“A lot of people come down here to work on making good government and building a better society,”  Rob DuRay of the progressive leaning New Era Colorado, told the Colorado Independent. “So, to bring forward a ‘birther’ bill is offensive and cynical. We have people working very hard and it is distracting from other problems.”

Sen. Kent Lambert

SCR 003, requiring proof of citizenship from elected officials before they can take office,  caused a stir among Capitol watchers and inspired a flurry of Twitter tweets that ridiculed the bill. Sponsored by Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, and Rep. Chris Holbert, R-Parker, the bill would have had no affect on those elected to national office but instead would have targeted those elected to Colorado office.

“This will not affect any federal candidates,” Lambert said.

The bill was killed on a quick party-line vote with Sen. Bob Bacon, D-Fort Collins, jokingly saying it came about too late.

Two other pieces of legislation also died in the committee Monday. Each was a bill that had already been shot down earlier this year, but which crept back to life as Republican sponsored Senate concurrent resolutions.

Democrats re-buried legislation initially proposed by Secretary of State Scott Gessler.  The resolution would have required the secretary of state to check voter records with state and national databases to look for discrepancies in legal voting status. Those determined by the secretary of state to likely be on the voting roll illegally would have been asked to provide proof of citizenship within 90 days or lose the ability to vote.

Democrats then closed the coffin lid on SCR 4 but not quite as tightly as the other Lambert sponsored pieces of legislation. The bill would have required all employers to use the E-verify national database system in order to ensure that those applying for jobs were legally allowed to work in the United States. While Democrats voted solidly against the bill after raising concerns that E-verify has been shown to be inaccurate in some cases, some said once those problems were fixed they could be a ‘yes’ vote. Both Senators Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, and Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, expressed their interest in voting for a more accurate E-verify system later down the road.

“Maybe the time will come before I leave this legislature that I can vote yes on this bill, but not this time,” Boyd said.

After the legislation was killed Lambert charged that Democrats were against curtailing illegal immigration.

“Democrats claim we need to send a message to Washington to deal with illegal immigration, but their solution is to give in-state tuition to ‘undocumented’ aliens. They cannot even agree that voters and elected officials should provide proof of citizenship,” Lambert told the Senate minority office’s “news agency.”

“Senate Democrats continue to thwart the will of the people by refusing to stem the tide of illegal immigration while simultaneously rewarding illegal behavior,” said Lambert. “With 9.2 percent unemployment in Colorado, when will they understand they are killing jobs for American citizens and legal foreign workers?”

“I commend Rep. Bill Posey for taking the lead in introducing and securing co-sponsors for important legislation that enforces the presidential qualifications outlined in Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution,” writes WND’s Joseph Farah in his introduction to the email. “It is critical that we begin enforcing the Constitution before the 2012 election with regard to the eligibility of presidential candidates.”

In his appeal, Posey asks donors to help him fend off an attack from Democrats–an attack based on his brave quest for presidential birth certificates.

“My bill (H.R. 1503) that would require all candidates for President in the future to provide documentation (such as a birth certificate) to prove they are natural born citizens of the United States, has resulted in the national liberal left making me Top target for defeat in the 2010 Congressional elections,” writes Posey. “As I said before, I’m being lambasted by the media and late-night comics and Nancy Pelosi’s team has already paid for tens of thousands of automated phone calls in my district and are raising a multi-million-dollar campaign war chest to defeat me.”

Here’s Farah’s introduction:

And here’s the fundraising splash page for Posey.

A group of five Texas congressmen, including Reps. John Culberson, D-Houston, and Ted Poe, R-Humble, is considering whether to require future presidential candidates to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Please, gentlemen. That strikes us as grandstanding in the third degree. The whole thing is getting weirder than those old tabloid stories about house cats giving birth to space aliens. It’s time to say, “Enough, already.”

Poe and Culberson both represent districts that have grown less white and less Republican over the last few years. Poe’s 2nd District, for example, is 64.2 percent white and gave Barack Obama 40 percent of the vote, up from John Kerry’s 37 percent. Culberson’s 7th District is 67.5 percent white and gave Obama 41 percent of the vote, up from Kerry’s 36 percent. Neither is seen to be in danger in 2010, but the rewards of their being seen to back a racially-tinged conspiracy theory are increasingly limited.

Via Matt Finkelstein.

Am I the only one to notice that mainstream media attention to the “Birthers” has picked up in recent weeks — and that this increased attention is coincident to the turn in Obama’s approval ratings?

A search of The Washington Post web site, for instance, on the term “Birther” yields as its oldest hit this one, from July 6; a search of The New York Times, though, shows first mention of the term on July 22.

Far be it from me to assume one is the cause of the other — as faithful readers know, I do my best to avoid falling into the post hoc, ergo propter hoc trap — but, still, it is an interesting coincidence.

