Can you imagine the constitutional problems/crisis?
From minutemennews.com
Supreme Court Opens Door to Obama Eligibility Challenge on February 15th
Chief Justice John Roberts Schedules A Case Regarding Obamas Forged IDs to be Heard in Conference Before the Full Supreme Court.
The case titled Noonan, Judd, MacLeran, Taitz v Bowen provides a mountain of evidence of Barack Obama using a last name not legally his, forged Selective Service application, forged long form and short form birth certificate and a Connecticut Social Security number 042-68-4425 which was never assigned to him according to E-Verify and SSNVS. Additionally, this case provides evidence of around one and a half million invalid voter registrations in the state of California alone.
Holy Cow!
Is this for real?
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My baloney meter is at 100% Baloney.
If this is real (and I doubt it is) I don’t think the SCOTUS would do anything about it.
As best I can quickly determine, it seems that a request for a stay of enforcement of a decision of the California Supreme Court has been distributed by the Chief Justice to be considered in conference by the full Court.
That is, SCOTUS is not hearing or considering anything on the merits.
No, this is not real. Kerchner v. Obama was laughed out of hearing (or as much as the venerable justices allow themselves laughter) in 2010. A quick glance at Reuters or another wire service shows this is just the Internet’s periodic belching forth of spuriousness.
It would be an interesting case but I think it would be useless because by the time it finishes, his term is over.
Legisperitus is correct. Here is the SCOTUS docket link: http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.aspx?FileName=/docketfiles/12a606.htm
Taitz is a well-known and repeatedly sanctioned serial litigator on this issue. Reading the docket, she filed a request with the Court and it was referred as a matter of course to the justice overseeing the Ninth Circuit, Justice Kennedy. When he denied it, Supreme Court procedure allows the request to be refiled with each justice in turn. Instead of clogging up the docket, the Chief Justice short-circuited her trip around the nine justices by referring it to the full Court. This time, when it gets denied, she won’t be able to refile. (She can file for reconsideration, but after that, she’s done.)
(Yes, I am a lawyer.)
[Helpful. Thanks.]
Wow, I am quite shocked that it has gotten this far (and not because I think these accusations are baseless). When they refused to hear the various Natural Born Citizen cases, I pretty much lost hope. I do think the SS# is probably just a mistake. I’ve read that it is just one digit off from what a valid Hawaii number would have been, so it could have been human error (I’ve had that happen to me). I have read quite a lot about some of the other issues names here, and there is certainly a lot to be curious about.
hmm…guess I should have read through the comments before I got all excited. I hadn’t noticed Taitz’s name on the case. Sigh.
Truly, if it were to happen that a case came before SCOTUS, is there any reason to believe they would do other than to ratify his eligibility? The alternative, it seems to me, would involve a plethora of issues, not least being the validity of any and all legislation passed over his signature.
I can dream, can’t I?
This will be interesting, prior cases regarding eligibility were not heard, not in regards to merits of the case, but with the simple excuse that the plaintiff’s lacked standing. The origin of the eligibility dispute, came not from the republican party, but from Hillary Clinton’s lawyers. Her campaign dropped the question without explanation during the 2008 primary. Were deals made in regards to this? Where is Hillary now?
It was filed as a petition for writ of mandamus and stay of certification of electoral votes for presidential candidate Obama. I just read the petition and briefly reviewed the evidence (sworn declarations attached to the petition.) The petitioners have standing because some are members of the electoral college from California and some are presidential candidates (from minor parties). The petition itself is quite persuasive, but what matters is the evidence. To me, it seems like there would be enough there for the case to proceed on the merits, but alas, this is not my area of legal expertise.
