The Missing Pieces Of Obama's Life Story

Normally, the question of a president's place of birth is established long before he assumes the office of the Presidency, unless you're Barack Hussein Obama. Prior to taking office, the Obama meme was that he was born at Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961; however, as WND reports, Obama shifted his birth place account to name Kapi' olani Medical Center in Honolulu as his birth place. The Library of Congress' genealogist, William Adams Reitwiesner, originally listed Queen's Medical Center as Obama's place of birth. He has now changed it to Kapi' olani. WND has tried to confirm with Kapi' olani hospital officials' the validity of the claim Obama was born at the hospital, but hospital officials declined to answer, citing health privacy concerns. WND notes that Snopes.com identifies Queen's Medical Center as his place of birth. A UPI story on his presidential campaign announcement said, "Obama described his birth at Queen's Medical Center in Hawaii Aug. 4, 1961, to a young white woman and a father of Luo ethnicity from Nyanza Province in Kenya . . . " It appears Obama switched the account of his place of birth after taking office as President.

That such simple matters of Obama's life story remain a mystery even after he's been in office for eight months is troubling. Unlike his presidential predecessors, Obama has gone to great lengths to block reporters and the public from obtaining his school records, particularly his records at Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His records from his tenure as a state senator simply disappeared. Medical records have been limited to a simple one-page letter from a doctor who hadn't examined Obama in over a year. He has refused to furnish his original birth certificate, the one he described holding in his hand when he wrote his second books, Dreams From My Father, which would have stated the hospital at which he was born and cleared up the confusion over his actual birth place. On his first day as President, Obama signed an executive order restricting the release of presidential records.

WND has devoted considerable time and resources trying to prove Obama really wasn't born in Hawaii. Instead, WND has attempted to prove he was born in Kenya based on the claims of some Obama relatives in Kenya, including his step-grandmother, Sarah Obama. WND's efforts have been misplaced and based on a false assumption that Obama's birth abroad alone would disqualify him as a natural born citizen, a constitutional requirement for serving as president. Other constitutional scholars disagree. Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate identifies a Kenyan citizen, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., as his father. By the Obama campaign's own admission, Obama had dual citizenship at birth. Constitutional research of the meaning of "natural born citizen" suggests the founders intended that a candidate must be born of U.S. citizen parents to be considered a "natural born citizen." His father's Kenyan citizenship alone disqualified Obama as a natural born citizen. More importantly, his mother later divorced and remarried an Indonesian citizen, Lolo Soetoro, who adopted the younger Obama and had his legal name changed to "Barry Soetoro" according to his Indonesian school records. Those same school records identified Barry Soetoro as an Indonesian citizen.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the U.S.Senate actually conducted hearings on Sen. John McCain's "natural born citizenship" status and declared him such by resolution based on his birth to U.S. citizen parents, who were stationed in Panama at the time of his birth while his father served in the U.S. Navy. That resolution read:

Whereas John Sidney McCain, III, was born to American citizens on an American military base in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That John Sidney McCain, III, is a ‘‘natural born Citizen’’ under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States

Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff was questioned by senators about the meaning of the term, "natural born citizen." "My assumption and my understanding is that if you are born of American parents, you are naturally a natural-born American citizen," he said. Oddly, though not surprising, the U.S. Senate never conducted hearings to determine Obama's eligibility.

According to a State Department manual, the issue of whether the term included persons like McCain had never been officially determined. “It has never been determined definitively by a court whether a person who acquired U.S. citizenship by birth abroad to U.S. citizens is a natural born citizen within the meaning of Article II of the Constitution and, therefore, eligible for the Presidency,” the manual states. Implicit in the State Department's statement, however, is the requirement that both parents be U.S. citizens. Perhaps the best explanation of what the term means can be found in the Law of Nations, a constitutional treatise sometimes cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions:

“The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own preservation; and it is presumed, as matter of course, that each citizen, on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that of the children; and these become true citizens merely by their tacit consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the society in which they were born. I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country."

This definition clearly excluded Obama as a natural born citizen and arguably would exclude McCain as well, which explains why many Republicans were reluctant to push the issue during last year's presidential campaign. The State Department manual notes that the original Immigration and Naturalization Act defined the term in a way that was helpful to McCain. "The 'Act to establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization', enacted March 26, 1790, (1 Stat. 103,104) provided that, “...the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born ... out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States." Again, Members of Congress who wrote this law immediately after the adoption of the Constitution would have deemed Barack Hussein Obama ineligible to be president based upon this Act. Many people confuse subsequent immigration laws deeming persons born on American soil as U.S. citizens, forgetting that "natural born citizen" is a unique term used only once in the Constitution to determine the qualifications for the president. Being a statutory citizen at birth does not equate to being a natural born citizen as mistakenly believed by many persons.

During the debate over the adoption of the 14th Amendment nearly a hundred years after the adoption of the Constitution, Rep. John Bingham stated what a natural born citizen is: “I find no fault with the introductory clause [S 61 Bill], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen . . ." Can it be said that Obama's father did not owe allegiance to the British Commonwealth of which Kenya was a part at the time of his birth? I think not. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Waite touched on the conflict in what the term means in an 1875 opinion in Minor v. Happersett:

“The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first.”

In the final analysis, it must be conceded that this constitutional issue has never been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Numerous citizen attempts to challenge Obama's qualifications in U.S. courts, both federal and state, were thwarted on standing grounds and not the merits of the challengers' claim. People on the Left can knock the people who raise the issue as "birthers" and "nuts" all they want, but there is considerable constitutional authority that would suggest Barack Hussein Obama is not a natural born citizenship by reason of his dual citizenship at birth because of his father's Kenyan citizenship.