Posted on 10/26/2008 11:51:13 AM PDT by Brown Deer
The problem is only a small percentage of Americans
1) Know this is a requirement
and
2) Give a damn
“The Constitution states that in order to be eligible to run for President you must be a Citizen”
Actually, I think it says you have to have been born in the United States. Being a naturalized citizen isn’t enough.
“If the President-elect is disqualified, the Vice President-elect is seated as President.”
Actually, the language of the 20th and 25th Amend. provides Biden (assuming he is sworn in) would be seated as “Acting Pres...” until a Pres shall have been qualified.
What is your opinion as to how that qualified Pres will be selected? Biden will already be the VP and there is no language providing he, by law, becomes the Pres.
This is not the best way to handle the problem.
We need to file a RICO suit against the criminal racketeering organization known as the Democrat Party.
Then they will recount over & over, until they "find" 501 Obama votes in a courthouse basement, locked in a "forgotten" ballot box.
Remember Gregoire/Rici last time in Washington? They 'miraculously' found ballots in the King County court house on the (IIRC) third recount, to put her over the top...then stopped recounting.
Remember New Mexico, darn near every election? Ballot boxes 'forgotten' in County Clerk's car trunks; in vehicles 'stranded' in the mountain snows on their way to be counted...until it was known how many votes were needed?
Remember how they kept 'finding' more & more Gore votes, the more they kept 'recounting' in Florida?
It doesn’t matter who gets to vote. It’s who gets to COUNT the vote that settles elections.
True. I’ve gotten tired of repeating myself on this subject so (nothing personal to you), regrettably, I took a short cut.
I am not particularly fluent in this area of the law, but here’s my take on it:
I think there are three general scenarios once there is an objection to a President-elect’s eligibility:
1. The decision by the Congress on the objection cannot be completed (or won’t be completed) before the Inauguration. Since the decision could still go either way (theoretically), the President-elect is neither qualified nor disqualified. So the VP serves as Acting President until the objection is sustained or denied.
If the objection ultimately is denied, the President-elect becomes President and the VP moves back to being the VP.
If the objection is sustained, then-—
2. If the objection to the President-elect’s qualification is sustained, but it’s “curable” (legal word for “it can be fixed,” basically), the VP would remain Acting President until the problem was fixed. Can’t think of an example, but let’s say it’s something technical that the President-elect could “fix” by filing certain paperwork or whatever.
Again, in that case, he would probably be allowed to “fix” the problem and then take office.
Being foreign-born, however, is not something that can be fixed. There is no process or paperwork that can be filled out or approved (except, I suppose, for changing the Constitution!) to make a foreign-born individual eligible to serve as President.
3. If the objection is sustained and the deficiency can’t be fixed, then I think the usual rules of succession would be applied-—even if this were not required, I think Congress would use these rules as guidelines at the least. That means the VP would become President, just as if the President had become incapacitated and unable to serve or had died.
IOW, at that point it wouldn’t matter WHY the President could not or was not serving. He would be considered absent from office and then the usual language about when the VP becomes President would control.
***
My two cents on these lawsuits (again, I am not an expert on this area of the law):
A voter will never have standing to challenge a nominee’s qualifications directly.
First, under the constitutional scheme, none of this is “ripe” until after someone wins the Electoral College.
At that point, a person becomes the President-elect and the voter’s only way to challenge the P-E’s eligibility is by convincing a Senator or Rep. to file a signed, written objection.
Of course, that would take information, and that would be the ground on which to litigate (if any).
It’s still a very long shot, but to “get there from here,” a plaintiff voter would have to find a way to connect what he is asking the court to do with a “legally cognizable harm” to his “right” (which could be styled several different ways), essentially, to ask Congress to object to a P-E’s eligiblity.
Like I said, a long shot, but never say never. It always depends on the facts.
Also when it comes to the production of official records, state laws may have different standards for standing and production. For example, someone mentioned that Hawaii state law said that anyone with a “vital interest” in a birth certificate could request production.
If that were true, the court would still have to agree that what the plaintiff voter argued constituted a “vital interest,” but that would be more surmountable than demonstrating standing in federal court, considering the constitutional process in place.
The girl in that video needs to run for office!
I agree with you on this and find it very odd that Obama just won't put this to rest. What is the big deal if there's no there "there"?
It's not like this concern is made up out of whole cloth. While I have yet to see anything that makes me think Obama is not a natural born citizen, the fact remains that he had an unusual childhood and clearly had family ties and movements to several foreign countries.
As Greta said the other day, this is not going to stop. She suggested that all four candidates produce their birth certificates. If Obama has something on his that he finds embarrassing (I really can't think of why he would not just produce the birth certificate), but which does not go to his eligibility, he would be well able to survive that politically.
Greta did say something like "He shouldn't be blackmailed into producing it." THAT I didn't get. How could he be "blackmailed" if there was no there "there"? And why shouldn't he be pressured to do something reasonable when clearly there are facts and circumstances that make people wonder about his background?
The way this is going, Obama might actually provoke a congresscritter, who would have standing to object to Obama's eligibility, to ask for, or sue for, production of the BC. And then there will really be unrest.
We were talking the other day about how Nixon declined to challenge JFK on voter fraud b/c of the impact that would have had on the country. (He also ended up resigning rather than putting the country through an impeachment, even though he probably could have won that.)
Yet Obama refuses to even produce his BC in the interest of civility.
I never thought there was merit to this controversy, but the longer Obama stonewalls, the worse it looks.
We are being played like an organ in church.
Something is going on here, maybe a national security issue, but there is a concerted effort on the governments part to deny the facts. If the post office can require a certified birth certificate for a passport I find it impossible to believe NO-ONE in the government is capable of requiring a papers check on “The One”.
This is not a frivolous or extraneous request. This man, if elected will be the most powerful man in free world and nobody is going to require him to present a $10 certificate of live birth? Freaking insane!
So you replace a foreign born radical socialist with a domestic born loose cannon socialist.
Well, how about if the President Elect were to turn 35 on Jan 28th... or even Feb 28th. Wouldn't that be such a 'curable' problem?
Yep!
That’s a good example. And say it also involved the production of the official BC. Say people had been agitating that the nominee wasn’t actually old enough to be President, and he kept refusing to show his BC to prove that he was or was not.
Or say his birth records were conflicting, with one “official” document saying one thing and another “official” document saying something else, with some kind of circumstances that might create the possibility of an administrative error. In that case, with the date in dispute being so close to reaching the minimum anyway, it would be reasonable for the objection to be handled by having the VP-Elect be Acting President until the date at which there was no question about the P-E’s age.
Another one I thought of after posting. There’s a lot of talk out there that at one time Obama had been a citizen of Kenya and a citizen of Indonesia.
Let’s say that’s true. If Obama were also a natural-born citizen of America, dual citizenship would not be a disqualification. However, since dual citizenship requires allegiance to both governments, one could argue that fact is disqualifying (or at least a problem).
In that case, say the dual citizenship was revealed after the EC vote, the P-E could simply renounce his dual citizenship, thus “curing” the problem, and then be seated as P-E.
For the life of me I can’t really come up with a situation where Obama loses by simply producing his BC and putting this issue to rest.
In fact, there are many possible backstories that would only make him more a more compelling and tragic figure to those so inclined to view him that way in the first place.
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