Unfortunately we live in a nation where the merits of this case are irrelevant. The political fallout of a valid nullification of the Obama election and/or previous presidential term would be devastating to the nation. I say this as an individual who is as anti-Obama as you are likely to find. There is simply no conceivable chance that SCOTUS would make such a determination. It would precipitate a constitutional crisis which would likely result in a full out collapse of the American society. Neither Obama nor his Congressional allies would simply sit back and go quietly into the night. His supporters would likely riot. The legitimacy of all of his legislation would be called into question as well as all of his executive orders. While many here might applaud that, the probable legal ramifications would paralyze the Federal government. I can think of no better atmosphere for some kind of power grab by one side or the other.
The Supreme Court Justice who was so worried about SCOTUS’s reputation and legacy that he declared a shaky law constitutional using an equally shaky concept of fines as tax, rather than open the court up to political criticism over Obamacare, is not likely to allow SCOTUS to precipitate such a crisis, law and constitution be damned.
Magash, while I would not dispute your vision of the impact of a nullification b SCOTUS, I am inclined to believe that the continuation of Obama’s policy and spending by the Democrats leads to essentially the same outcome. And the rioters are likely to be the same: the Obama supporters whose government checks have either ceased or ceased to have value.
Father Z, at this link there is the affidavit filed by Susan Daniels about the CT SS# Obama has been using.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/time_to_ask_obama_abut_his_social_security_number.html
Obama has spent millions preventing anyone from having access to any of his records.
The precedence in ignoring this issue or simply laughing it off is a constitutional crisis in itself.
By the way, nothing could happen if Obama was ineligible…
Barry Soetoro is as legitimate as a three dollar bill, Father.
[That is, I suppose, what some are trying to prove. Are the claims based on facts or animus?]
This is the sort of thing that periodically makes me embarrassed to be a conservative. Our president is a far-left fool, and not a single law or regulation that he proposes will do anybody any good. However, he is legitimately the president. He was born in Hawaii of an American mother, and I’ve seen no convincing evidence to the contrary. He won the presidential election twice, and by margins that make accusations of electoral fraud moot. The Congress of the United States duly counted the electoral votes and announced his election. They had the standing to determine that he failed to qualify under the Constitution, and they did not do so.
He’s the president, we’re stuck with him. Take the tinfoil out of your hat and make peace with that fact. We need to oppose him at every step in order to preserve our liberty. In order to do that, we need to convince our neighbors to help us. Continually harping on the alleged citizenship problem only makes the opposition view us as unreasonable or insane.
This is one of the few areas in which the US, and common law, is doing things the stupid way. I’m not talking about Obama per se, but about the lack of a proper civil registry. Working with birth certificates is fraught with error and danger. People loose them, people forge them, they may not get made in the first place. A nationwide database which records all births and deaths, immigrations and emigrations (and frankly, locations of residence) does wonders in keeping the voter rolls clean and establishing that people are who and what they say they are. In fact, one can also quite easily reduce another problem with it, namely illegal immigration, as it becomes a whole lot harder to function off the grid.
Probably some die-hard libertarians would see that as the exact objection, but if there is one thing that is necessary to safeguard the integrity of the democratic process and the nation in general, it’s that no-one can claim rights that belong to others.
Will D, two points:
1. President Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate looks nothing like mine.
2. The continued controversy surrounding Obama’s citizenship is entirely due to his actions. I’m sorry, but if you keep acting like you’ve got something to hide, expect people to believe that you do. As an aside, I believe that this was a calculate move on Obama’s part
MichaelJ:
1) My birth certificate was lost when my mother’s wallet was stolen. When we requested a new one, we got a laminated card about the size of a credit card that was an extract from the county records. I am unconcerned that my replacement certificate makes me less of a citizen than I would be with my old one. Further, I find it harder to believe some great conspiracy to legitimize his birth certificate happened than to believe that it he was born in Hawaii.
2) This I understand. I can’t think of any other prominent politician in the United States that has as weird a personal history as the president does. A foreign parent, a divorce, growing up in a foreign country with a foreign step parent, etc. If Jesse Jackson, Sr., or Colin Powell, or Condoleeza Rice been elected, for instance, this would not be an issue. I simply don’t believe the allegations have any basis in fact. I think that some people have let their disdain for him overpower their reason.
