Tomorrow the Supreme Court will decide on whether to hear a case arguing that Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen and, as a result, doesn’t meet the requirements to be President.
What if they rule he doesn’t meet the requirements before the electoral college meets?
What if they rule he doesn’t meet the requirements after the electoral college meets but before the inauguration?
What if they rule he doesn’t meet the requirements after the inauguration?
For the record, I don’t subscribe to this conspiracy theory, but I’m curious about the constitutional question.
The electors would STILL vote Obama as President. Then he’d be elected president but ineligible to serve. Then the process would follow. They’d vote the VP in and he’d take over as law dictates.
The hypothetical is absurd of course, but in the interest of staying GQ, the answer is easy: the succession rules would be the same as if the president-elect died.
If this happens before the electoral college meets, the electors can change their votes and vote for the VP-elect or anyone else. Presumably the victorious party would try to coordinate votes for a single candidate. Some states bind their electors, so this could be a messy political process. If no candidate receives a majority of the votes, the 12th amendment applies and sends the vote to the House of Representatives. If they can’t select a president by inauguration day, the 20th amendment says that the VP becomes acting president until they make a decision. If the electoral college didn’t already decide the VP, then the Speaker of the House becomes acting president until the House sorts out the mess.
If the president-elect dies or is ruled ineligible after the electoral college meets or after inauguration, the 20th amendment applies and the VP would ascend to the presidency.
At the risk of getting reprimanded for straying into GD territory… how in the heck has this absurd conspiracy theory about Obama’s citizenship gained any traction?
What if they rule he doesn’t meet the requirements before the electoral college meets?
Then the Electors will vote for whomever they like. But I imagine almost all of them would vote for Obama anyway. Which is functionally identical to question 2.
What if they rule he doesn’t meet the requirements after the electoral college meets but before the inauguration?
Then Congress could refuse to accept the results of the Electoral College. Except, since Congress has a solid democratic majority, they aren’t going to do that. Which is functionally identical to question 3.
What if they rule he doesn’t meet the requirements after the inauguration?
Then Congress could impeach Obama and remove him from office because he doesn’t meet the requirements. But since Congress is majority Democrat, that’s not going to happen either. Or by section 4 of the 25th Amendment:
Except that would require that Biden throw Obama under a bus, and that ain’t gonna happen either.
In other words, if the Supreme Court rules that Obama doesn’t meet the requirements for the presidency then what will happen is that Obama will still become president and the Supreme Court can suck it. The only thing that could convince Congress and/or Biden that Obama has to go is a solid majority of the American people demanding that Obama has to go. But that’s not going to happen, because we just had an election that Obama just won handily. The voters are the real backstop to prevent an unqualified candidate from becoming President.
But of course, the reality is that even if it were shown that Obama was born in Kenya, the Supreme Court wouldn’t rule that he wasn’t a natural born citizen. They’d declare that a political question…that is, one left up to the voters. In other words, the Supreme Court would agree with me.
What would happen if gravity reversed direction? What would happen if the LHC swallows the universe in a black hole? Why is this topic still on the board?
I am guessing it is because this has never received judicial review (on what, exactly, constitutes a “natural born citizen”). I fully expect the SCOTUS to say what the federal code on being a US citizen at birth is the thing to go with and thus Obama is a natural born citizen and settle this persistent question once and for all.
If the SCOTUS unseats Obama there would be mass rioting (I would bet all my money on that). No freaking way the SCOTUS, especially after 2000, is going to rule Obama out of office. The justices would be lynched…wouldn’t surprise me if the Senate tried to impeach them out of their seats. Would be a right mess. Not going to happen.
Just looking over the story, the Justices are not even considering whether to “grant cert.” (accept the case for consideration, more or less), much less indicating a likely decision. This is simply a petition to grant a stay – the equivalent of “Please tell them not to execute me until you’ve had a chance to decide whether to hear my appeal” or, on a much lower level, “Please tell respondent not to tear down the building we claim we own and want preserved until you’ve had a chance to decide if it’s his to tear down or ours to preserve.” Justice Thomas distributed the petition for a stay (presumably of Obama’s inauguration; the story says only that before continuation the case originally asked for a stay of the election) to allow the full court to decide whether to grant the stay. (An individual justice can either grant or refuse a petition for a stay or refer it to the full court for decision.)
