Nothing personal, but maybe this concept really is beyond the average person's intellect. If Congress or a state wants pass a law that requires a candidate for POTUS to produce a valid birth certifcate as a condition precedent for getting on the ballot, then that's up to Congress or the States to establish such a policy. The SCOTUS decides questions of law; it does not decide policy/political questions.
Maybe this is beyond your comprehension, but you can’t determine the eligibility of somebody if they have no legally-established birth facts. In order to “qualify” the person must be old enough, a resident of the US long enough, and a natural born citizen. If there are no legally-known facts of birth there is no way it can be legally established that the person is eligible. What we know now is that anybody who claimed he was eligible was lying through their teeth. Obama only got on the state ballots through fraud. That is now a legal FACT.
The 20th Amendment says that if a President-elect (somebody declared by Congress to be the electoral winner) fails to qualify by Jan 20th he cannot “act as President”. What I can tell you right now is that there is no way Obama could ever have qualified, given that he has no legally-established birth facts. There is NOTHING legally-credible to say that he was born in the USA OR that he is old enough to be President. We have no idea when or where he was born. That’s what it means to have no legally-established birth facts. There’s no way a President-elect like that could have “qualified”.
Being President-elect means they qualified from an electoral standpoint - which is the entire involvement of the states and Congress - so the disqualifying factors that the 20th Amendment deals with are the ones from Article II: the age, citizenship, and residency requirements. There is nothing that Congress can do about those requirements, and the states have dismissed administrative procedures that would have been able to establish birth facts if the non-valid BC had been presented as evidence.
My point is that the Article II eligibility issues, which are involved in the 20th Amendment, involve BIRTH FACTS and thus CAN NOT be determined through political means when there ARE NO birth facts. Hawaii statute specifically limits the determination of birth facts to procedures presided over by a JUDGE. Any judge who calls this a “political issue” is flat-out wrong, as attested by Hawaii statute itself.
SCOTUS decides questions of FACT and law.
There is no way to determine questions of law without first determining questions of FACT, and Hawaii has revealed that Obama’s Hawaii BC is non-valid and thus his birth facts can only be determined by a procedure presided over by a judge, in which that non-valid BC is presented as evidence.
The facts upon which eligibility depends are expressly forbidden to be determined by Congress, which is legislative.
And even state Secretaries of State cannot determine any birth facts for Obama without having the non-valid BC presented as evidence. If the SOS’s had POLICIES for doing that, it should have happened by now and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
And the Constitution says that even if the states and Congress are done with their entire involvement in the process of choosing a President, that President-elect can STILL “fail to qualify” by Jan 20th. So the 20th Amendment is EXPLICIT in saying that “qualifying” means more than simply meeting state and Congressional requirements to get elected.
The Constitution says that no one can be President if they are not old enough, not a natural born US citizen, or have not resided in the US long enough. Hawaii says that Obama has not proven any of those things and that the legal presumption is that the claims on his HI BC are NOT true. It CANNOT be legally presumed that he is old enough. It CANNOT be legally presumed that he was born in Hawaii. The burden of proof falls on Obama now because his BC is not legally credible according to HAWAII’s standards (and that’s saying a LOT, given Hawaii’s lax requirements!!!) What we know is that he has NOT adequately made his legal case for a Hawaii birth, because Hawaii cannot presume that anything claimed on his BC is true. Legally speaking, all we know is that we know nothing about Obama’s true birth facts at this point - and can’t until all the records are audited according to the Federal Rules of Evidence. Which requires a judicial or administrative procedure that we KNOW has not happened yet.
The sec of state already have that power. Cal declared Eldridge cleaver not qualified after asking for his birth certificate and seeing he wasn’t old enough.
The sec of state are charged with qualifying candidates to be on the ballot. That gives them the authority and responsibility to ask for evidence and verification.