I can’t speak to discussions inside those newspapers’ newsrooms, but I have been following this, err, story for a year, and before the blow-up this month, there were several bursts of “birther” attention whenever these people got into a courtroom to make their case. And searching for the term “birther” isn’t the way to check this.

For example, in December 2008 a New Jersey lawyer got the Supreme Court to read a lawsuit about Obama’s “natural born” status and consider it for the 2009 docket. That generated a lot of attention, including cable news and a column by Dana Milbank. But the high court passed on the case and America moved on. At that point, President-elect Barack Obama was riding on a wave of goodwill, so it’s hard to suggest the media was covering up for him. I’d track the current “birther boom” to the mid-July lawsuit filed by Orly Taitz on behalf of Maj. Stefan F. Cook. That got, among other coverage, a national heads-up from Sean Hannity on his Fox News show.

Last Monday I noticed a July 10 YouTube video of a woman in red howling at Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) about the birth certificate. I posted it at 8:57 a.m. The Drudge Report posted it at some point between 9:23 a.m. and 9:33 a.m. (You can see in Drudge’s archives that it was not up yet 26 minutes after my original post.) So I guess I started this current wave of birthermania. Sorry, Bill Pascoe!

More seriously, it’s impossible to imagine these people getting attention from mainstream media reporters if they didn’t get members of Congress to endorse their agenda with things like Rep. Bill Posey’s (R-Fla.) “birther bill,” or get Republicans at the state level to join onto to lawsuits against Obama, as several Tennessee Republican legislators have. The media isn’t forcing them to do this.

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Kris Kobach campaigns in Wichita, Kans. (YouTube: WichitaLiberty)

Kris Kobach is a law professor with degrees from Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and a veteran of George W. Bush’s administration who, after Sept. 11, helped craft the policy on domestic registration of foreign visitors to the United States. In May, he announced a run for Kansas secretary of state, campaigning for photo ID requirements at the voting booth. He’s considered a clear front-runner for the job. But over the weekend, Kobach spoke at a Republican Party barbecue and committed a minor gaffe. According to the Lawrence Journal-World, Kobach “asked what President Obama and God had in common, with the punchline being neither has a birth certificate.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Kansas Democrats pounced. “While Kris Kobach has in the past associated himself with extremists who frequently show poor taste,” said state Democratic Party Executive Director Kenny Johnston, “his latest attempt at humor has gone too far.” Kobach told the Democrats to “lighten up” before walking back the comment, explaining that “until a court says otherwise, I believe Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen.”

Kobach could have offered another defense. The joke was not his. One month earlier, Rush Limbaugh made the same remark on his radio show. “Barack Obama has one thing in common with God,” Limbaugh said. “Know what it is? God does not have a birth certificate either.” And Limbaugh may not have been writing his own material, either. At Patriot Depot, a conservative web site that sells books by Glenn Beck and signs designed for anti-tax Tea Parties, buyers can pay $10 to get two bumper stickers that read: “Obama & God Have ONLY ONE THING in Common: NO BIRTH CERTIFICATE! The Difference Is God Doesn’t Think He’s Obama!”According to a salesman for Patriot Depot, the company has sold “hundreds” of this and another birth certificate sticker since advertising them with the conservative opinion sites GOPUSA.com and Townhall.com.

Six months into Obama’s presidency, after scores of embarrassing legal defeats, and even after tussles between the attoneys who’ve turned frivolous lawsuits about the president’s citizenship into full-time jobs, the cottage industry of conspiracy theories about the president’s birth shows no signs of disappearing. The theories have found a home in talk radio and on conservative web sites such as Free Republic and WorldNetDaily. Conspiracy theorists are increasingly sending letters to their local papers, embarrassing members of Congress at town hall meetings, and hounding Hill staffers about challenges to the president’s citizenship.

“I wouldn’t consider what Kris Kobach said a ‘gaffe,’ although it wasn’t a prudent comment,” said William B. Lacy, director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. “It’s not at the root of the complaint that conservative [Republicans] have with this administration. In essence, what any Republican is doing by raising that issue is creating his or her own red herring. Kobach is probably okay here, but there’s a certain danger, I think, if it becomes something you repeat on a continuous basis.”

There’s no indication that the White House is worried about all of this. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has occasionally called on Lester Kinsolving, a radio host and correspondent for WorldNetDaily, to air the latest theories about the president’s citizenship as a way of defusing tense press briefings. While “birthers” claim that the president’s lawyers have spent “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars” fighting their lawsuits, they’ve never provided evidence for that claim. Indeed, most of the suits have been tossed out of court on technicalities.

