Arizona HB 2441 does *not* require candidates to "show birth certificates", which is too bad.
During the 2008 election Barack Obama's citizenship was challeneged and the campaign showed his birth certificate, but that wasn't enough for some people. They questioned the document's authenticity or pointed out that it's merely a "certification of live birth", not a "birth certificate". More recently recently it's popular to point out that the Hawaii document is the short form, not the original long form which includes figures like the hospital, birth weight, and delivering doctor.
A copy of the long form birth document wouldn't prove anything either. Birthers could always insist that they wanted the original document, not an officially certified duplicate. I've seen some birthers write that even if the original copy of the long-form document is ever produced that won't end the discussion either. The "original" could be challenged as a forgery, or they could demand to see if Obama's footprints compared with the baby's footprints, or they could hunt down the delivering physician and (assuming that he's still alive) pick apart his ~50 year old memories of that day.
At issue is what evidence is sufficient to prove that an individual is a "natural born citizen". Birthers don't say an original birth certificate is sufficient because nothing is sufficient. They're starting with the suspicion that Barack Obama isn't a natural born citizen and working backward, anomaly hunting for anything that might prove what they suspect is true.
News sources from Fox News to the Wall Street Journal law blog say that a new Arizona law will "require presidential candidates to show his or her birth certificate". If true, this would be at least a kind of progress, because it would define a birth certificate as a sufficient standard of evidence. This is not actually what the proposed law does. HB 2441 actually avoids all of the above issues and only requires that candidates "append to the affadavit documents that prove that the candidate is a natural born citizen" and that "if the Secretary of State has reasonable cause to believe that the Candidate does not meet the citizenship, age, and residency requirements prescribed by law, the Secretary of State shall not place that candidate's name on the ballot".
And that means that we're all right back where we started, with open criteria. Candidates can submit the short form certificate, certified duplicate, a certificate of live birth, sworn testimony from attending physicians, photos of the baby crowning at the base of Mount Rushmore next to the day's newspaper, or any other document that proves age, citizenship, and residency. If the Arizona Secretary of State follows the same rules as the State Department, Hawaii Department of Health or any of the judges from past Federal lawsuits they will find no "reasonable cause to believe that the Candidate does not meet the citizenship, age, and residency requirements". And if they're crazy or politically motivated they'll be in a position to claim that they're not persuaded regardless of how good the evidence is, at least until that decision can be appealed in a lawsuit.
Given the difficulty of disproving a negative and the ease that anything can be rephrased as an unfalsifiable negative, it's more productive to weigh the validity of two opposing positive statements. Based on the available evidence, is it more likely that Barack Obama is or isn't a natural-born citizen? Is it more likely that birthers are actually onto something, or are they just making up excuses to avoid accepting reality? We don't have to say definitively, once and for all. Evidence might some day turn up proving that Obama is a secret Kenyan, but until then the case against him looks a lot more like layers of unfalsifiable fantasy-based nonsense rather than anything rooted in reality that we ought to take seriously.
A copy of the long form birth document wouldn't prove anything either. Birthers could always insist that they wanted the original document, not an officially certified duplicate. I've seen some birthers write that even if the original copy of the long-form document is ever produced that won't end the discussion either. The "original" could be challenged as a forgery, or they could demand to see if Obama's footprints compared with the baby's footprints, or they could hunt down the delivering physician and (assuming that he's still alive) pick apart his ~50 year old memories of that day.
At issue is what evidence is sufficient to prove that an individual is a "natural born citizen". Birthers don't say an original birth certificate is sufficient because nothing is sufficient. They're starting with the suspicion that Barack Obama isn't a natural born citizen and working backward, anomaly hunting for anything that might prove what they suspect is true.
News sources from Fox News to the Wall Street Journal law blog say that a new Arizona law will "require presidential candidates to show his or her birth certificate". If true, this would be at least a kind of progress, because it would define a birth certificate as a sufficient standard of evidence. This is not actually what the proposed law does. HB 2441 actually avoids all of the above issues and only requires that candidates "append to the affadavit documents that prove that the candidate is a natural born citizen" and that "if the Secretary of State has reasonable cause to believe that the Candidate does not meet the citizenship, age, and residency requirements prescribed by law, the Secretary of State shall not place that candidate's name on the ballot".
And that means that we're all right back where we started, with open criteria. Candidates can submit the short form certificate, certified duplicate, a certificate of live birth, sworn testimony from attending physicians, photos of the baby crowning at the base of Mount Rushmore next to the day's newspaper, or any other document that proves age, citizenship, and residency. If the Arizona Secretary of State follows the same rules as the State Department, Hawaii Department of Health or any of the judges from past Federal lawsuits they will find no "reasonable cause to believe that the Candidate does not meet the citizenship, age, and residency requirements". And if they're crazy or politically motivated they'll be in a position to claim that they're not persuaded regardless of how good the evidence is, at least until that decision can be appealed in a lawsuit.
Given the difficulty of disproving a negative and the ease that anything can be rephrased as an unfalsifiable negative, it's more productive to weigh the validity of two opposing positive statements. Based on the available evidence, is it more likely that Barack Obama is or isn't a natural-born citizen? Is it more likely that birthers are actually onto something, or are they just making up excuses to avoid accepting reality? We don't have to say definitively, once and for all. Evidence might some day turn up proving that Obama is a secret Kenyan, but until then the case against him looks a lot more like layers of unfalsifiable fantasy-based nonsense rather than anything rooted in reality that we ought to take seriously.