Obama Conspiracy Theories closed to new articles on January 20, 2017, as as the very presidential Barack Obama left office, and was replaced by someone completely different. The open thread is a place to leave comments and continue the discussion. This thread will close, and be replaced by another in 4 weeks.
If you have not had an approved comment here before, your comment will first go into moderation for subsequent review and approval.
I think this might have gone under the radar, but it brings one thread of the whole Obama birth narrative to a conclusion–
http://obits.staradvertiser.com/2017/12/10/verna-k-l-lee/
May she rest in peace.
Speaking of the deceased…
Robert Laity’s Petition for Rehearing in Laity v New York, et. al. died a quiet death.
I added a note at the end of the article.
https://rcradioblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/last-birther-case-scheduled-to-be-executed-on-march-16th/
I don’t think either demise could be called unexpected.
I guess it’s true that there may yet be future birther cases filed.
In some sense though, that seems sort of a fairly final end.
To every birther, everywhere:
We told you so.
Free court docket lookup service described:
http://wisblawg.law.wisc.edu/2009/06/new-source-for-free-federal-court-dockets-no-pacer-required/
Interesting, but it seems like a lot of work just to save a few dollars.
Not sufficiently newsworthy for Sharon, apparently.
Unbelievable. Sharon just keeps on birfin’.
You’d think people would get tired of complete b___s___.
Apparently not.
Someone has to be the last one to turn out the lights I suppose. I am sure she has only a handful of readers. Very few people comment there other than a few regular idiots like Cody Robert Judy.
All the other Birther blogs have shut down like Birther Report, Apuzzo’s blog, etc. I think he, Lucas Daniel Smith is is running his con but no one is paying attention.
Every once in a while David Farrar and Apuzzo pop up in comments on articles mentioning something about the natural born citizenship requirement.
Looks to me like Mario’s still birfin’, too. He hasn’t published a new article in over 2 years, but there are a few recent comments in the comments section.
As long as that jackass has an admiring audience to stroke his ego, even if it’s only 2 or 3 people, he’ll continue to bray.
One of Mario’s admirers’ posts:
There’s a disorder there of some kind.
Because normally, that level of stupidity ought to cause its bearer some physical pain.
Just to clarify a point in the prior open thread, Lafayette was never eligible to be president because he didn’t live in America for 14 years. Baron von Steuben did become eligible a few years before he died. Both were U.S. citizens when the Constitution was adopted, but they still had to meet the residency requirement.
Judy still fantasizes that SCOTUS will revive his dead and buried lawsuit.
Rondeau didn’t even know about Laity’s latest fail (until some mean Obots told her about it). Rondeau didn’t even know how to research Laity’s latest (final?) fail.
* * *
Apuzzo’s blog is mostly tumbleweeds, but he occasionally pops up in his own comments to continue declaring victory.
Smith’s blog is mostly just “Bruce” reposting articles from the usual RWNJ sites. (Ditto with Taitz’s.)
Birther Report?; dead. The Right Side of Life?; dead. Etc.
Although the P&E still churns out stories, most are just rehashing the “glory” days of 2010.
* * *
Judy’s comments used to suggest that he understood that SCOTUS was never going to entertain the petition he claims he filed (it has never appeared on its docket). His more recent comments, however, describe it as “pending.”
The residency requirement is a little fuzzy as written because the United States didn’t exist before 1776 at the earliest. I suppose they meant that citizens of any of the colonies at the time of separation were included. Otherwise even George Washington was not eligible when he assumed the office on April 30, 1789.
Disagree. ‘Successor in Law’ doctrine for a start, and the concept that citizenship of a particular state meant also citizenship of the nation.
Clearly everyone KNEW that Washington was eligible and the residency provision presented no bar to that. The residency requirement ‘count’ obviously carried across the independence threshold.
I have always considered that Alexander Hamilton was the chief beneficiary of the grandfather clause. Born in Jamaica, he was naturalized in New York before the war of independence. Obviously, he was killed in a duel before he had the chance.
Lafayette was granted ‘natural born citizenship’ of the State of Maryland, and thus of the United States (along with all his living male heirs) during his lifetime – in 1784 (i.e. after Independence but before the Constitution was adopted). On the other hand, he was granted ‘Honorary Citizenship’ in 2002 – was that a demotion or something?
In 1787 he was a member of the French ‘Assembly of Notables’, essentially the Government Cabinet. In 1789 he was elected to the French Estates-General of 1789. Jefferson wanted to appoint him Governor of Louisiana in 1803, but he was busy keeping his head on his shoulders while Napoleon was running things.
So if there is any ‘fuzziness’ it is about Lafayette’s citizenship, not his residency.
(Plus, according to an historical play I saw last year in Chicago, he was black 😎 ).
Yeah. Ditto. Everyone knew Washington was eligible.
That particular petition was never docketed because Judy misaddressed it to Justice Gorsuch, who doesn’t have jurisdiction over petitions from the Tenth Circuit. It should have gone to Justice Sotomayor, but Judy insisted that she wasn’t available because she “had” to recuse herself, which of course is nonsense.
Not that it would have made any difference.
Trivia note: the first candidate to benefit from the “grandfather clause” was Edward Telfair of Georgia. He was born in Scotland and received one electoral vote in the 1788-1789 election. All of the other candidates who received electoral votes in that election were born in the colonies.
Samuel Johnston of North Carolina (born in Scotland) and James Iredell of North Carolina (born in England) both received electoral votes in the 1796 election.
To my knowledge they are the only non-natural born citizens to have received electoral votes in presidential elections.