Will, you missed the point. This has nothing to do with Obama’s personal history nor is it an attempt to prove that Obama is not a Natural Born US Citizen. Instead, it is simply to point out that peoples’ initial and continuing belief otherwise is not as unreasonable as you think.
Other Presidential candidates have had their citizenship questioned – including John McCain in 2008. All of them produced documentation proving their citizenship and the “issue” died.
Obama reacted quite differently – again as if he had something to hide – and the issue has not died. I think we can both come up with reasonable explanations for that fact which do not require the belief that others are fools wearing tinfoil hats.
I doubt this 100% The president is not some Kenyan imposter. Sorry folks, he is not. As much as would like to have someone else be my president. This is what we have to deal with. Pray and fight for a different outcome in 2014 and 2016
As several people have pointed out, the Supreme Court has not agreed to hear this case:
“The roughly 10,000 petitions that the court receives annually are referred to the regular conference meetings for discussion, then around 100 are picked by the justices for oral arguments and a final decision. The votes of four justices in the conference are needed to schedule arguments.”
Also,
“The scheduling comes a week after another birther activist suggested impeaching Roberts if he attempted to swear-in Obama later this month.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/09/orly-taitz-birther-supreme-court_n_2443077.html
This looks like a variation of this old canard:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/ssn.asp
To those saying that it could precipitate a constitutional crisis, well, perhaps. But it’s actually a political issue: the proper vetting did not take place. If it were demonstrated that an ineligible man was elected, Congress (political) could and probably would move to make him eligible. The scandal would not be that his acts as president were invalidated or anything like that. The scandal would be that the press and politicians refused, despite warnings, to ensure that this candidate was eligible. That’s a breakdown of the electoral system.
Those who scoff at people who believe he was born in Kenya have not actually read the various birther claims. While some “birthers” do claim a Kenya birth (which would render him ineligible because his US-citizen mother was under the age of 18–details I won’t go into here), as many or more believe that, even if/though he was born in Hawaii, he at some point chose Indonesian citizenship. They suspect that he came to Occidental College portraying himself as a foreign student and that he traveled on an Indonesian passport. Whether that would make him ineligible to be elected president, I don’t know. But their point is something else: it all adds up to a man who at various points in his life eagerly portrayed himself as a foreigner. (This includes the “I was born in Kenya” info he himself supplied to his publicist who was circulating claim for years, apparently because he and she thought it made him sound more interesting as an author.)
At issue is just what sense of being of and from and grounded in America this man possesses or whether he changes his sense of who he is chameleonlike, depending on what he thinks will work to his advantage.
It was the job of a critical (in the sense of question-asking) press to have raised these questions. They weren’t raised.
I came back from a year studying in Germany in 1972 thinking much the same way it appears that Obama thinks about himself: as an outsider, very aware of all that was wrong with America and how superior other cultures were.
There’s plenty wrong with America, to be sure. But after I grew up a bit, I began to realize that just because the people I met and lived with abroad were sure all sorts of things were wrong with America, that didn’t necessarily mean those things were wrong. I came to identify myself as an American with America, the way a person identifies with his own family, warts and all.
The “outsider” mentality, seeing nothing but warts, is characteristic of a lot of academics to this day–having roots in the Grand Refusal, the Non Serviam, of my generation in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s characteristic of NPR and PBS and a host of people who, noses elevated, consider themselves smarter and more knowledgeable than those gun-clingers and Flyover-Country hicks.
It’s that sense of outsider-superiority-elitism that some of us perceive in this president that leads us to ask, why has he so assiduously obscured everything about his past, from passport records to college records. No president in American history has ever been so little vetted and tried so hard to keep it that way. Perhaps it’s just meaningless noise, signifying nothing. Then again, . . . .
