Former GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) on Wednesday defended his remarks that candidates' legal credentials to run for president should be cleared by a new government office.
"When you're a candidate for office, I fill out hundreds of pages of documents to verify each and every contribution that comes to my campaign. I have to fill out pages and pages that list every asset that I own," he told CNN. "You would think that the United States of America could go through a very simple process that said, 'Hey, I want to run for president,' and there would just be a person who would say, 'OK, here are the minimum qualifications. There's an age requirement. There's a birth requirement. Show that you meet these requirements and we move on.' "
Hoekstra, who's running for Sen. Debbie Stebenow's seat, told a Tea Party meeting earlier this month that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had missed an opportunity when he refused to question President Obama's citizenship in the 2008 race. He proposed a new governmental office to check future candidates' qualifications. The comments were
first reported by The Hill Wednesday morning.
When asked on CNN if he thought Obama was a U.S. citizen and whether his birth certificate was authentic, Hoekstra didn't answer. His campaign told The Hill Tuesday night that he did believe Obama was a citizen.
"This has nothing to do with Barack Obama. This has nothing to do about the past. This is all looking forward and saying, 'We have requirements in place. We have requirements in some states where people, when they go to vote, they've got to show a driver's license," he said. "We'll never have this kind of debate again. Let's talk about the real issues."
When asked about his comments that the "birther" movement had lost its best chance to argue Obama wasn't born in the United States when McCain refused to broach the topic, Hoekstra walked back his previous comments a bit.
"In 2008, our presidential nominee, the head of our political party, John McCain, decided that this was an issue that he was not going to pursue and moved on and talked about the things that he believed were most important about the campaign," he said.
"I don't know if that was an opportunity that was missed or not. It doesn't matter at this point. Barack Obama is the president of the United States. He has demonstrated, and no one has taken a look at this stuff and discredited it. I'm not talking about Barack Obama."
Hoekstra had told the Tea Party group that McCain had cost them the chance to delve into Obama's birth certificate.
"I think with this president the book is closed ... I hate to say it, but I think the debate's over," he said in early May. "We lost that debate in 2008 when our presidential nominee said, 'I ain’t talking about it' ... I'd love to give you the answer and say that I'm going to fight it, we're going to beat it and we're going to win it. I think it wasn't fought and we lost it."
