I had been previously reporting that Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA), currently a 2010 gubernatorial candidate, was in the process of sending a letter to Mr. Obama allegedly to request his birth certificate. On Friday, January 8, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the White House had, in fact, received the letter (coverage also at RadioPatriot, Anti-Mullah, and the News-Independent):

The White House on Thursday confirmed receipt of a letter from U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal that formally asks Barack Obama to address questions about his place of birth – and thus, whether he is qualified to be president.

The letter arrived Dec. 10. Beyond that, no one is willing to say much.

According to my AJC colleague Bob Keefe in Washington, Todd Smith, Deal’s chief of staff, likewise confirmed that the letter had been sent. But neither Smith nor his boss would comment on its content.

“[Deal] just did what he said he was going to do,” Smith said. “It’s not news.”

Likewise, White House spokeswoman Gannet Tseggai – while acknowledging receipt of Deal’s letter, declined to release a copy or discuss its content, saying that the issue of Obama’s birth has been addressed repeatedly. …

Deal said he has “no reason to think” that Obama is not a legal citizen – but added that questions raised by so-called “birthers” about Obama’s nationality warrant more proof.

“I have looked at the documentation that is publicly available and it leaves many things to be desired,” Deal said in November.

After declining to respond to numerous phone calls and e-mails seeking comment, Smith finally addressed the letter during a brief interview at Deal’s Washington office on Thursday.

He declined to provide a copy, saying it was out of deference to the president.

PeachPundit, Georgia’s most influential political blog, began taking issue with the sentiment expressed in the last sentence of the AJC quote, above:

With all due respect Mr. Smith and Representative Deal, this is news. You made it news. You have decided to go all in with “crazy” by deciding to question the legitimacy – in every way that word has meaning – of a sitting President.

You don’t want it to be news because you just want the World Net Daily readers to know that you’re really one of them. But you want the more mainstream voters to know you’re a normal mainstream establishment Republican.

Yet, commenter “Mozart” took issue with the posting by “Icarus:”

So, let me see if I can gather from Icarus’s view of the world:

Once a question has ever been answered (whether the answer is the truth or not), it can never be asked again without someone laying a title on the asker of “birther, weirdo, crackpot, nutball”, etc.?

And commenter “Harry” brought up an excellent point, very similar to where I personally go with the eligibility issue (except for a brief foray into ignorance, mistaking “native-born” with the constitutional phrase, “natural born”):

The idea of a constitution is to help us all argue from the same starting point. There are basic constitutional differences that can’t have to be resolved in order to format national policies, differences involving decentralized free market vs. centralized collectivism among other things, some questions more difficult than others. If we give in on the easy questions, where does that lead us? One of the easy questions should be, does Obama meet the constitutional test for the presidency? He managed to avoid addressing this issue in 2008, but there’s still 2012. Only native-born U.S. citizens (or those born abroad, but only to parents who were both citizens of the U.S.) may be president of the United States, can become president according to the constitution. Whether Obama meets this requirement can be very easily put to rest, by him providing his full, original certificate of live birth. He hasn’t done this. The abbreviated, ex-post-facto computer version he put on the internet proves nothing. Let’s see the real one.