Some “birthers” are not hayseeds or tinfoilers.
I should add that I also spent several years studying in Canada. It was the Canadian nationalism that I observed, which found fault with all sorts of things American in order to solidify a sense of Canadianism after the British Empire gave up the ghost and with it important aspects of Canadian identity (the thesis of the Canadian political philosopher, George Parkin Grant, _Lament for a Nation_) that got me thinking. Most of the things Canadians were so sure they differed from Americans in, as I evaluated them, turned out to be ways Canadians were actually not so very different from Americans. I began to see how culture invent straw men readings of the Other, not for the sake of accurate and virtuous critique of the faults of the Other, but to serve the strengthening of their own cultural or national identities.
Americans, of course, do the exact same thing. But somewhere along the line, to have a cohesive identity, members of a nation or culture need to say, for all the warts, I am who I am. Had I been born and bred Canadian or French, I’d point out warts, yes, but I wouldn’t sit there finding fault with everything Canadian or French in the name of “constructive criticism.” That turns my fellow Frenchmen or Canadians or Americans into “others” and “foreigners” with me as the True American or Frenchman or Canadian. But that’s a construct and a lie. I am implicated in America’s or Canada’s or France’s faults. Perhaps I fought against them as best I could, but I don’t get to elevate myself on a hilltop above all my warty fellow citizens, lambaste them and think myself superior. I belong to my family, despite and with its warts.
And yes, to all Canadians and Latin Americans and . . . . who might read this, I know I have sinned greviously in using the term “American” to refer to the United States of America. Sorry, can’t help it. Mea culpa. I guess I’m an Ugly American, as they say in Canada or France or . . . .
If true, would be easy to validate.
I have not been able to do so.
My standard answer to people who bring up this Obama “birther” stuff is that if there were really any reason why Obama was *Constitutionally* ineligible to be president, surely the Clinton campaign would have dug it up during the 2008 Democratic primaries. At the time, the Clintons would have welcomed anything that would have kept Obama from defeating Hillary in the primaries. After all, as I understand it, it was the Clinton campaign that dug up Jeremiah Wright and tried to use him against Obama. If there were really any fire under the smoke, the Clinton campaign would have dug it up. (Sorry to mix metaphors.) The fact that they didn’t find anything convinces me that there isn’t anything there to find.
Whether Obama is *temperamentally* suited to be president is another issue. So is the question of whether he may have broken the law in some way. But I don’t see any reasonable doubt that he meets the *Constitutional* criteria to be eligible to be president.
Interesting stuff, but I don’t think it’ll come to anything.
albinus1 –
That’s assuming no background deals were made in the process that the public isn’t wary of, no different than those made between two supposed opposition parties the Republicans and the Democrats. you’d be surprised at what actually goes on, and on the many topics both parties actually agree on but feign opposition with each other. The left and right arms may well be part of the same body performing a magician’s sleight of hand.
As for the Snopes article, discussions between the author of said video and others find the expert admitting himself that he cannot actually prove his defence of the certificate, but he does make a good case as to why it could be the computer software being responsible for hte separation of layers.
In any case, the President who promised the American people that he’d created a very transparent government is hilariously the most closeted secretive one. But remember folks, Obama’s only using powers granted to him by previous Republican Presidents… It’s time to pull the wool from your eyes and see the big picture as to how this world is really run!
He’s in somekind of Kenyan/British witness protection program. His father was Masai and worked against Kikuyu rebels succesfully and they still want him. Hows that for a conspiracy theory
I’m not sure he would be ineligible if he ever did carry an Indonesian passport; one never surrenders American citizenship, so that’s not the issue. The question is does he qualify as natural-born then, going on the (and we’re stretching it) premise he did carry a foreign passport? I would argue that yes he does, since the law doesn’t cover it.
I have met Orly Taitz, once, at a social gathering. The birther issue appears to be her only topic of conversation, even among friends and acquaintances. When someone expressed doubt, she had a full throttle spittle-flecked nutty. Her personal hatred of Obama verges on obsession.
Whatever one thinks of the question, or of Taitz and Trump keeping it alive, I share the opinion that it ultimately helped get O reelected by making his opponents look unbalanced, with no genuine points to make about him.
“He was born in Hawaii of an American mother,” Will D. says: 16 January 2013 at 2:32 pm
Assumes facts not in evidence
“and I’ve seen no convincing evidence to the contrary.” Will D. says: 16 January 2013 at 2:32 pm
You quite obviously haven’t been paying attention, William, and I doubt seriously that you’ve personally viewed any evidence regarding this matter.
There are 19 year olds with security clearances currently serving in the armed forces of the United States that have been subjected to more thorough background investigations than Barry Soetoro has.
I’m glad I don’t have your nerve in my tooth. You make a fair number of assumptions yourself, starting with my name. You deny the facts in evidence, namely the birth certificate, the nationality of his mother, and the birth announcements in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser. You’re free to do so, but I don’t reject them.
Don’t blame me for that, blame James Madison. Elected officials are vetted by the election itself, for good or ill, and the fact of the matter is that the president was elected. The congress confirmed the electoral votes sent by the several states. The time to raise those objections has passed. Should Obama have been more thoroughly vetted? Absolutely. Was he underqualified to be elected in 2008? Definitely. Sadly, the majority of voters disagreed with me. The media and the McCain campaign treated Obama with kid gloves, and the voters were happy to accept that. But short of a constitutional amendment to vastly change the way a president is elected, I don’t see how to change that. Making potential presidential candidates go through a background check similar to that used for security clearance may be a great idea, but it is impossible as the constitution stands today.
Ss
Sheriff Joe Ariapo from Arizona did an investigation on this and found that “President Obama’s”birth certificate to be a forged document. He did public conference on his investigative findings if you like to watch it. I met Mrs. Tatiz several years ago and I attended a court hearing at the Ronald Reagan Federal Court Building in Santa Ana , Ca with Judge Carter hearing this case . She seemed very pleasant and soft spoken but highly concerned.
Sheriff Joe Ariapo from Arizona did an investigation on this and found that “President Obama’s”birth certificate to be a forged document.
He did, and as a software guy with a history of imaging work, I found his presentation convincing. That document was piecework, not a scan.
I doubt that the president was actually born in Kenya — although he was willing enough to claim that he was before it became an eligibility issue. His bio in one of his books and his wife in a speech while he was a state senator both stated that he was born in Kenya, but I think that was just a clumsy attempt at street cred and consistent with many other misstatements he has made about various subjects.
The certified copy of the birth certificate that was offered as proof is clearly a forgery, however, and the sealing of his various official records doesn’t inspire confidence either.
I can think of a number of reasons for all this secrecy totally unrelated to the place of his birth, all are totally speculative but within the bounds of possibility. His actual certificate of live birth may contain embarrassing information – such as a different father or “father unknown”, his surname as his mother’s rather than the father’s or other indication of illegitimacy, the listing of his race as something other than what he now claims, a birth date inconsistent with the date stated, etc. It could have been a late certificate issued under the rather fast-and-loose Hawaiian Certificate of Live Birth program, which was not ended until 1972. Such a certificate, or an “amended certificate of birth” (often issued at the time of an adoption) would of course raise questions about what happened to the original. And it all could just have been a good faith attempt by his maternal grandparents to establish something like a “normal” birth certificate for a kid whose circumstances were pretty irregular for the time.
Or perhaps he had a foreign passport, or applied for aid as a foreign student. Lots of possibilities.
I will say that I have never seen so much silence and obfuscation over basic life facts in a major public figure. He is probably the least “transparent” individual ever to hold high public office in this country.