Ironically, the ‘birther’ movement began in response to Obama’s own efforts to debunk rumors. One year ago this week, the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barack Obama launched FightTheSmears.com, a web site designed to push back against false rumors about the first African-American presidential nominee. To push back against rumors that he was not born in Hawaii, the campaign reproduced a Certificate of Live Birth from the state’s Health Department. Instead of terminating the conspiracy theories, that inspired new theories — that the certificate had been forged or that even if it hadn’t been forged it was the sort of certificate that could be given to someone born outside of the United States. But the certificate is specific about Obama’s birth in Honolulu, down to the 7:24 p.m. time.

“It’s crazy,” said Janice Okubo, director of communications for the Hawaii Department of Health. “I don’t think anything is ever going to satisfy them.”

Okubo, who said that she gets weekly questions from Obama ‘Birthers’ that are “more like threats,” explained that the certificate of live birth reproduced by Obama’s campaign should have debunked the conspiracy theories. “If you were born in Bali, for example,” Okubo explained, “you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali. You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate. But it’s become very clear that it doesn’t matter what I say. The people who are questioning this bring up all these implausible scenarios. What if the physician lied? What if the state lied? It’s just become an urban legend at this point.”

The urban legend has become too pervasive for Republicans to avoid. In February, Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) introduced a much-mocked bill that would require presidential campaigns to provide “a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate.” While Posey initially said that he disbelieved conspiracy theories about the president’s birth, he told the host of an Internet radio show that he’d discussed the possibility of Obama being removed from office over “the eligibility issue” with “high-ranking members of our Judiciary Committee.” As of July 15, nine fellow Republican members of Congress were backing the bill. While Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) has said that he supports the bill because he didn’t know whether Obama was a citizen, other sponsors say that they weighed in to pour cold water on the conspiracy theories.

“It’s a good idea,” said John Donnelly, a spokesman for Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who became one of the bill’s co-sponsors this month. “If candidates provided that information to the Federal Election Commission you wouldn’t have all this hullaballoo. You don’t want to needlessly expose presidents to crazy conspiracy theories.”

At the state level, “birther” conspiracy theorists have made headway in getting Republican lawmakers interested in legislation like Posey’s. At least four Republican members of Missouri’s state legislature have looked into introducing a similar bill. State Sen. Randy Brogdon (R-Okla.) who is running for governor of Oklahoma in 2010, said that he’d co-sponsor birth certificate legislation if it made it out of the state senate and would “definitely” sign the bill if he won the governorship.

“You bet I’d sign it,” said Brodgon. “I know I’d have no problem showing my birth certificate.”

The Republicans who appear to be willing to listen to “birthers,” even to debunk them, have to walk a tightrope. In April, freshman Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) held a town hall meeting at her old high school in Cheyenne, Wyo., and got a question about the president’s citizenship. Lummis challenged the skeptic to “please send” evidence that the president was not a natural-born citizen. “I’m not questioning your concern,” Lummis said. “I am questioning whether there is credible evidence.” In early July, a small group of “birthers” walked the halls of Congress handing “grand jury presentments” over to the confused front desk assistants of members of Congress; the activists rushed online to report the latest member who had been “handed” the information. After “birthers” provided some of their papers to Michael Schwartz, the chief of staff to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), they rushed online to report that Schwartz had been won over to the cause and was about to get in touch with Orly Taitz, a California lawyer who has filed several unsuccessful challenges to the president’s citizenship.

“It is possible to mistake politeness for agreement,” Schwartz told TWI, “and I make every effort to be polite.” He did have a “brief conversation with Dr. Taitz,” but challenged the way online “birthers” had hyped their contact with Coburn’s office. “An observer would not report it quite like this,” said Schwartz.

Taitz’s lawsuits and the pressure of conservative talkers like Limbaugh have made it increasingly difficult for Republicans to avoid the “birthers.” On June 16, after Limbaugh joked about the president’s citizenship, WorldNetDaily editor-in-chief Joseph Farah appeared on the Web-based Recharge Radio to thank the host for spreading the “birther” message. “What that did is beyond Rush’s impact,” said Farah. “It also gives other talk show hosts license to talk about this issue … Rush is kind of the standard of talk show hosts. A lot of people emulate what he does. He crossed the Rubicon on that show, and I’m very proud of him for doing it.”

Farah’s instincts have been borne out by conservative media. This week, Taitz represented Maj. Stefan F. Cook, a reservist who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan, then demanded to be released from the commitment unless the president proved that he was a U.S. citizen. “I did not volunteer with the intent of becoming a conscientious objector,” Cook told TWI in an email. On Wednesday Cook’s deployment was cancelled, and a spokesman for Centcom took issue with Taitz’s claim, made in a WorldNetDaily story, that this decision verified conspiracy theories about the president’s birth. Later that night, Sean Hannity cited the story on his Fox News show and used Taitz’s version of the facts, not Centcom’s.

“Major Cook and his lawyer expressed joy at this outcome,” said Hannity. “And they took it as an admission on the part of the military that the president is not in fact a legitimate citizen by birth.”