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To: Tau Food
The vote is a formal mechanism and implicit in the vote for a candidate is a finding by the voter that the candidate is qualified. Similarly, a general verdict of guilty or not guilty carries with it the presumption that it is based upon jury findings necessary to support the verdict.

You're meandering here. The vote is NOT a formal mechanism in terms of making a finding about a candidate's eligibility. The stuff about guilty verdicts is bizarre and irrelevant. Three questions will help prove why voting is not an eligiblity mechanism.

Is it possible for voters to vote for ineligible candidates?
Is it possible for electors to vote for ineligible canidates?
Is it possible for an ineligible candidate to get elected to an office?

The answer to any and all of these question is "yes." If there were a mechanism for voters/electors to make formal findings of eligibility, then the answers should be no to all three questions.

People in government write and say lots of things.

A preface, for "I don't have a real argument." People on discussion boards write and say lots of things too, but that's a not reason to discount statements that are supported by known legal precedents.

When you read a judicial opinion, it is important to read the end of the opinion where the court indicates what it has decided to actually do.

Sorry, but that's not the only part of a decision where a precedent is set. It certainly gives the action of the court, but the legal priniciples used for guidance can be in any part of a decision, or in some cases, expressed in the syllabus.

Assuming (as you do) that those two premises are correct, how do you account for the reality that in over four years, the Supreme Court has failed to find a means of correcting what must appear to you to be a monstrous and blatantly obvious constitutional crime?

Part of it is because several of the cases that have made it this far haven't properly cited Minor v. Happersett and Luria to show the court's historical precedent on the issue. Second, there's a known political divide within the court, and the issue has been effectively marginalized to the point where a lot of people are simply afraid to touch it.

How do you account for a Republican Chief Justice actually assisting in the commission of this monstrous and blatantly obvious constitutional crime by administering the oath of office (an act which is not required of a Chief Justice)?

A) It's not up to a Chief Justice to take invididual action against an elected candidate, and B) at the time Obama was first sworn in to office, the Supreme Court precedent was not cited properly, and C) there's still a formal protocol that should be followed to make sure the case is heard, and D) Roberts may simply have been blissfully ignorant, happy to perform a ceremonial function.

Do you think the time has come for you to consider the possibility that the Chief Justice and the Supreme Court might disagree with one or both of your premises? Is it perhaps time for you to reconsider those premises?

These questions are based on circular logic. The act of swearing in an ineligible candidate doesn't make the candidate eligible. The refusal of a court to hear a case doesn't make an ineligible candidate eligible. The Supreme Court citations I've given speak for themselves: all children born in the country to citizen parents ... these are the natural-born citizens. Obama was NOT born to citizen parents. We still don't know where he was born, but unless his father was a citizen, he is not and cannot be Constitutionally eligible for office. The failures of the courts to affirm and uphold their own historical precedent does NOT make Obama Constitutionally legitimate.

1,561 posted on 03/17/2013 10:14:57 PM PDT by edge919
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To: edge919
Is it possible for voters to vote for ineligible candidates?
Is it possible for electors to vote for ineligible canidates?
Is it possible for an ineligible candidate to get elected to an office?

Well, this could be the root of our disagreement. I don't believe that there can be devised a system that will make it impossible for an ineligible candidate to occasionally get elected. Voters, electors and judges are all human beings with human limitations.

It is never possible to prove with certainty the qualifications of any candidate. Mistakes will always be possible. No judge or group of judges can protect you from uncertainty. In fact, one of the things of which you can be certain is that, no matter how we design our system, we are all destined to die without being certain of the qualifications of any of our presidents.

When it comes to a candidate's qualifications, some person or group of persons has to be empowered to decide. In the last 57 presidential elections, the voters and their electors have selected our president and implicitly approved their qualifications. I believe that our procedures conform with the terms of the Constitution.

I don't agree with your suggestion that we can avoid all possible mistakes by entrusting the Supreme Court to measure the qualifications of our presidential candidates. I don't think that the Constitution grants them that power and I don't think that the Supreme Court even wants that kind of power. I don't think any of our justices want to spend their time questioning whether a state's public records are false or fraudulent. I don't think that they want to spend their time trying to determine the real paternity of candidates. I don't think that any of them want to spend their time rummaging through utility bills and such in order to make sure that the residency requirement has been met. And, on and on and on and no one will be any more certain than before. And, no matter how they decide, particularly if they cannot unanimously decide, many will disagree.

After four years of very public "birther" investigations and legal research, Chief Justice Roberts accepted an invitation to administer the oath of office to Obama less than two months ago. As I previously indicated, the Chief Justice is not required to ever administer oaths to presidents. Neither he nor any of the justices are required to even attend a presidential inauguration.

I resist your suggestion that Chief Justice Robert's active participation in Obama's recent inauguration might be due to his being "blissfully ignorant" of your legal research and of your conviction that you have discovered the one and only true meaning of the term "natural born citizen" as used in our Constitution. (I won't ask you to tell me if you have ever met anyone who has actually read Vattel's eighteenth century historical theories in the language in which he wrote it.)

Like everyone else, I cannot offer you any certainty. However, I firmly believe that if Chief Justice Roberts agreed with your two premises ((1) that Obama is "clearly ineligible" and (2) that the Supreme Court has the power to reverse the decision of the voters and their electors), he would not have ratified the legitimacy of Obama's presidency by administering the oath of office. I also believe that if the other justices had agreed with your two premises, they would not have showed up at all. I think you ought to consider the implications of their conduct.

1,564 posted on 03/18/2013 9:47:17 AM PDT by Tau Food (Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.)
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