Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Barack Obama Lawsuit(s) - Update 10/21/08

Posted by Maggie at Maggie's Notebook

Photo Courtesy: The Drudge Report

Earlier today, Susan here at Wake up America, posted an update to the latest saga in the quest to determine Barack Obama's citizenship status.

Susan said this:
I have tried hard to stay away from this issue and simply wait to see how things played out, but since Barack Obama has now filed a motion to dismiss Philip Berg's lawsuit against him, where Berg was requesting three items from the Obama campaign, to which the campaign has refused to supply, I figure I will at least write about what is happening, with no opinion given either way....

As I said above, I have no opinion one way or another on this whole strange mess, but I do have a simple question I have been asking for a while now.

Why does Obama not just supply the paperwork and be done with this whole issue altogether?
Oh, she had another question too: "What the hell is going on?"

These are appropriate questions to ask: why isn't Obama et al providing documents to prove his natural born citizenship status?

It seems the situation changes minute by minute. Here's some of the latest:

An excellent source for information, from the beginning, has been Jeff Schreiber at America's Right. Philip Berg's original lawsuit, filed in U.S. Federal Court in Philadelphia, was brought against Barack Obama, The Democrat National Committee (DNC) and the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Yesterday, Schreiber reported that Obama and the DNC filed for dismissal. Today, he reports that the FEC has done the same.

One of the problems with the Berg lawsuit seems to be that Berg may not "have standing" with the court. Here's what Schrieber has posted about the "minimum requiremets of standing:
[From FEC v. Atkins] Three elements constitute the “irreducible constitutional minimum” of standing: (1) an injury-in-fact, (2) a causal connection between the injury and the challenged conduct of the defendant (traceability), and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision of the court ... The injury-in-fact required by Article III is an invasion of a legally protected interest that is “concrete and particularized” as well as “actual or imminent,” rather than “conjectural” or "hypothetical." The injury cannot be merely a generalized grievance about the government that affects all citizens or derives from an interest in the proper enforcement of the law.
Isn't that interesting? If Berg's case is dismissed, then at least one reason may be that "we the people" really do not have a "grievance" if we have a President who is not a natural born citizen, as required by The U.S. Constitution. Just to be clear, since I have quoted Schreiber at times, he certainly didn't say those words, I did.

Now, here is a portion of something Jeff Schreiber did say:
That final sentence, from FEC v. Akins, truly shows the similarity between the issue of voter standing and the issue of taxpayer standing. Just as you or I could not sue the United States of America claiming to have standing simply because we are taxpayers, the FEC contends--just as was contended by Obama and the DNC, as well as the defendants in the three similar cases against John McCain--that voters cannot raise the issue of constitutional eligibility just because they are voters.
The question then is, who the heck can raise the issue and why haven't they? I'm told that this is accomplished through the U.S. House of Representatives. If this is correct, when might we expect Speaker Pelosi to raise the issue? BWHAAAAAHAAAAAHAAAAA. Another question, how would we force her to do so?

Another interesting non-happening, reported yesterday by Jeff Schreiber: Philip Berg claims that Barack Obama and the DNC failed to answer "requests for admissions." According to Berg, a party so served:
"...must respond, within 30 days, or else the matters in requests will be automatically deemed conclusively admitted for purposes of the pending action.
It seems both parties, Barack Obama and the DNC, failed to answer. So what next?

Related:
How many Obama Lawsuits