After seven years of nonsense from the right fringe disputing President Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth, it’s delicious to see the GOP become entangled in its own birther squabble involving Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Not surprisingly, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has been the ringmaster of both circuses.
Trump first ran for the White House in 2012 in a short-lived campaign built around long-discredited allegations that Obama was born not in Hawaii, but in his father’s native Kenya.
Nevermind that Obama had posted a copy of his birth certificate on the Internet and that Hawaii’s Republican Gov. Linda Lingle had vouched for its validity.
Trump vowed to send investigators to Hawaii to uncover the “truth,” a promise never fulfilled.
Now Trump is questioning whether his GOP presidential rival Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban-Canadian father, meets the constitutional requirement that the president be a “natural born citizen” of the United States.
The irony is that Cruz is supported by some of the most far right in his party who helped stoke the disinformation campaign about Obama’s birth.
The hypocrisy is that their defense of Cruz — that he’s a natural born citizen because his mother was an American citizen — would have applied equally to Obama even if he had been born in Kenya.
State Sen. Sam Slom, Hawaii’s highest-ranking Republican elected official, is treading a middle ground.
When Trump revived the Obama birth conspiracy in 2011, Slom would only go so far as to say Obama was “probably” born in Hawaii and agreed there was “a legitimate issue” about the president’s birth.
Slom, who supports Ben Carson for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, takes a similar position on the Trump-Cruz dispute.
“I think it is a legitimate question and smart tactical move on Trump’s part, but everything I’ve read points to citizenship,” Slom said.
He’s probably correct on the law, as most legal scholars agree that the Constitution doesn’t require birth on American soil, only American citizenship at birth by virtue of having an American parent.
But the legal community isn’t unanimous, and the issue remains open because the Supreme Court has never ruled on it.
Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, faced the question because he was born in Arizona before it became a state, but the matter never got to the Supreme Court.
The issue came up again in 2008 when Sen. John McCain, who was born to American military parents in the Panama Canal Zone, ran against Obama.
The Senate pushed a resolution, co-sponsored by then-Sens. Obama and Hillary Clinton, declaring McCain to be a natural born citizen, but Senate resolutions aren’t binding on the Supreme Court and the matter wasn’t litigated.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
