Posted on 02/17/2010 10:00:07 AM PST by opentalk
My circle of friends and professional colleagues includes many noteworthy persons; lawyers, scientists, doctors, business owners, etc. Many of them are my Mensa buddies. None of them are crazy and none of them are stupid. Some of them are smart enough to avoid politics altogether.
Those who do keep up with political issues agree that there is something really fishy about Obama’s history. So when we see the irrational “head in the sand” avoidance of the obvious lack of full disclosure we wonder what motivates people to NOT want to know the truth. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Note to Erickson, Breitbart, O'Reilly and Beck: At a minimum, Obama has not been fully candid with the American people about his birth certificate. Giving him a pass for that is wrong. The bad news is that you blinked. The good news is that Abraham Lincoln was right:
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
Biography - Michael J. Gaynor
--Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member. Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research.
also from link,comments.
"Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate and had it verified by an independent organization and the results were posted online for everyone to see." Repeating this false propaganda over and over does not make it true. No matter what you might think there is no escaping that AKA Obama is not practicing the virtue of full disclosure.
Which is most likely;
(a) AKA OBAMA is hiding documents that are innocuous?
(b) AKA OBAMA is hiding documents that are damaging?
This is the exact same case I quoted, and it directly and absolutely does address the issue of non-citizen parents. It cites hundreds of years of English Common Law well understand by the authors of the Constitution, specifically citing discussion of that fact in a historical Supreme Court case. It's very conventional and, quite frankly, is the expected outcome anytime this issue is addressed by a court.
“Unfortunately, a large percentage of judicial rulings are decided by activist judges who make up their minds then twist what was presented to them into whatever fits their decision. They simply omit and distort evidence that does not suit their purposes. It happens all of the time.
Among the specific citations is the following:
[It thus clearly appears that by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country, and continuing to The present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, and the jurisdiction of the English sovereign; and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.
III. The same rule was in force in all the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the constitution as originally established.]
Those words are about original intent. They most certainly are not judicial activism, unless the phrase is simply interpreted to mean “anything I personally disagree with is judicial activism.”
Some people suggest that BHO is a NBC because he was born in Hawaii and his mother was a US citizen.
My answer:
What if his father had been Nikita Khrushchev and he had been indoctrinated for several years in an elementary school in the Soviet Union? Would that be okay? How is his actual history any different in principle?
Proper Tea Party Attire:
1. “The common law of England is not the common law of these States.” —George Mason”
2. What might the phrase “natural-born citizen” of the United States imply under the U.S. Constitution? The phrase has always been obscure due to the lack of any single authoritative source to confer in order to understand the condition of citizenship the phrase recognizes. Learning what the phrase might have meant following the Declaration of Independence, and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, requires detective work. As with all detective work, eliminating the usual suspects from the beginning goes a long way in quickly solving a case.
What Natural-Born Citizen Could Not Mean
Could a natural-born citizen simply mean citizenship due to place of birth?
Unlikely in the strict sense because we know one can be native born and yet not a native born citizen of this country. There were even disputes whether anyone born within the District of Columbia or in the territories were born citizens of the United States (they were generally referred to as “inhabitants” instead.) National Government could make no “territorial allegiance” demands within the several States because as Madison explained it, the “powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.”
Jurisdiction over citizenship via birth within the several States was part of the “ordinary course of affairs” of the States that only local laws could affect. Early acts of Naturalization recognized the individual State Legislatures as the only authority who could make anyone a citizen of a State. Framer James Wilson said, “a citizen of the United States is he, who is a citizen of at least some one state in the Union.” These citizens of each State were united together through Article IV, Sec. II of the U.S. Constitution, and thus, no act of Congress was required to make citizens of the individual States citizens of the United States.
Prior to the Revolutionary War place of birth within the dominions of the crown was the principle criterion for establishing perpetual allegiance and citizenship. After independence each State was free to establish their own maxims on the subject. James Madison’s own State of Virginia adopted a birthright law authored by Thomas Jefferson in 1779 that recognized parentage (citizenship of father) in determining citizenship of the child:
“[A]ll infants, wheresoever born, whose father, if living, or otherwise, whose mother was a citizen at the time of their birth, or who migrate hither, their father, if living, or otherwise, their mother becoming a citizen, or who migrate hither without father or mother, shall be deemed citizens of this Commonwealth until they relinquish that character, in manner as hereinafter expressed; and all others not being citizens of any, of the United States of America, shall be deemed aliens.”
Again the issue is detailed further and their is a lengthy discussion at:
http://federalistblog.us/2008/11/natural-born_citizen_defined.html
Of course there are numerous other sources of similar information. Unfortunately, my family and I have been the victim of legal activism that cost us several hundred thousand dollars, it went to the level of our State Supreme Court. I am not going to go into the details but I have very strong feelings about judges who attempt to bend current law by reviving some long lost historical tid bit that had been swept into the cesspool of legal nonsense centuries ago. Call it what you will, but I call it legal activism of the worst and most disgusting sort. Judges are expected to rule on what is presented to them in court based on current law and precedence. If your family had been driven to financial ruin by attorneys and legal activist judges you would probably be singing a different tune yourself.
