Technical Discussion
David Horowitz is castigating the nutty conservatives who claim Obama wasn't born on American soil and therefore can't become President. That's all very well and good, but he goes too far:
The birth-certificate zealots are essentially arguing that 64 million voters should be disenfranchised because of a contested technicality as to whether Obama was born on U.S. soil. [...] What difference does it make to the future of this country whether Obama was born on U.S. soil? Advocates of this destructive campaign will argue that the constitutional principle regarding the qualifications for president trumps all others. But how viable will our Constitution be if five Supreme Court justices should decide to void 64 million ballots?
What difference does it make? I guess the same difference it would make if it were revealed we voted in a 34-year-old President. If that result were challenged on the purely technical point that the Constitution demands he be at least 35, and the Supreme Court overturned the election, I'd probably agree with their decision. (There's a decent argument that these issues shouldn't be settled after the fact, but I could see the Court going either way.)
What if my candidate won the popular vote, but the other candidate won the Electoral College? The winner got in by a constitutional "technicality," but no one was disenfranchised because we all agreed to play by the rules.
Imagine if you thought some War on Terror policy regarding surveillance or due process were central to our basic security, and the majority of Americans agreed with you. Now imagine the Supreme Court declared this policy unconstitutional, 5-4. You may rail against the decision, but does that mean the President should defy it? The Rule Of Law is worth quite a bit. How viable would our Constitution be without it?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:09 AM
3 Comments:
There's a decent argument that these issues shouldn't be settled after the fact
I think that's the crux of the argument. There is a strong public policy interest in encouraging people to investigate and file such suits ahead of elections, because allowing litigants to wait until after the election to file suit to disqualify a candidate could tempt folks to hold onto information and use it to game the system, rather than disclosing it ahead of time.
I believe the suits being heard now were filed before the election (Certainly Dinofrio's was). berg's first suit was filed before the election, and was dismissed for lack of standing (how does a voter not have standing to challenge the qualifications of an official candidate?).
The FOIA request to see Obama's Selective Service Registration was filed in December 2007, and took like 10 months to be filled (at which point a probably fake record was produced by the Illinois SSS).
I don't think anything will come out of the current challenges, but only because the system is very corrupt, not because it shouldn't. As the Governor of Ill. is led away in cuffs, I think we may very well see a surge in corruption, not the least because I don't believe Obama has an overriding moral sense that governs his actions. But Presidents who do have such hightened moral sensitivities have been among the poorer Presidents the nation has experienced (Carter and George W. Bush leap to my mind).
So I am not distraught at the idea that Obama may be a typical product of the Chicago political machine.
I wish Mike Royko were alive.
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