Back in August 2011, MLive political columnist Susan J. Demas wrote a piece about Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg with a headline that has aged into something more than a punchline: "U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg just can't let Barack Obama's birth certificate go."

It was not a close call. President Obama had released his long-form birth certificate nearly four months earlier. The nonpartisan FactCheck.org had already examined the original document in person back in 2008, confirmed it met every State Department requirement for proving U.S. citizenship, and concluded flatly: "The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A."

Walberg still wouldn't say it. At a 9/12 group forum in Tipton that August, asked about Obama's birthplace, he told the room that regardless of whether the "license" Obama showed was true or fake, he hadn't seen it himself other than what was "portrayed in the news" — and that while he'd like the question "finally answered as much as anybody else," chasing it took his eye off the ball.

That's what "just can't let it go" looks like: the evidence arrives, and the congressman decides the evidence doesn't count because he personally hasn't held it.

How Walberg got there

This wasn't a stray comment at one forum. Walberg worked the birther conspiracy repeatedly while running to win back his seat in 2010.

In September 2010, on a Michigan radio call-in show, Walberg was asked whether Obama was an American citizen. His answer, as Right Wing Watch documented, was: "You know, I don't know. I really don't know. We don't have enough information about this President." He went on to say the real priority was making sure Obama didn't remain president. After the story got attention, he walked it back, saying he took the president at his word that he was a Christian and an American citizen.

The walk-back lasted about a month.

In October 2010, at a town hall, Walberg went further than "I don't know." He suggested using the impeachment power of Congress to pry the document loose. In his own words:

"The Executive has an awful lot of power to keep from showing certain things unless the courts will stand up to him. Or unless Congress, in majority, will stand up -- up to and including impeachment."

Read that again. A candidate for Congress publicly floating the impeachment of a sitting president — the gravest power the Constitution hands the House — as a tool to force him to produce a piece of paper he had already produced.

Then impeachment became sacred

Fast forward nine years. On December 18, 2019, Walberg voted against both articles of impeachment against President Trump, and put out a statement explaining why:

"Our Founding Fathers never intended impeachment to be a one-sided, political weapon."

He complained that impeachment had been reduced to "a purely partisan tactic," that the process "lacked credibility and transparency," and that "neither article of impeachment names a specific high crime or misdemeanor."

So: impeachment as a partisan weapon is a betrayal of the Founders when the target is Trump. Impeachment as a partisan weapon is a reasonable idea to raise at a town hall when the target is Obama and the underlying "high crime" is refusing to satisfy a conspiracy theory that had already been debunked.

There is no principle that reconciles those two positions. There's only whose side the president is on.

Why this isn't ancient history

It would be easy to file birtherism under "old news." It isn't — not for Walberg, and not for what it says about how he treats a fact he doesn't like.

The birther rumor was never really a question about paperwork. Researchers at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research studied who actually believed it, using national survey data. They found that strong Republicans with higher levels of racial animus were more inclined to believe the birther rumor — but not a comparable conspiracy theory about Obamacare "death panels." The racial attitudes predicted the birther belief specifically. As co-author Michael Traugott put it, they expected partisanship to matter, "and because he was an African American, racial attitudes would play a role as well."

That's Michigan's own flagship research institute, describing the thing Michigan's own congressman kept alive in front of a crowd in Tipton, the town he's from.

And the habit didn't stop when the birth certificate story died. Walberg has spent his career telling voters that a documented outcome is illegitimate whenever his side loses:

• On December 10, 2020, he was one of 126 House Republicans who signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to throw out the election results in four states Trump lost.
• On January 4, 2021, he announced he would object to certifying the election, citing "valid concerns about election integrity."
• Hours after a mob stormed the Capitol, he voted to throw out Arizona's electoral votes, and the next day Pennsylvania's.
• He then voted against creating an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack.

It's the same move every time. Documents get produced. Courts rule. Officials certify. And Walberg says he'd like the question "finally answered" — because the only answer he'll accept is the one that helps his party.

What Michigan's 5th District gets out of this

Here's the part that should matter most to people in Niles, Dowagiac, Monroe, Tipton, and the rest of the district: none of this did a single thing for you.

Walberg told that 2011 forum that the birth certificate question was taking his eye off the ball — off budget and policy work that would "make a long-term difference for this country in a positive way." He was right about the distraction. He just kept doing it anyway, for another decade, in a different form.

Meanwhile, the actual ball: an estimated 30,420 people in Michigan's 5th District are projected to lose health coverage because of the health care cuts Walberg voted for — 12,500 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 17,920 losing Medicaid. When constituents show up to ask him about that and the rest of his record, he told a Dowagiac crowd in August 2025 that he doesn't apologize for his positions, and whether they "accept the answer or not is not my biggest concern."

That's the throughline. A man who spent years demanding proof he'd already been given, from a president he didn't like, has no patience at all for constituents asking him to account for votes that will cost them their doctor.

Fifteen years in Congress. When the evidence was in front of him, he refused to accept it. When his own voters are in front of him, he doesn't much care what they think.

We deserve better.

Source

"U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg just can't let Barack Obama's birth certificate go" — Susan J. Demas, MLive, August 16, 2011 (archived). Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.