As I have stated previously, I encourage people to keep working on the legal aspects of this situation, but I am not optimistic because of my own negative experiences with lawyers and judges. Which after inquiries I will summarize below.
In my own families case, we had my parents’ house and property was taken through eminent domain several years ago. The property was conservatively valued at $2,000,000. It was my parents’ retirement nest egg. The house had great historical significance. It was the only house left in the area that had been built by the railroad. My dad was working with local railroad historians to turn it into a museum.
Sound Transit decided to make an example out of us. My parents still owed approximately $500,000 in debt directly related to the house and property and secured by their ownership. Sound Transit offered $200,000 and refused to negotiate. Which in itself was against the law.
My parents were sued by Sound Transit without any prior notice and hauled into court every other week for several years in a transparent effort to run them out of money. In the end their legal expenses came to over $500,000 and they received around $450,000 for the property they owned for over thirty years. There was no reimbursement for their legal fees, so they lost their house and their property and ended up $50,000 in debt not including the money they still owed.
Sound Transit claimed in court that they needed the property immediately. The house was flattened immediately. They did build a “modern art” statue on it that Sound Transit spent several hundred thousand dollars on. In the years since they acquired the property it is still just an empty parking lot. Their basically is almost no chance that it ever will become a train stop because the entire project was ill-conceived and has been put on hold for the foreseeable future.
Among the frustrating aspects is that less valuable property directly adjacent to my parents house and property was available and already paved and ready to be used as a Sound Transit parking lot.
The news coverage on all aspects of the case was slanted and completely inaccurate in nearly every case. Sound Transit spent $2,000,000 in legal fees to keep my parents from getting a fair price. They also spent unknown sums of money spinning the situation in the media.
Another adjacent property which was far less desirable for several reasons including that it was L shaped, had less square footage, had a larger elevation drop, and was covered with an old building that had to be demolished was sold for approximately $1,000,000 ten years previously.
This ordeal literally sucked the life out of my 70 year old parents and left them in financial ruin. The rulings by judges and courts were literally unbelievable. Years later I am still in shock.
Sound Transit was legally required to give my parents notice before a decision was made to take their property. Our State Supreme Court ruled that an obscure reference several layers down on a Sound Transit web site that made reference to “certain real properties between Lakewood and Federal Way” a distance of over 20 miles was adequate notice. My dad had never even used a computer at that point in his life. There was one ruling after another like that. The court room antics by Sound Transit attorneys in the final valuation hearing were unbelievable. I can't even discuss the situation this much without having to make a trip to the bathroom because it still puts my bowels in an uproar.
Then these conservatives rewrite and/or deny the Constitution insofar as the Law of Nations is embedded in that document by the deliberate intentions of the Founding Fathers who were very much concerned about something happening like we have today.
Then these conservatives rewrite and/or deny the Constitution insofar as the Law of Nations is embedded in that document by the deliberate intentions of the Founding Fathers who were very much concerned about something happening like we have today.
The Indiana Court of Appeals’ ruling is being appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court. Perhaps it will make its way up to the federal courts and eventually the US Supreme Court.
There have already been 7 Obama eligibility suits to make it to Justices’ “Cert” conferences at the US Supreme Court but none of them has been deemed worthy of being heard by the full Court.
It’s unclear if he actually became a citizen of Indonesia or not. But as has been enumerated many times, that would have no effect on his US Citizenship at the time.
“Then these conservatives rewrite and/or deny the Constitution insofar as the Law of Nations is embedded in that document by the deliberate intentions of the Founding Fathers who were very much concerned about something happening like we have today.”
That is your personal fantasy. You can believe it all you want, but most people accept the documented opinions of actual courts over what people with an ax to grind desperately want to believe.
I’m sorry for your parent’s ordeal. Alas, the law is a process system predicated on details that the average person often has difficulty navigating. My advice has always been find a mutually acceptable, documented way to avoid court altogether, or get yourself good representation very early on.
That quote is actually taken out of context. It was said in the Virginia Ratifying Convention is a discussion over Article 2, Section 2, Clauses 2 and 3. The specific issue was the proposed Presidential authority to make treaties with the consent of 2/3 of the Senate. This is his statement in its entirety:
“Mr. Chairman, it is true that this is one of the greatest acts of sovereignty, and therefore ought to be most strongly guarded. The cession of such a power, without such checks and guards, cannot be justified: yet I acknowledge such a power must rest somewhere. It is so in all governments. If, in the course of an unsuccessful war, we should be compelled to give up part of our territories, or undergo subjugation if the general government could not make a treaty to give up such a part for the preservation of the residue, the government itself, and consequently the rights of the people, must fall. Such a power must, therefore, rest somewhere. For my own part, I never heard it denied that such a power must be vested in the government. Our complaint is, that it is not sufficiently guarded, and that it requires much more solemnity and caution than are delineated in that system. It is more guarded in England. Will any gentleman undertake to say that the king, by his prerogative, can dismember the British empire? Could the king give Portsmouth to France? He could not do this without an express act of Parliament—without the consent of the legislature in all its branches. There are other things which the king cannot do, which may be done by the President and Senate in this case. Could the king, by his prerogative, enable foreign subjects to purchase lands, and have an hereditary indefeasible title? This would require an express act of Parliament.