But there really is no legal theory possible under which the Supreme Court could rule that Obama isn’t a “natural born citizen” unless new facts come to light, like that Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
But the Supreme Court doesn’t argue facts. That’s up to lower courts to decide.
We can imagine the Supreme Court ruling that anyone who was born outside the United States might be a citizen but not a “natural born” citizen. But they wouldn’t then rule on whether Obama was or was not born outside the United States.
And anyway, this case wouldn’t even be a ruling on what a “natural born citizen” is, or whether Obama does or does not fit that definition. Rather it would be to rule on who has standing to complain about whether a candidate is a natural born citizen or not.
One note (which is actually addressing a related and relevant GQ)-taken verbatim from a comment by a poster (one Roy Englert) on a post of Eugene Volokh’s analyzing the issue. Volokh’s post itself is good, but the valuable point is made in a very clear way in the comments: http://volokh.com/posts/1228153366.shtml#494257
So if he’s right, referring it to the conference is just a way of rejecting the request for a stay in a way that prevents refiling.
(I note, somewhat chagrined, that I have argued in the past on this message board that there wasn’t any reason to submit it to conference. On that, I was wrong insofar as there is a reason for the case to go to conference. (Even so, the posts in question were in the context of whether there was any good reason to take the case, which there isn’t. (and, after all, IANAL-my knowledge of supreme court procedure is amateur compared to those guys.).). Ignorance fought once again.
Well, that’s the point. In order for Obama to not be a “natural born citizen” we would have to have more than new legal theories, but new facts.
As you say, McCain was born in Panama, and being born on a US Naval base doesn’t make you a US citizen. What makes McCain a US citizen is that both his parents were US citizens. What makes Obama a US citizen is the fact that he was born in the US. In order to demonstrate that Obama is not a US citizen or a “natural born” US citizen, you’d have to prove that fact wrong, and probably several other facts as well, like that Obama’s mother was a US citizen.
The guy who filed this lawsuit, Lee D’onofio, happens to be a huge fan of one of my favorite bands, the Stone Roses. He once wrote a huge, totally off-the-wall manifesto under the name Burnweed about how this band and its songs were written to tell the world of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Each member of the band functioned as a different role in God’s secret master plan, but the drummer was the messiah. He saw all these secret signals everywhere and believed that signs were pointing him towards the hidden truth about this band and their cosmic purpose. You can read all about it at the link below. It’s a totally crazy story, and he’s a totally crazy guy, but believe it or not, I think it actually makes for a pretty good story:
The Electoral College would nevertheless very likely elect Obama anyway, and if it didn’t, it would very likely elect Biden.
Obama would note that he had been duly elected, and ask the Court to reconsider. It very likely would (having realized it was foolish to rule as it had in the first place).
Congress could impeach him or he could resign; both are equally unlikely.
But just to be clear: the Supreme Court is simply not going to do this. Not a chance in hell. It’s as political a question as one can imagine. Having taken as much heat as they did in 2000 (see Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine for a fascinating account) in a very close election, the justices have to know it would be sheer madness to further damage the court’s standing and create a constitutional crisis now, when the will of the voters is so clear.
But isn’t it well settled already? The constitution specifically authorizes the congress to set the rules to define citizenship (Article I, Section 8), and they have. What’s the legal issue you (they) want SCOTUS to rule on?
The case against Mr Obama’s citizenship is not quite as trivial as this board has made it out to be, but that discussion is not the point of this thread.
I believe what is in front of the SCOTUS is whether or not to allow a lower case to proceed. Before Mr Obama was president-elect it was difficult for a plaintiff to complain that he had been harmed. Now that Mr Obama is the president-elect, it’s a bit easier to claim harm since the constitutional authority of a president who did not meet the requirements would be open to debate.
