President Obama is US citizen
Citizen Obama
Some of the fringe, who believe that the Supreme Court erred in its decision in US v. Wong, or who believe that Wong only applied to the children of permanently domiciled aliens, need look no further than the Code of the United States to see what Barack Obama’s US citizenship status is:
SEC. 305. [8 U.S.C. 1405] A person born in Hawaii on or after August 12, 1898, and before April 30, 1900, is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of April 30, 1900. A person born in Hawaii on or after April 30, 1900, is a citizen of the United States at birth. A person who was a citizen of the Republic of Hawaii on August 12, 1898, is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of April 30, 1900.
I see no reference to the citizenship of parents in this law.
Sandford v. Sanford
Here’s a quick tutorial:
- Governor of South Carolina – Mark Sanford
- Author of Lynch v Clarke decision in New York – Lewis H. Sandford
- Defendant in Dred Scott v Sandford - John F.A. Sanford
Not only did the Supreme Court get the law wrong in the Dred Scott decision, it misspelled the name of the defendant.
RICO
While the word “Rico” will forever remind me of the character from the book Starship Troopers, it is also the acronym for the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act of 1970. Designed to take a bite of organized crime, world-famous birther leader and anti-Obama crusader Orly Taitz has stated that RICO should be used against “All Newspapers” for their willful denial of coverage of her lawsuits.
While this web site has documented significant coverage of Orly Taitz and her antics in the media, any objective tabulation of the number of mentions for “Orly Taitz” and “Barack Obama” will show that Orly is not getting equal time. So what is this RICO statute and what does it have do with the anti-Obama movement?
While primarily a criminal prosecution tool, there is a civil lawsuit provision. If an individual can demonstrate that they were harmed by a RICO, they can collect treble (three times) damages. RICO is codified as Chapter 96 of Title 18 of the United States Code, 18 U.S.C. § 1961–1968. For a civil lawsuit, there must be one of four specified relationships between the defendant(s) and the enterprise:
- Most courts have ruled that the only injury compensable under § 1962(a) is that resulting from a defendant’s investment of racketeering income.
- Most courts have required that the alleged injury to the plaintiff proximately result from the defendant’s acquisition of an interest in, or control over, an enterprise.
- Most civil RICO claims are filed under § 1962(c), which makes it unlawful to “conduct or participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct” of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. The key word here is “racketeering” which refers to an “illegal business”.
- Conspiracy to commit one of the previous 3.
[Thanks to LectLaw.com for research information for this article.]
OK, now where exactly does “newspapers not covering Orly’s cases” fit? Generally, newspapers may print what the want, and it is not illegal for them to print one thing and not another. I think Orly would say that that the crime is “fraud”, but we would have the same problem relating “criminal fraud” to the newspapers as we do RICO. Unless Orly has bought a newspaper company, I don’t think she gets in the door with a RICO suit.
And so as usual, birthers do not know what they are talking about.
Caution: I am not a lawyer.
International Law and the Constitution
In an article in the Yale Law Journal from June 2009, titled: The constitutional power to interpret international law, there is an interesting section dealing with the types of international law and their relationship to the Constitution of the United States. On this web site, we frequently refer to “The Law of Nations” by the Swiss philosopher and jurist Emmerich de Vattel, and it’s assertion that the indigenous people are those who are born in the country of citizen parents. (Later post constitutional English translations use the phrase “natural born citizen.”) The underpinning concept in his philosophical treatise is “natural law” as stated in the full title to the work: The Law of Nations or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns.
The article talks about “customary international law,” which is the kind of international that de Vattel writes about. It makes it clear that the constitutional phrase “The Law of Nations” does not refer at all to the work previously cited, nor is de Vattel even mentioned in this article.
The third type of international law, what is (customarily) referred to as customary international law, is the foggiest type of all. It refers to the norms and practices of nations, apart from treaties or other written agreements. Within the regime of international law, it is “law” inferred from “a general and consistent practice of states followed by them from a sense of legal obligation.” It is, in effect, a body of unwritten international “common law” principles. As such, the system of international law regards it as just as binding as treaties or other written conventions. Before so much of international law became treaty-fled in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such customary international law, referred to at the time of the Framing of the Constitution as the Law of Nations, was the dominant form of international law. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to refer to international law, at the time of the Framing of the Constitution, as largely consisting of principles of natural law, applicable to the conduct of nations (and their citizens) toward each other on the international plane. What we today call customary international law was, originally, a body of principles of just, proper, and proportionate conduct–right conduct–deduced from general principles of natural justice. (more…)
A Certification is not a Certificate….
