Category Archives: Election Law

Speaker Boehner and congress, Legal experts speak out, Obama eligibility, Obama issues

“Why has Obama, for over 2 years, employed numerous private and government attorneys to avoid presenting a legitimate birth certificate and college records?”…Citizen Wells and millions of concerned Americans

Quite a few attorneys have been involved in lawsuits challenging Obama’s eligibility. Some of them are Democrats. Other attorneys and legal experts have commented on Obama, eligibility issues and court proceedings. Some of those expert opinions are presented below.

John Boehner, members of Congress, judges and other officials holding offices designed to serve and protect the American public, pay attention.

Long time Democrat and civil rights attorney, Bartle Bull.

From Citizen Wells November 12, 2008.

Responses to Judge Surrick’s ruling in Berg v Obama.

“Judge Surrick ruling exerpts:

“If, through the political process, Congress determines that citizens, voters, or party members should police the Constitution’s eligibility requirements for the Presidency, then it is free to pass laws conferring standing on individuals like Plaintiff. Until that time, voters do not have standing to bring the sort of challenge that Plaintiff attempts to bring in the Amended Complaint.”

“…regardless of questions of causation, the grievance remains too generalized to establish the existence of an injury in fact. To reiterate: a candidate’s ineligibility under the Natural Born Citizen Clause does not result in an injury in fact to voters. By extension, the theoretical constitutional harm experienced by voters does not change as the candidacy of an allegedly ineligible candidate progresses from the primaries to the general election.””

Mark J. Fitzgibbons is President of Corporate and Legal Affairs at American Target Advertising:

“Chief Justice John Marshall, writing in Marbury v. Madison, said that judges have a duty to decide cases under our paramount law, the Constitution. I have lamented previously about how some judges tend to evade their duty to decide constitutional matters by resorting to court-made doctrines.  Judge Surrick’s reliance on case law to dismiss Berg’s suit for lack of standing is reasoned from a lawyer’s perspective, but not heroic and perhaps evasive of his larger duty. 
His decision to “punt” the matter to Congress creates, I suggest, a dangerous, longer and perhaps more painful constitutional quagmire than had he heard the evidence in the case.  Even had the case lacked merit, the Constitution would not have been harmed.”

“Ellis Washington, currently a professor of law and political science at Savannah State University, former editor at the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

Mr. Washington wrote the following response to the Philip J Berg lawsuit and Judge Surrick ruling in a World Net Daily article dated November 8, 2008 :”

“Constitutionally speaking, Judge Surrick’s reasoning is completely illogical and a total dereliction of his duty as a judge to substantively address this most vital constitutional controversy. Instead, in a gutless manner, Surrick dismissed Berg’s complaint 10 days before the elections on a technicality of standing, which to any rational person begs the question: If Philip J. Berg as an American citizen, a respected Democratic operative and former attorney general of Pennsylvania doesn’t have the “standing” to bring this type of lawsuit against Obama, then who in America does have standing? The good judge in all 34 pages of legal mumbo jumbo didn’t bother to answer this pivotal question.

That Berg’s complaint is not “concrete or particularized enough to constitute an injury” is an amazing admission by any person that went to law school and even more so given the fact that Surrick is a respected appellate judge!”

Read more:

https://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/obama-not-eligible-us-constitution-tenth-amendment-bill-of-rights-us-supreme-court-federal-judges-state-judges-state-election-officials-electoral-college-electors-philip-j-berg-lawsuit-leo-c/

From the Michigan Law Review.

John McCain, with two US Citizen parents, has questionable status.

“A. Citizenship and Natural Born Citizenship by Statute

According to the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Constitution “contemplates two sources of citizenship, and two only: birth and naturalization.” Unless born in the United States, a person “can only become a citizen by being naturalized . . . by authority of congress, exercised either by declaring certain classes of persons to be citizens, as in the enactments conferring citizenship upon foreign-born children of citizens, or by enabling foreigners individually to become citizens . . . .” A person granted citizenship by birth outside the United States to citizen parents is naturalized at birth; he or she is both a citizen by birth and a naturalized citizen. This last point is discussed thoroughly in Jill A. Pryor’s 1988 note in the Yale Law Journal, The Natural-Born Citizen Clause and Presidential Eligibility: An Approach for Resolving Two Hundred Years of Uncertainty.

