Friday, December 05, 2008

[obama] produce the vault copy and have done with it


Simple solution

The Chicago Tribune says:

The Obama campaign has maintained that he was born in Hawaii, has an authentic birth certificate, and is a "natural-born" U.S. citizen. Hawaiian officials agree.

The Obama camp can "maintain" all it likes. The fact is that there is a court order on them to have produced the vault copy, not the extract that they are basing it on and they have failed to do that relatively simple thing.

The extract seems pretty clear in itself - it certainly seems an authentic copy and has been viewed and checked by Factcheck.org. That would seem to be that until you discover that Factcheck is run by the Annenberg Foundation, for whom a former board member was ... Barack Obama.

All it takes to clear the whole thing up is:

Submit the vault copy to the USSC, as ordered by the court.

The instant that is done, all these lawsuits fall away. Instead of that, those who are asking the questions are being labelled "a small minority of anti-Obama people", indulging in "sour grapes' and "conspiracy theories".

Ad hominem attack has no weight in law and hardly constitutes evidence. Once again, the solution is simple - produce the vault copy and end this speculation:

Obama’s paternal grandmother still maintains that her grandson—Barack Hussein Obama (AKA Barry Sotero)—was born in Kenya and that she attended his birth. Obama’s half-brother and half-sister have confirmed the grandmother’s statement.

Another source.

By the way, does anyone remember a man named Richard Nixon and some tapes he refused to release? His opponents were called cranks and conspiracy theorists too.

Pots and kettles

So why aren't the Republicans up in arms about it? Perhaps this will answer the question:

"The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over McCain's eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make McCain a natural-born citizen.

"It's preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy," Professor Chin said. "But this is the constitutional text that we have."

"No court will get close to it, and everyone else is on board, so there's a constitutional consensus, the merits of arguments such as this one aside," said Peter Spiro, an authority on the law of citizenship at Temple University."

There it is - the law and the constitution don't matter, as long as "everybody's on board about it. When a large number of people agree to suspend constitutional provisions, that's OK then, isn't it?

What happens next?

The first Presidential Succession Act, passed in 1792, provided that after the President and Vice President, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate would serve as President.

In July 2005, Senate Bill 442: "A bill to provide for the Secretary of Homeland Security to be included in the line of Presidential succession", sponsored by Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio).

  1. Vice President Dick Cheney
  2. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
  3. Senate President Pro Tem Ted Stevens, R-Alaska [1]
  4. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
So clearly it would be Bush and Cheney until January but if there had not been another election before then, then House Speaker Pelosi takes over, then Sen Pres pro Tem Robert Byrd, then Condi.

What's with Hillary?

Obama’s transition team gave the green light to Clinton’s nomination after lawyers worked out a remarkable agreement addressing potential conflicts of interest for former President Bill Clinton, who has extensive financial ties abroad.

There is also the Johnson/J Edgar Hoover maxim about having the bstd inside p---ing out. What did Clinton discover about Obama when they were at bitter loggerheads?

5 comments:

  1. Congress as a body ruled that McCain was indeed eligible for the Presidency in 99 or 2000 (when he ran the 1st time).

    No clue why BO isn't just producing the stinking paper though

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  2. Yes, McCain does seem to have answered the question and it's line ball if he was naturalized or not but it seems the clinching argument there was two U.S. parents.

    The 2000 run also supports his claim.

    Obama though does not have two U.S. parents and won't prove he was born in Hawaii. He has also ignored a SCOTUS order. Further, his camp is casting aspersions on Justice Thomas.

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  3. It's a peculiarly ill-written part of The Constitution (blessed be its name). What does "natural born" mean? When the question was discussed at The Volokh Conspiracy, the answer that sounded plausible to me was that The Constitution (peace be upon it) requires that one be an American by virtue of birth. There was further discussion of cases of that; naturally pretty much every one sneered at the silly notion that it means that one needs to be born in the USA - a well justified sneerfest, I'd say. Anyway, two points: (i) of course O should hand over the proper scrap of paper, (ii) remember that when things are Really Important, The Constitution (which art in heaven) is ignored.

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  4. This part of the constitution is - to put it bluntly - bloody stupid. If you are entitled to be an American citizen from birth - which both Obama and McCain are - that should be the end of it, although considering the US is a land of immigrants, I find it strange that someone who is a naturalised American is barred from the top job. This is an issue that needs to be addressed by Congress.

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  5. Andrew, Congress can't "address" it - it would need an Amendment.

    ReplyDelete

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