Though the king can make treaties, yet he cannot make a treaty contrary to the constitution of his country. Where did their constitution originate? It is founded on a number of maxims, which, by long time, are rendered sacred and inviolable. Where are there such maxims in the American Constitution? In that country, which we formerly called our mother country, they have had, for many centuries, certain fundamental maxims, which have secured their persons and properties, and prevented a dismemberment of their country. The common law, sir, has prevented the power of the crown from destroying the immunities of the people. We are placed in a still better condition—in a more favorable situation than perhaps any people ever were before. We have it in our power to secure our liberties and happiness on the most unshaken, firm, and permanent basis. We can establish what government we please. But by that paper we are consolidating the United States into one great government, and trusting to constructive security. You will find no such thing in the English government. The common law of England is not the common law of these states. I conceive, therefore, that there is nothing in that Constitution to hinder a dismemberment of the empire.
Will any gentleman say that they may not make a treaty, whereby the subjects of France, England, and other powers, may buy what lands they please in this country? This would violate those principles which we have received from the mother country. The indiscriminate admission of all foreigners to the first rights of citizenship, without any permanent security for their attachment to the country, is repugnant to every principle of prudence and good policy. The President and Senate can make any treaty whatsoever. We wish not to refuse, but to guard, this power, as it is done in England. The empire there cannot be dismembered without the consent of the national Parliament. We wish an express and explicit declaration, in that paper, that the power which can make other treaties cannot, without the consent of the national Parliament—the national legislature—dismember the empire. The Senate alone ought not to have this power; much less ought a few states to have it. No treaty to dismember the empire ought to be made without the consent of three fourths of the legislature in all its branches. Nor ought such a treaty to be made but in case of the most urgent and unavoidable necessity. When such necessity exists, there is no doubt but there will be a general and uniform vote of the Continental Parliament.”
He is clearly addressing a specific issue of concern, and in fact recognizes the historical value of English Common Law. Not to mention that even if he had meant to invalidate English Common Law as a reference for American Jurisprudence, he's just one guy and that never happened.
I've seen any number of articles like this. Find it compelling or not, but it's basically just cherry-picking some quotes to try and make it appear like this is a real source of controversy. It's not. Any number of English Common Law precepts are taken as a given in interpreting the original intent of the Constitution. This is one of them. As another poster noted, the US Supreme Court has had several opportunities to hear this issue and has declined them, most likely because it is considered a settled point. I would expect any court hearing this issue to decide along the same lines as the Indiana Court. And it won't be because they're making it up. There is a real historical basis for that decision, whether one likes it or not.
“I’m sorry for your parent’s ordeal.” Thank you and I do appreciate your input here. Unfortunately it turned at that unknown to my parents at the time was that their attorney did a very poor job. It also did not help that the judge in their trial turned out to have been a staff lawyer for Pierce Transit for many years. It also did not help that the person who was elected jury foreman has a brother who just happened to be a high official at Sound Transit but this was not disclosed in jury selection. Inexplicably, in our case a large percentage of the Jury pool somehow happened to have relatives employed by Sound Transit.
As far as your citing of the reasoning behind the Indiana Supreme Court, I do understand the line of thought, but I have heard equally persuasive arguments that lead to a different conclusion.
As far as I am concerned the legal system in this country is rigged and I doubt whether we will get satisfaction from it in the case of Obama at least untill his own people start to turn on him.
I believe the Constitution is easy to read and understand and means what is written. My fantasy stands as opposed to other’s make-believe.
Ah.. I see your point. I could rationalize that behavior, but my heart isn't in it. They should not insult those with honorable skepticism.
Thanks for this information. Sorry I did not reply sooner—life happened.
We don’t agree, but your information took me on quite a search and helped me learn a lot. For that, I say thanks.
from England
Here we go again, Beck calling people who question o’s background crazy
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However in the only court decision specifically looking at the Natural Born Citizen status of Barack Obama, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled that Vattel is not American law nor precedent for US law and that Barack Obama is indeed a Natural Born Citizen. LOL ... Are you and the After-Birthers REALLY going to hang your hat on Ankeny et. al. v The Governor of Indiana now?! Any competent Constitutional attorney can rip that Opinion to shreds. Other than the fact he leans HEAVILY on US v. Wong Kim Ark, let's start with the MOST obvious! Judge Brown INCORRECTLY cites the US Constitution in his own Opinion!!! It's NOT Clause 4 that contains the "Natural Born Citizen" provision — it's Clause 5! His screw up is on page 10 of Indiana Court of Appeal Judge Brown's so-called ruling:
B. Natural Born Citizen NOW ... From Congress' own website, here's BOTH Clauses 4 AND 5 from Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution:
Clause 4: The Congress may determine the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.  |
“Judge Brown INCORRECTLY cites the US Constitution in his own Opinion!!!”
Ouch.....not even the Freeper BC trolling mental defective league would make that kind of mistake.
Hard to find competent activist judges these days.....
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