The Constitution is not just "a body of suggestions that can be disregarded when expedient."
“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” George Washington
I am not going to talk about how Mr. Obama stole the nomination from Hillary Clinton. I am not going to talk about widespread voter fraud involving Acorn in the Obama camp, both in the primaries and general election. I am not going to talk about how all the Obama's men either had influence in his life or helped him to his meteoric rise to power. I am not going to talk about Obama’s pre-paid Credit Card Fraud problem. I am not going to talk about how Radical Muslims paid Obama’s way through college. I am not going to talk about Obama's Middle East Studies Mentors. I am not going to talk about Obama's Voodoo Economics. I am not going to talk about the Logan Act when Mr. Obama did not speak responsibly when he went to Europe, Iraq and also a trip in 2006 to Kenya to meet with Odinga.
No, I am not going to talk about any of them, since none of those issues apparently mattered to those who voted for him. They elected him despite knowing those facts. So, I concede, he won the election by receiving more votes than Senator McCain who seemed he desperately wanted to wrap things up and throw in the towel.
However, I am truly disturbed. I do want to talk about the fears that are rampantly mounting, concerning the question of Mr. Obama being a natural born U.S. citizen, as required by the Constitution, to run for the office of the presidency of the United States. These fears are based on three elements:
process, ensuring Mr. Obama is a Natural Born U.S Citizen.- The failure of Mr. Obama to provide a Vault Birth Certificate.
watchdog "Fourth Branch" of the government.
This issue led Philip J. Berg, a long time Democrat and attorney, to file suit against Barack H. Obama, (Lawsuit Continues) challenging Senator Obama’s lack of "qualification" to serve as President of the United States. He filed a Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court on October 30, 2008, requesting a review of the United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Judge Surrick's dismissal of Philip J. Berg’s lawsuit against Barack H. Obama, Jr., the DNC and the other co-Defendants.
According to Berg, Obama is not eligible to be president. He says Obama was born in Kenya and he carries an Indonesian passport and became an Indonesian citizen when his stepfather adopted him while going to school in Indonesia. In addition, Mr. Obama's parental grandmother in Kenya, has publicly stated that she attended his birth at a hospital in Mombosa, Kenya, in 1961.
Ironically, Linda Lingle, the Governor of Hawaii, ordered to seal his birth records shortly after Mr. Obama’s recent trip to Hawaii. That begs the question: What is he hiding? Why not just open his records, if there is nothing to hide? In an extraordinary gesture, honorable U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick tossed out the suit claiming citizens do not have any standing to challenge the constitutionality of the chargers.
"This is a question of who has standing to uphold our Constitution,” Berg said in a statement. “If I don’t have standing, if you don’t have standing, if your neighbor doesn’t have standing to question the eligibility of an individual to be President of the United States - the Commander-in-Chief, the most powerful person in the world - then who does? So, anyone can just claim to be eligible for congress or the presidency without having their legal status, age or citizenship questioned."
Berg argued, "We the people have no right to police the eligibility requirements under the U.S. Constitution? What happened to …Government of the people, by the people, for the people…?” Apparently Mr. Obama’s credential at Columbia University is SEALED. His year at Harvard is SEALED. His Certificate of Live Birth, or COLB (a COLB is a completely different document, one that can be registered much later than at the time of birth) in the possession of the Hawaii Department of Public Health is also SEALED.
Berg stressed the urgency of his case, arguing that “we” the people are heading to a "Constitutional Crisis" if this case is not resolved quickly.
Utah Senator, Orrin Hatch, once said, “Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.” James Madison said, “The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power is derived.”
Freedom is a principle that must be applied indiscriminately. Once the constitutional laws are in place, they must be applied and practiced to their fullest. After living in America for 30 years, I have come to believe the Americans, of all people, understand the importance of a good, legal and sound constitutional framework as the foundation of political life.
Here is the question in the minds of many American citizens now: Is Barack Obama a United States Natural Born Citizen, and is he eligible to become the President of the United States, or did he present a forged government document to verify a citizenship he does not possess?
I am a recent "shareholder" in this magnificent "company" -- United States of America. The charter that lights the path of this country is the Constitution. I vehemently disagree with those who are more than willing to violate the Constitution and call it little more than a body of suggestions that can be disregarded when expedient. To me, the Constitution is our nation's most sacred document. It is the document that binds its vastly diverse constituents as equal loyal members.
I strongly feel that Mr. Obama and his supporters have not abided by the explicit provisions of the Constitution. For this reason, I am launching my protest and am demanding that the truth about Mr. Obama's eligibility to be the president of this great nation be conclusively established so that we can function as one nation and without the nagging question about Obama's eligibility that deeply troubles me and millions of my fellow Americans.
Amil Imani is an Iranian-born American citizen and pro-democracy activist residing in the United States of America. Imani is a columnist, literary translator, novelist and an essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran. He and his family escaped Iran after the radical Islamic revolution. His observations on the growing Islamo-fascist threat need to be heard and understood by as many people as possible if we are going to stem the tide.
NOTE: Mr. Imani recently appeared on our radio program, "Meet the New Press" . Click here to download the podcast.
Comments
Posted by: wolfwalker | November 11, 2008 9:49 PM
Posted by: mer | November 12, 2008 5:39 AM
Posted by: wolfwalker | November 12, 2008 11:54 AM
Posted by: mer | November 12, 2008 1:47 PM
Small correction: that's what you think was the gist of it. Funny thing about legal opinions: a lot of the time, they don't actually say what partisans would have you believe they say. The champion example of that in my experience is Miller v. US, the gun control case from 1936. For seventy years it was quoted ad nauseam as support for federal and state gun control. In fact, if you read the original SCOTUS opinion it's strong support for gun rights.
So until I read the judge's opinion, until I know his actual reasoning, I won't draw any conclusions. Neither should you, or anybody else. In particular, you should never trust a cherrypicked set of quotes from either side. For all either of us knows, the judge's ruling was the only one he could reach under the law and court rules.
As it happens, I ran another search and did find what appears to be the text of the dismissal order. Reading it, it appears that what happened is exactly what I thought happened: the judge dismissed because under standing law and precedent, by which judges are generally bound, Berg indeed did not have standing to file such a lawsuit. Note, incidentally, that two of the cases cited as precedent were cases in which the decision benefited Republicans: the similar controversy over McCain's citizenship, and a case from 2000 where some Democrat busybody alleged that Bush couldn't have Cheney as his veep candidate because they both [supposedly] lived in Texas.
There's no conspiracy here. There's no great constitutional issue here. There isn't even a particularly interesting legal question here. The Supreme Court's doctrine on standing makes perfect legal and common sense, as most well-established SCOTUS doctrines do: a plaintiff must establish actual harm, not just theoretical harm, in order to have standing to file any lawsuit. I'll agree that in this situation, that doctrine seems flawed, but in the absence of any clearer definition from the legislature, it will have to do. Few judges have the guts to ignore precedent on such a politically sensitive case. As an attorney, Berg should have known all this before he ever filed -- after all, the Bush-Cheney precedent is eight years old, and other cited precedents are older than that.
So we wind up right back where we started: Berg filed a lawsuit he knew he would lose on procedural grounds, purely as a publicity stunt. He's a nut, and no one should take him seriously.
Posted by: wolfwalker | November 13, 2008 8:07 AM