I never meant to imply that Washington was ineligible. It’s just that one has to go outside the language of the Constitution to come to that conclusion. No one had been a citizen of the United States for 14 years in 1789 because it had not existed for 14 years. Prior to 1776 all residents of the 13 colonies had been British subjects.
But obviously, they never intended that the first President of the United States under the new Constitution — didn’t have to be George Washington, literally anyone else would’ve been in the same boat — would be ineligible to serve.
Hence, it’s clear that residence in any of the colonies that became the United States qualified a candidate.
Interesting info on Telfair, Johnston & Iredell.
I agree. All citizens who had been residents of the USA and prior residents of one of the colonies and who were 35 years of age would have been considered eligible. I was just being technical in pointing out that no one could have resided “within the United States” for 14 years in 1789 since it had only existed for 13 years.
Also the residency requirement did not refer to citizenship. Therefore anyone who naturalized prior to the very day of the adoption of the Constitution in one of the states but met the 14 residency requirement was eligible if they were also 35 years old.
It’s worth noting here that in The Charming Betsy, 6 U.S. 64 (1804), Chief Justice John Marshall described Jared Shattuck, who “was born in Connecticut before the American Revolution,” as having been “born in the United States,” 6 US at 116.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/6/64/case.html
I’m completely convinced that while there may have been dissent on the matter, the prevailing view at the time was that natural born status in the colonies was nothing less than natural born status in the United States, and that residence in the colonies was considered residence in the United States for purposes of Article II.
I agree. Rambo Ike and some others make the ridiculous argument that the Founding Fathers changed the definition of natural born citizen from what had previously been used for natural born subject. He claims they changed it to jus sanguinis except that they didn’t bother to write it down anywhere. That is essentially what Apuzzo is saying too.
As the Supreme Court explained in Wong Kim Ark the English common law definition for natural born subject was what was assumed in the Constitution and had been in use in all the states until it was codified in the 14th Amendment.
I should have said jus sanguinis and jus soli. The Birthers claim both are necessary. They are wrong of course.
Wasn’t that Bob Gards idea?
Ballantine replied:
“Your theory appears to be based upon your speculation as to what someone who wasn’t at the Convention thought the word meant with no evidence that any people who framed the document or ratified it agreed with it. Kind of sad. I guess we are all going to have to change the way we understand the Constitution and follow Bob’s new theory.”
To believe the contrary implies that John Jay thought George Washington unqualified to be Commander in Chief, and that is hardly credible.
Also Madison’s argument in the Smith-Ramsay controversy talks about the assumption of political allegiance by a citizen/subject when the government changes. One’s primary allegiance is to the civil society.
Madison said:
“I conceive that every person who owed this primary allegiance to the particular community in which he was born, retained his right of birth, as a member of a new community; that he was absolved from a secondary allegiance that he had owed to a British sovereign.”
And to believe the contrary implies that nobody was eligible to be Commander in Chief, which obviously is absurd.
Apuzzo awakens to write a new article in response to yet-another-doomed proposal to amend the natural-born-citizen clause out of the U.S. Constitution.
It is funny to watch Apuzzo try to lecture Walsh on his paper when he doesn’t even know the definition of natural born citizen. Apuzzo is the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Unless I missed them Apuzzo didn’t actually leave his comments on the Reason article. He only posted them in an article on his blog. Of course there he can moderate any replies he doesn’t like.
I came across a Supreme Court case that I was not familiar with which clarifies that aliens domiciled in the United States, even undocumented aliens, are “subject to the jurisdiction” under the Fourteenth Amendment. The case involved an effort by Texas to deny public education to undocumented children. Justice Brennan wrote the majority opinion.
Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)
In appellants’ view, persons who have entered the United States illegally are not “within the jurisdiction” of a State even if they are present within a State’s boundaries and subject to its laws. Neither our cases nor the logic of the Fourteenth Amendment support that constricting construction of the phrase “within its jurisdiction”…Use of the phrase “within its jurisdiction” thus does not detract from, but rather confirms, the understanding that the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State, and reaches into every corner of a State’s territory.
Thus a child born in the United States to undocumented parents is indeed a natural-born citizen.
American Experience on PBS will be airing an episode on the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Here is a trailer for it discussing Wong Kim Ark.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/chinese-exclusion-act-united-states-v-wong-kim-ark/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_term=20180524&utm_content=1553987986&linkId=52138561
Show airs May 29th and can be streamed on the PBS website for a short time after that.
It’s déjà vu all over again.
Gallups went on a fellow traveler’s show this week, and went full tin foil about how the president’s recent spy accusations are really all about the birth certificate.
Then Zullo was on Freedom Friday today for an hour. Much of it was rehash; the only new things:
1. Zullo bragged about his inbox has been exploding, but it sounds like a birther recently contacted FORLAB, which in turn contacted Zullo;
2. Zullo teased the existence of a smudge on a PDF layer that he thinks looks like a partial latent fingerprint.
I wonder if he means the layer of white dots up at the top of the PDF. I always thought it sort of looked like a thumb. It’s the only layer that doesn’t have a ready explanation.
Of course it just shows how stupid the guy is.
I wonder if Zullo is still putting in 100 hour weeks sitting there staring at the LFBC?
I posted this comment on my blog:
Apparently the fired CCP lead, Mike Zullo was on Carl Gallups’ radio show Friday. Of course the Post & Email ran the obligatory article about Gallups’ and Zullo’s baseless speculation:
In the now deleted comment left by “Curious” at my blog he said that he had contacted FORLAB in Italy. I wonder if that is what was the basis of Zullo’s ranting?