The Arizona legislature is fighting an Obama eligibility battle over a bill to make candidates prove they are eligible to their offices. The problem: Republican legislatures in Arizona are trying to stall the bill until the legislature ends its session.

The Obama eligibility bill

The new bill, Arizona House Bill 2480 (50th Legislature), says that anyone who wants his name on the ballot in Arizona, for any office, must swear that he is eligible to the office he seeks. That includes the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States. Furthermore, any citizen of Arizona, who has any reason to suspect that a candidate for office is not eligible, has standing to sue that candidate in court and ask the court to enjoin the relevant election authority from listing that candidate on the ballot.

This bill would be the first of its kind in the United States. It goes even further than the Georgia statute. That law lets candidates, or citizens of the State, bring their concerns before an administrative law judge. Administrative law judges are creatures of the executive branch, not the judiciary. Arizona’s law would let people sue in a court of law, under traditional rules of evidence.

A local blogger in Tempe, Arizona, correctly infers that this bill would let a court consider more than a candidate’s birth certificate. It would also ask a court to decide who is, and who is not, a natural-born citizen of the United States.

Republican roadblocks

Representative Carl Seel (R-6-Phoenix) introduced his bill in the Arizona House. But House Speaker Andy Tobin refused to assign it to a committee. Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ) had vetoed a bill like this one last year, and the Speaker suggested that Brewer would veto this one, too.

Seel, undaunted, prevailed on a Senator to attach his bill as an “amendment in nature of substitution” to House Bill 2480, that had already passed the House and gone to the Senate. The problem: the Senate Healthcare and Medical Liability Reform Committee (Senator Nancy Barto, chair) already had the original bill. (The bill was a brief amendment to the rules of the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System.) On March 14, the Senate Government Reform Committee passed the substituted bill, 4-2, with 1 member not voting.

Seel and his allies in the Senate have sought to withdraw the bill from Senator Barto’s committee. But Senator Barto will not let it go until Seel can satisfy her that the substituted bill would pass the full Senate. The problem: if the Senate Rules Committee does not take up this bill by Monday (April 2), it will not have enough time to pass it with a proper debate rule before the Senate adjourns sine die (Latin, “without a date”), that is, finally ends its session. The bill must also come back to the Arizona House for passage, because the House has never voted on the new text of the bill. (See also this article by Richard Winger at Ballot Access News, and this article by Alia Beard Reu of The Arizona Republic.)

Seel fights back

Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ.

Yesterday Representative Seel took his case to the public. He called a press conference with Senator Lori Klein, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, and Mike Zullo, head of the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse. Seel had one thing to ask the people: call their Senators, especially Senator Barto and Senator Steve Pierce (R-Prescott), President of the Senate, and demand that they move Seel’s bill forward.

Zullo spoke briefly about the latest that his Posse has found while investigating the Obama birth certificate and Barack Obama’s Selective Service registration form. The finding that worries the Posse most is that the date stamp on the draft form has only two digits for a date, and those digits are off-center. Government forms like this one always have four digits for a date. He therefore assumes that this form is fraudulent. That alone suggests that Barack Obama, or someone close to him, broke the law in 1980 by filing a false draft registration form.

Sheriff Arpaio will host another press conference at 1:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time in Sun City West, Arizona. There, event organizers will circulate a petition to force the Democratic National Committee to give Sheriff Arpaio information that could possibly validate the birth certificate.

Related:

• Obama birth certificate still suspect
• Obama born in Kenya?
• Presidential succession crisis
• Does anybody really know what time it is?
• Obama birth certificate investigation
• Obama birth certificate fraud analysis
• Obama birth certificate fraud
• Natural born citizen: what that means
• Obama eligibility: reactions to ruling
• Obama eligibility: flawed ruling
• Obama eligibility challenges multiply
• Obama eligibility challenges explode
• Obama eligibility challenges go forward
• Obama birth certificate does not satisfy
• Obama releases official-looking birth certificate

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