Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein is still a birther, and he's so proud of it that he has devoted a July 15 article to trying to prove his case.
Klein lays out his thesis at the start of the article:
One central point seems to be missing from the national conversation about impeaching President Obama for alleged violations of the Constitution.
When Obama was first proposed as a presidential candidate in 2007, the nation failed to have a meaningful debate concerning the serious constitutional issue of electing someone whose father was not a U.S. citizen.
According to correspondence from the original framers of the Constitution as well as Supreme Court rulings, the legal writings that helped establish the principles of the Constitution and even a Senate resolution affirmed by Obama himself, Obama likely does not qualify for the constitutional requirement that stipulates only a “natural born” citizen can serve as U.S. president.
In other words, Obama’s very presidency could itself be unconstitutional. And the matter has nothing to do with where the president was born.
While Klein concedes that "natural born citizen" isn't defined in the Constitution or federal law, he has decided that he knows better by citing Emmerich de Vattel's "The Law of Nations." But as we've noted, no direct equivalent to "natural born citizen" appears in Vattel's original French, and the phrase shows up only in English translations of the book issued after the Constitution was written.
Klein also invokes the Supreme Court's 1874 Minor v. Happersett decision as authoritative on the definition of "natural born." But that decision involved a woman who was suing for the right to vote, not presidential eligibility; the woman's status as a "natural born citizen" was not the issue; and the court ruling discusses only two types of citizens, "natural born" and "naturalized."
Klein makes no mention whatsoever of a decision that much more directly applies to the issue at hand -- the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a child born in America was a U.S. citizen.
Klein goes on to insist that a 2008 Senate resolution declaring John McCain to be a "natural born" citizen "seems to define the term as one who is born to two U.S. citizens." The Senate may have done so regarding McCain's citizenship, but it also did not establish two citizen parants as the only possible way to be defined as a "natural born" citizen.
Klein has also decided he won't even concede that Obama was born in Hawaii. He writes only that Obama "was born Aug. 4, 1961, to Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr." but won't mention the location. That attitude contradicts what he wrote in his 2009 book "The Manchurian President," in which he declared there was "no convincing evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, nor that his birthplace was any place other than Hawaii, his declared state of birth."
All Klein has done here is simply rehash what he and WND was claiming since at least 2011 -- pretty much cutting-and-pasting previous work -- while making no effort whatsoever to examine any of the evidence that discredits birthers like himself, let alone acknowledge that such evidence exists. But then, hiding the fact that birthers have been discredited is how WND rolls.
The fact that Klein is still peddling discredited birther nonsense doesn't bode well for the veracity of Klein's upcoming book, in which he purports to tell "the real Benghazi story."
