Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Journal-Constitution Finally Reports On Eligibility Case

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to put up a story late yesterday discussing the fact that a judge in its state had refused to quash a subpoena ordering President Obama to appear at a hearing considering whether he is constitutionally eligible to appear on Georgia's presidential primary election ballot as a presidential candidate. The AJC's Bill Rankin doesn't take the challenge seriously and doesn't think Obama should either. Rankin reports on Obama's plans for Thursday:

Even though President Barack Obama has been summoned to a court hearing here Thursday, don’t expect the Commander in Chief to come.
Obama will embark on a three-day trip following his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, White House press secretary Jay Carney said during a press briefing Monday. The White House has said that Obama will be in Las Vegas, Denver and Detroit this Thursday.
Rankin, like so many of his media colleagues, has chosen to lie about the key contention of the eligibility lawsuit.  Rankin calls Judge Michael Malihi's order refusing to quash the subpoena issued against Obama "surprising" in "a challenge to strike him from the Georgia ballot this fall on claims he is not a U.S. citizen." Again, Rankin apparently is another glaring example of how our school systems apparently no longer teach civics to students. Word to Rankin, a person can be a citizen and still not be a "natural born citizen."

Rankin wants you to know that 68 other challenges against Obama's eligibility filed around the country have been dismissed and are viewed as "baseless" allegations by "birthers." Rankin also found a law professor at Georgia State University who is equally ignorant of the U.S. Constitution. He claims the lawsuits are litigating "the issue of president's nationality." He says the case is "frivolous" and should be dismissed like the other lawsuits, all of which were dismissed on standing grounds, not the merits of the plaintiffs' contention that Obama is not a natural born citizen.

As I pointed out, during the 1968 presidential election, major newspapers like the New York Times wrote dozens of stories discussing the issue of whether George Romney, father of Mitt Romney, was a natural born citizen despite the fact that he was born to two U.S. citizens because he was born in Mexico. Not a single one of those stories suggested Romney wasn't a citizen. None of those stories suggested the persons doubting Romney's eligibility were anti-Mormon or anti-Mexican. Romney was eventually hounded out of the race before a single vote was ever cast in that election under the threat of litigation over his eligibility to claim natural born citizenship status.

Nothing in the constitution has changed in the past 50 years concerning presidential eligibility. What has happened in the ensuing fifty years is that the U.S. Constitution has simply been amended in the court of public opinion to mean something the framers never intended it to mean. If they can rewrite the natural born citizenship requirement without an amendment, think what else they can write out of the constitution without an amendment. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down yesterday an attempt by the Obama administration to further erode our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government through the use of warrantless tracking devices. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court allows him to get away with abolishing habeus corpus as he did by signing into law the National Defense Authorization Act late last year. By allowing the public to be fooled into thinking this debate is just another bigoted attack against Obama by people unwilling to accept an African-American president, we are taking a trip down the slippery slope of becoming a nation of men, not a nation of laws as was envisioned and adopted by our Founders.

UPDATE: What do you know? Mr. Rankin revised his online story to state that the complaint contended Obama was not a "natural born citizen" as opposed to a citizen after I e-mailed him and pointed out his mistake and he replied "gotcha" and was correcting the story immediately. I'll give him credit for correcting his error, although the updated story doesn't mention the earlier mistatement.

No comments: