo: AP

The election is over and Barack Obama will be the official President of the United States come Jan. 20. But one anti-tax advocate from upstate New York is still clinging to the allegation raised during the campaign that Obama isn’t really a U.S. citizen, and thus isn’t legally eligible for his new job.

Robert L. Schulz, 69, chairman of We The People Foundation, took out full-page ads in Obama’s hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, on Monday and Wednesday to raise questions about whether Obama’s Hawaii certificate of live birth is authentic. Today’s Tribune, in a blow-by-blow account, refutes the allegations in his ad.

The story notes that cases challenging Obama’s citizenship have been tossed out of courts in several states, and Hawaiian officials have vouched for the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. It’s now locked in a state vault. Obama’s campaign has always refuted the accusations.

Last summer, the campaign produced a digital copy of his certificate of live birth. When that failed to satisfy critics, staff at FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said they had seen, held and examined the actual birth certificate. To add to that, Hawaii’s health director and head of vital statistics reviewed Obama’s birth certificate and vouched for its authenticity.

According to the Tribune, Schulz’s ad offers a few misstatements of U.S. law – chiefly that federal law at the time of Obama’s birth “denied citizenship to any child born in Kenya if the father was Kenyan and the mother was not yet 19 years of age.”

Schulz, who once had a judge in the Northern District of New York order him to shut down a website that sold advice on avoiding taxes, told the Tribune he’s spent tens of thousands of dollars to get his message across.

“We never get involved in politics,” he told the paper about his group, We The People. “We avoid it like the plague.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 03, 2008 (boomark / email).