The Supreme Court holds that the citizenship statutes are exclusive; there is no residual common-law or natural-law citizenship. Citizens have no constitutional right to transmit their citizenship to children. In Rogers, the Supreme Court upheld a statute requiring children born overseas to citizen parents to reside in the United States to retain their citizenship. Since “Congress may withhold citizenship from persons” born overseas to citizen parents or “deny [them] citizenship outright,” it could impose the lesser burden of requiring U.S. residence to retain citizenship.

Congressional power to withhold citizenship from children of U.S. citizens is not hypothetical; for decades, it was law, and to some extent still is. The Tribe-Olson Opinion proposes that “[i]t goes without saying that the Framers did not intend to exclude a person from the office of the President simply because he or she was born to U.S. citizens serving in the U.S. military outside of the continental United States . . . .” However, the Seventh Congress, which included Framers Gouverneur Morris and Abraham Baldwin among others, did precisely that. In 1961 in Montana v. Kennedy, the Supreme Court construed an 1802 statute to mean that “[f]oreign-born children of persons who became American citizens between April 14, 1802 and 1854, were aliens . . . .” Thus, children of members of the armed forces serving overseas, and diplomats and civil servants in foreign posts, were not only not natural born citizens eligible to be president, they were not citizens at all.

Denial of automatic citizenship had very different implications than it would now because until the late nineteenth century, there was little federal immigration law. There were no general federal restrictions on who could enter the country, no provisions for deportation of residents who became undesirable, and immigration officials to deport them. Of course, these children could become citizens by individual naturalization. But even if the child suffered based on lack of citizenship, according to the 1907 Supreme Court decision in Zartarian v. Billings, “[a]s this subject is entirely within congressional control, the matter must rest there; it is only for the courts to apply the law as they find it.””

Read more:

http://www.michiganlawreview.org/articles/why-senator-john-mccain-cannot-be-president-eleven-months-and-a-hundred-yards-short-of-citizenship

William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor at Cornell Law School, believes Obama was born in Hawaii but states the obvious.

“There is a bizarre intellectual dance taking place around the topic of Barack Obama’s birthplace. 

The world has been artificially divided into “Birthers” and “anti-Birthers” when in fact I suspect a large percentage or even majority of the population is neither and simply wants all the evidence released so that we can move beyond the issue.  For most people, who have had to show their own birth certificates at various points in their lives, the notion that a presidential candidate should release his or her birth certificate to prove qualification for office reflects neither pro- nor anti-Obama sentiment, but a “what’s the big deal?” attitude.”

“We can deal with accusations of John McCain’s alleged misconduct during imprisonment even though such suggestions were beyond the pale, and also questions as to whether McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone disqualified him from the highest office in the land:”

“We have reached the point that merely expressing normal political and legal inquisitiveness will result in a charge of Birtherism or racism because it now involves Barack Obama, even though similar questions as to John McCain’s eligibility for office were raised in the 2008 election cycle.

I repeat, whiter-than-white John McCain had his eligibility questioned because of his birthplace, so how is it necessarily racist that the same thing takes place as to Barack Obama?  The racist charge is just a way of shutting down the conversation, a convenient excuse for epistemic closure.

As I’ve posted before, I think the circumstantial evidence supports the view that Obama was born in Hawaii, and there is no credible evidence otherwise.  But to reach this conclusion, the one thing neither I nor anyone else can honestly say is that all the evidence has been reviewed.”

Read more:

http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/12/bizarre-birther-intellectual-dance.html#comment-form

“But to reach this conclusion, the one thing neither I nor anyone else can honestly say is that all the evidence has been reviewed.”

Did you get that Speaker Boehner?