I agree that the chance anything will come of this is trivial. Mr Obama has apparently lived his life under the assumption that his citizenship is US, and allegations to the contrary, such as those who say he applied to Harvard as a foreign student, or that his original Hawaiian birth certificate is different from the one printed off as an official replica, or that his mother renounced his US citizenship while they were in Indonesia–all of these sorts of allegations rest upon conjecture, and Mr Obama is under no obligation to refute them. The evidence that would put them to rest may be under his discretion to provide, but he isn’t under some sort of obligation to provide documents to refute allegations simply because they would refute them.
And of course, if it turns out that his biologic father is Frank Davis and not Barack Obama Sr, it’s an embarrassment perhaps, but it renders the “natural born” issue moot.
I don’t think the SCOTUS wants to be the National Enquirer, so I think they’ll just refuse the case and that will be that.
Should the National Enquirer crowd find something to support the various rumor-mongerers, I think there would be a brouhaha and nothing more; no real stomach to unseat him.
Just to clarify, because my response above might seem to suggest that I don’t know what the issue is… there is no judicial ruling that clarifies the definition of “natural born citizien”, and whether a person who qualifies as a natural citizen under statute also meets the constitutional requirement to be eligible for president. It was an issue raised with respect to McCain, and Goldwater, and Romney. The general consensus has been that they do, but this question has never been addressed definitively.
SCOTUS is not going to entertain Berg’s claim that Obama was actually born in Kenya, since that is a factual matter that lower courts have already ruled on. I think I’m well within the bounds of GQ decorum to say that the claim is nonsense on its face, and that there are no real constitutional issues at sway.
SCOTUS is also not going to address the underlying question of “natural born citizen” either, because that is a legislative question. At best, they might issue a ruling saying that congress has failed it’s duty to provide a clear definition and suggest that they do so.
Technically, I’m not aware of any lower court ruling on obama’s citizenship. The lower courts made no findings of fact-they simply held that Berg (and the others) didn’t have standing to assert their claims.
(this is not to deny that the claims are entirely devoid of merit, or that the factual record is full of evidence that obama is a citizen, and is entirely empty of evidence that could support the claim he isn’t. But my understanding is that the lower courts have made no findings of fact.)
One might also note that berg’s claim that obama was born in Kenya doesn’t even necessarily raise the issue of how to define “natural born citizen.” Obama was born in honolulu, in the state of Hawaii. Any possible definition of “natural born citizen” includes him. The false contention that he was born in Kenya is being used to support the claim that he wasn’t born a U.S. Citizen at all.
(and yes, I know berg also claimed at one point that obama had, through some mysterious chain of events, surrendered his U.S. citizenship. That claim is rarely given any attention even by those supporting berg and his tin-foil-hat-brigade. It is similarly without merit)
Missed the edit window. Here is the (better) version of my point:
I agree with you that (at least to my knowledge), there is no supreme court decision interpreting what a “natural born citizen” is. However, berg’s claim is that obama was born in Kenya, and presumably, that Obama wasn’t a citizen by right of birth. (let’s assume, for the purposes of argument, that he’s right that were obama born in Kenya, he wouldn’t be a citizen.) This doesn’t even necessarily raise the issue of what a “natural born citizen” is.
Obama was born in honolulu, in the state of Hawaii. That’s what he’s arguing. There are plenty of possible interpretations of “natural born citizen”, but in order for the term to have any meaning at all, it would have to include someone who was born on U.S. soil (and in a state, if it matters), and who became a citizen as a result of that birth. Hence, if obama is right on the facts, I don’t think the term would need to be defined. Similarly, given what berg is arguing, the (entirely false) contention that obama was born in Kenya, and hence wasn’t born a U.S. Citizen at all, if berg is right on the facts, there is also no need to define the term.
Of course, as is rightly noted by many others in this thread, the court has not been asked to decide the facts (and it won’t), and has not been asked to define “natural born citizen”-it has simply been asked to stay (something-originally the election) and to consider the question of whether Berg can even assert those claims in lower courts.
Law only reconizes two types of citizens. “Natural born” and “naturalized”. The first being born a citizen, the second by going through the legal process and taking the oath as a new citizen.
I did not vote for Obama, but this argument is bull.