…but it’s just as good.
I’ve written on this topic before. Part of the problem with the language is that it is used imprecisely and terms with technically different meanings are used interchangeably. States are not fully consistent with the titles they put on their documents. I’ve done some research in consultation with professionals in the field, and want to give you, the reader, some guidance on using the terms correctly:
- Birth certificate. This is an original document generated in most cases by a hospital, but possibly by others when a birth happens outside a hospital and not on the way to a hospital (if mother and newborn arrive in a taxi where the baby is born, the hospital completes the certificate). Different jurisdictions have their own procedures for the creation of certificates for those born outside a hospital. (There are variations on the theme when the birth is registered later — delayed birth certificates, or in the case of a foreign-born adoption.) Certificates contain one important attribute, the signature of the person attesting to the event. The most common type of certificate is the Certificate of Live Birth for the timely registration of children born alive.Nowadays many births are reported electronically by hospital systems (as a stream of data), and there is no paper birth certificate. In this case, the birth certificate is the electronic data and the signature is electronic.
- Certified Copy. Unless you work in a hospital or a vital records agency, chances are that you have never seen a real Birth Certificate. What you got from the State is a certified copy. A certified copy is a photocopy or digital image copy of the birth certificate. I will be signed by someone attesting that it is a true copy, and it should also be sealed (either in multiple colors or impressed) by the agency issuing it. Of course, with a paperless electronic system, there are no certified copies.
- Certification of Birth. Modern vital records systems carry computer databases of birth registration information. Some may retain images of old records while newer records may never have had an electronic image. The Barack Obama Certification of Live Birth is an example of one of these.
Certified Copies and Certifications of Birth carry certain basic information, including the child’s name, date and time of birth, location of birth (city, state, county), the State File Number, Sex and the date the record was filed with the vital records agency. Some may contain more. The important thing is that from a legal perspective a Certified Copy carries equal weight as a Certification of Birth, and both are fully valid for obtaining a passport, joining the military, registering with Social Security, and getting a drivers license, and until the lunatics run the asylum, proving that you’re eligible to be President of the United States.
Licenses and Certificates
How do you get a driver’s license? You show up with some documents, say a Social Security card and a birth certificate. You take an eye test. You take a written test. You take a driving test, and the tester more than likely signs a piece of paper with your score on it. All that goes to a clerk who types that information into a computer screen, takes your picture, and prints a drivers license with a computer-assigned number for you. I daresay none of the paperwork that went into the computer is kept.
My driver’s license doesn’t have my Social Security number on it; it doesn’t have my written test score; it doesn’t have the letters I read off the eye chart. It doesn’t have the signature, or even the name of the person who gave me my manual test. Nevertheless, when I have to prove that I’m licensed to drive a car no one seems to care about all that paperwork; they just want to know if the state says I’m a licensed and they tell that by looking at a document with the state seal and the governor’s signature on it.
A birth certificate is pretty much the same thing, especially now in the days of electronic health records. A baby is born and the time of birth and some medical findings are entered into a computer EHR. The attending physician might sign a signature pad to capture an electronic image, or he may just key in a password and swipe an access card. Later on the mother is interviewed, or given a worksheet to fill out. It all gets keyed, and transmitted from the hospital to the state vital statistics entry. They make sure everything is filled out and they mark the record as registered and assign a certificate number.
Your birth certificate is a dump of some of the birth registration data from that computer system onto a nicely formatted piece of security paper, with the state seal, and signed by some responsible authority. Nobody asks you for the mothers worksheet, your APGAR score, the doctors dictation recording, the delivery room nurse’s name, or anything else. The process was followed in the past and now it’s the state who certifies the information.
Driver’s licenses and birth certificates are really very much alike. In both cases someone goes through a prescribed process to get the paperwork into the computer, and in both cases, the state issues a document certifying that the process was indeed followed, and the information they print on it follows the state regulations required to record it.
