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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Court rejects Obama lawsuit

By Michael Doyle
McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Hawaii news photo - The Honolulu Advertiser

President-elect Barack Obama

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WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama's January inauguration is still good to go, after the Supreme Court yesterday declined to hear a long-shot challenge to his electoral eligibility.

Without comment, the court brushed off a lawsuit claiming Obama didn't meet the Constitution's citizenship requirements. The move undercuts but doesn't end a legal campaign that's gotten far more traction on the Internet than in the courts.

Justices must still dispose of at least one other legal challenge to Obama's eligibility. Promoted on Web sites and in the conservative media, the various challenges differ somewhat in detail but build on common questions and insinuations about the circumstances of Obama's birth.

"Since candidate Obama was born to a Kenyan father, he is not eligible to the office of the president since he is not a natural-born citizen," said retired attorney Leo C. Donofrio in his petition to the Supreme Court.

Obama was born in Hawai'i. His mother was a U.S. citizen and his father, a native of Kenya, was a British subject.

While the Obama team has largely dismissed questions about his citizenship, the persistence of the questions drove the campaign in June to make public his birth certificate. It shows, among other things, that he was born in a Honolulu hospital at 7:42 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961.

Anyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, regardless of his or her parents' immigration status.

Hawai'i Health Department Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino and the state's registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, say they checked department records and have determined there is no doubt Obama was born in Hawai'i.

"Smears claiming Barack Obama doesn't have a birth certificate aren't actually about that piece of paper, they're about manipulating people into thinking Barack is not an American citizen," said an Obama Web site created during the campaign to counter misinformation about the candidate.

Some conservative activists haven't been convinced. They've been paying for ads, including a full-page missive that appeared Nov. 17 in the Washington Times national weekly edition, and they've been filing multiple lawsuits.

Donofrio also contends that two other candidates, Republican John McCain and Socialist Workers candidate Roger Calero, also are not natural-born citizens and thus ineligible to be president.

The other appeal over Obama's citizenship was brought by Philip J. Berg of Lafayette Hill, Pa. Berg argues that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawai'i as Obama says and Hawai'i officials have confirmed.

Berg says Obama also may be a citizen of Indonesia, where he lived as a boy. Federal courts in Pennsylvania have dismissed Berg's lawsuit. Federal courts in Ohio and Washington state have rejected similar lawsuits.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.