By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
It just doesn't appear to be going away.
The idea that Barack Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office, and do chores such as appointing Supreme Court justices, needs to be explored and documented is headed back to the highest court in the land.
According to the Supreme Court's own website, there is scheduled to be a conference Jan. 7, 2011, on a case submitted by Orly Taitz.
This particular case has had a long proceeding; it began as a challenge to the legality of the military orders under Obama, whose eligibility to hold the office of president never has been documented to date. While that officer, Capt. Connie Rhodes, ultimately followed her orders, the attorney was fined $20,000 in the case, and it continued its path through the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and now is pending in Washington.
WND Exclusive BORN IN THE USA?
Supremes facing eligibility challenge to Obama, again
Taitz's case distributed for conference among justices on Jan. 7
Posted: December 18, 2010
12:35 am Eastern
By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
It just doesn't appear to be going away.
The idea that Barack Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office, and do chores such as appointing Supreme Court justices, needs to be explored and documented is headed back to the highest court in the land.
According to the Supreme Court's own website, there is scheduled to be a conference Jan. 7, 2011, on a case submitted by Orly Taitz.
This particular case has had a long proceeding; it began as a challenge to the legality of the military orders under Obama, whose eligibility to hold the office of president never has been documented to date. While that officer, Capt. Connie Rhodes, ultimately followed her orders, the attorney was fined $20,000 in the case, and it continued its path through the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and now is pending in Washington.
Whether it will fall by the wayside as have other cases on the same issue that have been submitted to the court remains to be seen. But even if this case falls, it doesn't appear the issue itself will fade.
Read the full report on Obama's eligibility yourself.
Consider:
* More than a year ago, polls revealed that a bare half of the people in the United States even knew there was an issue over Obama's eligibility but recent polls have indicated up to 58 percent of Americans now have doubts over that issue.
* Fining attorneys, even jailing defendants, as happened in this week's high-profile case against Lt. Col. Terry Lakin at Ft. Meade, Md., hasn't caused the issue to disappear.
* A billboard campaign that simply asks "Where's the Birth Certificate" has appeared in many dozens of locations, and one billboard company that a year ago concluded it was more or less a settled issue now has asked to be allowed to participate in the campaign.
* Various officials have "verified" Obama's eligibility but have declined to document their statements.
* Extensive examinations of the available record suggest Obama likely is, in fact, ineligible.
* There remains a multitude of lawsuits still making their way toward Supreme Court review:
* In Congress, a pending proposal would require all candidates for the office of president to document their eligibility under the Constitution's requirement that they be a "natural born citizen."
* Similar plans are moving even more quickly at the state legislature level.
* And there even are predictions that Congress will take up the dispute.
Retired Cmdr. Charles Kerchner, whose legal challenge to Obama's eligibility recently was turned back by the Supreme Court on a vote that included two members of the bench appointed by Obama and therefore holding an apparent conflict of interest, said the problems will just get bigger the longer the issue remains unresolved.
"The Obama eligibility matter should have been fully and thoroughly addressed and openly investigated by the investigative reporters in the major media and political parties early in the spring of 2008 during the primaries to get all of Obama's documents released to the public as part of the vetting process. It wasn't done," he said.
"Congress should have addressed when asked by 100s of thousands of constituent letters and petitions sent to them and when constitutionally it was required to [do] so under the 20th Amendment. It didn't," he continued. "Everyone in our system of government chose ignoring the problem and appeasement over confrontation and punted the ball to someone else.
Orly Tait
"Now it is far worse. The Supreme Court has chosen appeasement and inaction over action and dealing with the issue and questions openly in a court of law under the rules of evidence and law," he said.
That decision not to address the uncertainty of Obama's background now, "will only delay the inevitable and fester and grow and in the end be a far worse situation to deal with when the real nature of the tyrant reveals himself in a much bolder way and attempts to take away all our protections to our unalienable rights and liberty," he said.
Taitz, who was among those who brought concerns to the Supreme Court at the time of the election on an emergency basis – all of which were refused by the Supremes, told WND that she's convinced ultimately the Supreme Court will review Obama.
"I don't believe they can continue avoiding this issue," she said. "They have to show integrity, have to show that the Constitution of the United States matters."
She said also the case has been getting "ripe," or coalescing into a specific dispute. There now are disagreements among court rulings, she said. She cited a California court ruling that there could be a door for the courts to determine the issue but only after Congress has acted, even though another judge ruled the matter should have been brought to the courts before the election.
Further, one judge has ruled that the military should resolve the question over Obama's eligibility to be commander in chief while the result from the recent Lakin court martial was that Judge Denise Lind refused even to allow his defense arguments, evidence and witnesses in her courtroom, essentially withholding related due process and discovery procedures.