“He was born in Hawaii of an American mother, and I’ve seen no convincing evidence to the contrary.”
The term “natural born citizen” is often confused with “native born citizen.” The former is a term of English common law, which would have been understood by the Founding Fathers, not to mention any educated man of the time. It would require that both parents were citizens at the time of one’s birth. Barack Hussein Obama Jr was the son of a citizen of Kenya, then a British crown colony. By this definition (which was upheld in a SCOTUS case in the late 19th century, the name of which escapes me), he could be determined to be ineligible, whether he was elected once, twice, or a thousand times, his being born in Hawai’i notwithstanding.
People who question Obama’s eligibility to be POTUS are often called “Birthers” or “racists”. Sadly even by people who consider themselves conservative. . They have fallen prey to this Saul Alinsky rules for radicals tactics. Over four years ago I was discussing this issue with very close friends. One of the friends accused me of being a racist, I was extremely hurt and offended by their comment. A few months later the person appologized to me. Today this person believes President Obama is a fraud.
Whenever anybody calls me a racist I just respond, “My father marched at Selma. What was your family doing?” Shuts ’em right up (it’s true too. Dad says he was having some serious second thoughts when things got hot, but . . . )
Or if I’m in a kidding mood, I’ll say, “I’m sorry, but your race card has been declined. You’re over the limit.”
SusanfromCalifornia, one thing which really irritates me is the casual willingness of so many to ignore the fundamental constitutional importance of the birth qualification. Yes, Virginia, it is a big deal! I fully acknowledge that there are some who have been irrational in their pursuit of the issue, but that cannot be a just reason to bypass the case itself.
Opps! My apologies for failing to close the bold tag!
So, the bottom line is that the story at the top seems not to be accurate in several respects. Nevertheless there are still legal challenges coming. Moreover, there is an unwillingness on the part of the Administration to clear the question up, which fuels the claim that something is wrong with the paperwork.
Having watched the series The West Wing with interest, I am trying to get my head around what sort of constitutional crisis would be provoked were the present occupant of the White House found actually not to have been eligible for office. I suppose Congress would have to enact some sort of “sanatio in radice of the legislation he signed and examine his executive decrees and treaties, etc. What a mess that would be.
One factor in this issue, of course, is the conflict between Obama’s campaign claim of openness, and his action immediately after inauguration to seal all of documents of his bona fides.
The depth of a possible crisis subsequent to a possible ruling against his eligibility is an interesting question. My faith in both parties is so low that I can rather easily imagine them joining forces to rubber stamp all affected legislation. On the other hand, some stalwarts might succeed in blocking such action, leading to a reversal of all his executive orders, and the invalidation of all legislation he signed. Realistically, though, were such a ruling given, the actual effect would fall between those extremes, I think.
I, too, am inclined to think not all the figures add up, and I DO think it is important, because (suppposedly) we have a rule of law where all are treated equally. If I am ineligible for something legally, then I am ineligible for it (let’s say in-state tuition for a state in which I do not live), no matter how much I or someone else (or the compliant press) “wants” it. Obama HAS been represented as a Kenyan citizen (book promo) etc. There SHOULD be some curiosity and investigation about it, whether it provokes a Constitutional crisis or not. Heck, to have an ineligible person serving as a president is by definition a Constitutional crisis.
That being said, it seems to me a quixotic endeavor at this point, although I support it. What is also so disturbing is, no matter if Obama was legitimately eligible to run, his formative years were spent in a foreign country, and he apparently has adopted those foreign attitudes, as Dennis noted above. The years when a youngster absorbs, almost by osmosis, the love for country and an appreciation and respect for how it works (basically up till adolescence) were spent by Obama in a foreign land and THAT is the third-world model of government he seems to have absorbed. Again, Dennis’s posts above nail it; Obama’s attitude towards the US seems to be one of an outsider and a critic, not one who loves it, “warts and all”; after all, what else does “fundamental change” mean?