Obama Citizenship

Ballot Update: OK State Rep Ritze Pre-fills Bill

By Phil

Per Ballot-Access.org:

Oklahoma Representative Mike Ritze (R-Broken Arrow) has pre-filed a bill, requiring candidates for public office to submit a copy of their Birth Certificates. Ritze is a professor of Forensic Science and a physician, and was just elected to his first term in the legislature in November 2008. Ritze introduced his bill because he does not believe that President-Elect Barack Obama has demonstrated that he meets the constitutional qualifications.

Ritze also says that he is trying to persuade U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe to object to counting electoral college votes for Obama, when Congress counts the electoral votes on January 8.

The Oklahoma legislature does not convene until February. Oklahoma legislators are free to pre-file bills, but the Oklahoma legislature?s web page does not yet have the text of pre-filed bills, so the text of Ritze?s bill is not available. Since presidential nominees of qualified parties do not actually file for the November ballot in any state, it is not clear how Ritze?s bill can accomplish its objective, relative to general election presidential nominees of qualified parties.

The last paragraph notwithstanding, I think the point of initiatives such as this is to fix the system now and going forward, so that we can begin rectifying the State-based electoral system for federal candidates. Would it be great to make something like this retroactive? Absolutely, and there’s a good chance it wouldn’t even be unconstitutional, since it’s up to the States on how they wish to pursue federal office elections. However, I doubt that retroactivity will be a goal for this bill (though I’d be happy to be wrong).

A current lisiting of State-based initiatives can be found here.

-Phil

Full post as published by The Right Side of Life on January 01, 2009 (boomark / email).