I have a somewhat mixed response. I said some time ago and at one point in the summer of 08 pitched a group, that a legal action could be initiated to successfully address this claim. But it would be expensive.
At the time, it was before the convention and I thought you had a better shot getting someone with standing to impact the convention outcome. And some of the expensive was due to the short time remaining before the convention because I had a significant item built in to my budget for investigators.
That didn't happen.
There is a real lack of understanding of what lawyers do and how cases like this really get resolved. A single attack is likely to involve multi-jurisdictional litigation and obligations on the lead lawyers to appear in the same place on several different days. And is apparent from the dance here with the birth certificate, we need some really high powered investigators on board and they cost money just like everything else.
And in the modern world, lawyers are like everybody else--the senior lawyers are financially overextended and have to work all the time to hold their obligations together (not always incurred wisely but look in the mirror); the younger people who are doing the work are working seventy and eighty hours a week because they have school debt to pay as well as wives and children to support and raise.
The best lawyers are working on the more difficult and complicated cases which is why they get paid more and why they are in demand. But you look here at the other side and you see Kirkland & Ellis and the Williams Connelly firm and many of the best lawyers in America. This nonsense about him having spent a million bucks so far is just that--my own guess several weeks ago was in the two or three million range and I now think that is significantly understated.
And the legal community is not generally supportive of the objective here--most lawyers are Very Liberal, generally Dems. Many are invested in Obama. In my own case, my top litigation partner is a Republican--but he is working 70 hours a week on pending business litigation; and the firm is generally strongly biased in favor of Obama--maybe we have three or four senior lawyers who are not.
To get a team of lawyers together who were qualified and able to fight this battle would be pretty difficult. At the time I pitched it, I had in mind staffing which in light of hindsight wouldn't have worked.
If I were going to try to do it now, I would look to a group of very senior guys who are retiring or on the edge of retirement who might be willing to get in the act. It would still cost a lot of money because you would need staff support.
And you need a client. I assume you can get a hypothetical set of facts where you have someone who is directly affected by some Presidential Act but you would like to have at least your lead litigators on board before you made a decision.
And the best client is the military. They are the most exposed; I have difficulty imagining what the Joint Chiefs are thinking about at this point. The Judge Advocate General's office has looked at the issue--what he is telling his client is anybody's guess.
But a legal process resolution at this point doesn't look like a very easy shot.
Orly doesn't look like a very capable lawyer to have in this act. Joe is sophisticated and has been around and presumably ought to have access to advice.
I think the pending litigation is good because it is helpful in continuing to develop the real facts and get them in the public stream. Lots of people in the media know perfectly well that he was born in Kenya.
Maybe getting a group of senior lawyers together to manage the efforts of the many lawyers and lawsuits that are presently pending would help the objective.
At the point you get enough information before a strong majority of the American people, the tide will turn--we are still short of that point.
One mistake the founder's made was not to leave us with some kind of legal avenue on which to attack this kind of problem--maybe not a mistake but intentional; we need to make the political case to the American people. We need to continue to pursue the legal case because that is part of the understanding. And there isn't any doubt that the Opposing Forces are firing their best shots.
You just made a false statement or was that your poor grammar?
You wrote-
“The judge has already thrown out Orly’s motion. (Not on the merits, but simply because Orly is too incompetent to even file a motion in federal court correctly.)”