The Arizona Legislature has passed a bill requiring presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to prove they were born in the U.S. in order to get on the Arizona ballot. If Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signs it, it will become law. The bill was instigated by “birthers” who hope to keep President Obama off the 2012 ballot, and reportedly 13 other states are considering similar bills.
Personally, I think birthers are wingnuts. However, I would happily support such a law — provided all voters have to prove their citizenship in the same way in order to vote; also, birth certificates to get driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, guns, business licenses, building permits, airline tickets, mortgages, jobs, education, and health care.
Sauce for the goose; sauce for the gander. I can live with that.
I don’t understand why this controversy continues. Since there’s already a law requiring presidents to be natural born citizens, I don’t understand why the birth certificate wasn’t made available from the beginning. Since there is no law restricting drivers licenses, etc to natural born citizens, we’d need new laws for that. This whole thing just makes no sense to me. John McCain had a similar problem, but here’s how he handled it.
Certainly we’d need new laws for much of what I mentioned. But in Colorado, at least, proof of citizenship is already required to get a driver’s license, as I’ve discussed before. Of course, that means we have a lot of people driving around without licenses …
After actually reading the link I provided earlier and this one from Wikipedia, it seems to me that McCain would be having the same, or worse problems proving his own legitimacy.
Dare I suggest that Obama is having this problem because he’s an African-American Democrat, whereas McCain is a white Republican?
I absolutely agree that there are far too many ID loopholes, most of which derive from the assumption that a birth certificate had been produced somewhere in the chain before the ID that is actually being shown was issued. You know what they say about assumptions. Now we’re all left looking like asses.
For as long as I can remember, one of my pet peeves has been how easy it is to use stolen credit cards. Even now, after all these years since I first saw it, it still amazes me to see someone make a credit (or debit) card purchase without having to provided confirming ID. Even the little scanner machines don’t require punching PIN numbers in!
Only a year ago I was complaining about my card getting blocked because I entered the PIN wrong. It was inconvenient, but I appreciated the security. It makes me nervous to think anyone could use my card by scribbling “Mickey Mouse” on the scanner screen and get away with it.