Taitz said one of the largest issues that remains a roadblock to the case being resolved is that Obama's two appointees to the Supreme Court apparently are participating in cases in which they have an interest.
"In my opinion they [Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor, both appointed to the bench by Obama] should recuse themselves," she said. "However until now they have refused to recuse themselves in such cases."
Taitz said the conflict is clear: they were appointed by a president who may not have had the authority to appoint them, therefore their own positions would be in jeopardy.
Kerchner brought forward the same concerns.
"The two justices appointed by Obama who in my opinion had a direct financial conflict of interest (their very jobs and appointments to the court) in the outcome of this petition and they did not recuse themselves even though they should have!" he wrote.
"Their recusal was called for in our petition on page 36 with the relevant U.S. Code cited. The two justices and the court ignored that. … I suspect the water cooler buzz at SCOTUS was that 3 justices were leaning for granting certiorari. So it looks like Sotomayor and Kagan ignored ethical considerations and stayed in the review of the petition to be sure it got killed, i.e., to be in that room to argue against certiorari, and to require 4 votes instead of 3."
Taitz v. MacDonald, the case now pending before the Supremes, originally was brought on behalf of Rhodes, an Army flight surgeon questioning the validity of deployment orders issued under Obama's signature. The case argues that Obama has not proven that he is a "natural-born citizen" of the United States, which Article 2 of the Constitution requires any president to be.
A "natural born citizen" was considered at the time the Constitution was adopted as an individual whose parents are both American citizens. Obama's father was a British subject when Obama was born in 1961.
But Taitz vs. MacDonald goes beyond Obama's legitimacy to raise the possibility of Social Security fraud.
"Legitimacy is a theoretical question," Taitz told WND earlier. "This case also presents evidence of criminal actions by Obama, showing he needs to be both removed from office and prosecuted."
Taitz said the case provides evidence generated by professional investigators showing that the Social Security number currently used by Obama is fraudulent.
"It cannot have been legally obtained," said Taitz.
Her brief asserts that Obama's Social Security number was first issued to a Connecticut resident born in 1890.
"This is evidence of fraud," Taitz said.
More legal documents related to Taitz v. MacDonald can be found on Taitz' website.
According to Taitz, the likelihood that the Supreme Court will rule on the merits of Taitz v. MacDonald is increased because she personally has legal standing to bring the case. Taitz was fined $20,000 by Judge Clay D. Land in connection with the case, and she's appealing the fine, which she contends violated her civil rights.
WND has reported on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's status as a "natural born citizen." The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."
Some of the lawsuits question whether he was actually born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.
Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. The cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.
Several of the cases have involved emergency appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court in which justices have declined even to hear arguments. Among the cases turned down without a hearing at the high court have been petitions by Philip Berg, Cort Wrotnowski, Leo Donofrio and Taitz.
Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions.
One other prominent case in which a judge threatened sanctions against an attorney involved attorney John Hemenway. He brought a challenge on behalf of retired military officer Gregory S. Hollister.
The Hollister case ultimately was dismissed by Judge James Robertson, who notably ruled during the 2008 election campaign that the federal legal dispute had been "twittered" and, therefore, resolved.
Robertson sarcastically wrote: "The plaintiff says that he is a retired Air Force colonel who continues to owe fealty to his commander in chief (because he might possibly be recalled to duty) and who is tortured by uncertainty as to whether he would have to obey orders from Barack Obama because it has not been proven – to the colonel's satisfaction – that Mr. Obama is a native-born American citizen, qualified under the Constitution to be president.
"The issue of the president's citizenship was raised, vetted, blogged, texted, twittered and otherwise massaged by America's vigilant citizenry during Mr. Obama's two-year campaign for the presidency, but this plaintiff wants it resolved by a court," Robertson wrote.
Then the judge suggested sanctions against Hemenway for bringing the case. Hemenway responded that the process then would provide him with a right to a discovery hearing to see documentation regarding the judge's statements – not supported by any evidence introduced into the case – that Obama was properly "vetted."
Hemenway warned at the time, "If the court persists in pressing Rule 11 procedures against Hemenway, then Hemenway should be allowed all of the discovery pertinent to the procedures as court precedents have permitted in the past.
"The court has referred to a number of facts outside of the record of this particular case and, therefore, the undersigned is particularly entitled to a hearing to get the truth of those matters into the record. This may require the court to authorize some discovery," Hemenway said.
The court ultimately backed off its threat of sanctions.
This case also remains in the court system heading for the Supreme Court.
