At 08:42 PM 8/9/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
Baloney. This is your opinion proffered as law.
Nothing more than a bunch of BS. A Natural Born US citizen is one
with both US citizen parents and born on US soil. Period. Stop the lies.
That opinion was rejected more than a hundred years ago.
There are some interesting legal issues here, but they are utterly of
no practical consequence. The position that both parents must be "US
citizens" is utterly without foundation, it's made up.
The case of a U.S. Citizen mother and a non-citizen father, with the
child born outside the U.S., is a marginal one and it's not clear how
a court would decide. Does the law in effect in 1961 apply? If later
law essentially defines "natural born" differently -- as it does --,
does this reach back and define as "natural born" for purposes of the
constitutional requirement, according to the current definition?
Some statements I've seen of the current law imply that it is not
retroactive, so if this is true, then Obama would not be a natural
born citizen, since his mother was three months short of her 19th
birthday, which is the age required under the old law for the birth
to be automatic citizenship.
Jojo seems to be requiring that the constitutional provision have
some kind of "original intepretation," but it's entirely unclear what
that was. The original clause, from what I've seen, was inserted at
the last minute and without explanation.
What I've been asserting is what a U.S. court would be likely to
decide, based on precedent. Jojo seems to belong to a
"fundamentalist" school of law, that presumes that there is some
"constitutional law" that exists separately from how the courts
interpret it. And anyone who sides with the court's actual
interpretation, as confirmed over, say, more than a century, is a liar.
It's fanaticism, pure and simple.
The marginal case is irrelevant, because Obama will be considered by
any court, unless someone pulls a rabbit out of a hat, as being born
in the U.S., specifically in Hawaii, in 1961. It's established by the
required documentation, and anyone who thinks that the courts will
disregard the documentation, absent a clear showing of fraud, is
seriously deluded.
The U.S. Supreme Court has, to my chagrin, made decisions that were
motivated by results rather than the facts and law and precedent in a
case, but a decision removing a sitting President based on what has
been alleged is far, far worse than anything I've ever seen them do.
Even if it were actually shown that Obama were born in Kenya, for
example, the Court would be highly likely to refuse the case, citing
res judicata, that the matter was decided by Congress in certifying
the election results. Congress has the right -- and responsibility --
to consider eligibility.
Congress could also impeach, if there was Presidential misbehavior
involved, and forging documents would probably be considered
misbehavior. That is a reason why the forgery is exrremely unlikely.
It's difficult to imagine anything that might be on the document that
would be worth risking his presidency over. People have claimed that
the father might be different, and that he couldn't stand the heat of
that. Highly unlikely, folks, even if it were true.
(On the other hand, I'd have thought that a sitting President was
constitutionally protected from prosecution, and the Court, not so
long ago, allowed a sitting president to be thoroughly harassed over
matters that were entirely distracting from the business of the Presidency.)
Notice how the birther claims are essentially all over the map.
What's consistent about them is that "there is something wrong."
There usually is, if you look hard enough. That is, you can always
find something that *looks wrong.* It just takes persistence. Look at
what I found about the long form. All kinds of ridiculous claims,
presented as if they established some kind of strong suspicion of
"wrong." And nothing more there than the kinds of oddities that commonly occur.
