Did Supreme Court clerk torpedo eligibility cases?

BORN IN THE USA?
WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Did Supreme Court clerk torpedo eligibility cases?
Taitz submits motion for rehearing in case challenging Obama's citizenship

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Posted: March 12, 2009
11:30 pm Eastern



By Bob Unruh



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WorldNetDaily

A California attorney whose emergency submission to the U.S. Supreme Court on President Obama's eligibility was turned back without a hearing or comment now is submitting a motion for re-hearing, alleging some of her documentation may have been withheld from the justices by a court clerk.

The motion for reconsideration alleges a court clerk "of his own volition and on his own authority refused to file of record, docket, and forward to the Chief Justice and Associate Justices petitioners' supplemental brief presented on January 15, 2009."

Orly Taitz, who is working on the case Lightfoot vs. Bowen through her foundation, Defend Our Freedoms, told WND that she started checking back through her paperwork after asking Justice Antonin Scalia this week about the case.

His response was that a petitioner needed four affirmative votes among the nine justices for a hearing to be held. Taitz interpreted to mean that among the four justices generally considered conservative, at least one had been voting against hearing the Obama eligibility issue.


Antonin Scalia

The issue of Obama's eligibility has been raised before the Supreme Court at least four times already but has yet to be given a hearing. Cases have been brought by Taitz, Philip Berg, Cort Wrotnowski and Leo Donofrio.

While the requests have been heard "in conference" by the justices, no hearings have resulted on the evidence. WND previously has reported that cases brought to individual justices on an emergency basis can be discussed in such conferences, but they need the affirmative vote from four justices before a hearing on the merits can be scheduled.

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The Supreme Court today is considered to have mainly a 4-4 conservative-liberal split, with one swing vote on most issues. On the conservative side generally are Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Anthony Kennedy often is the swing vote. The liberal side frequently includes Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

Where's the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 325,000 others and sign up now!

Taitz explained in the motion that she submitted a brief Jan. 15 that reflected new developments in the case. She noted such filings "are allowed, when there is a new law or changed circumstance in the case."

The change was the approval by Congress of the Electoral College vote in the presidential race.

However, the clerk "refused to file this brief in the docket, stating that he will send it back with [an] explanation," the motion states. "Nothing was sent back and no explanation [was] provided."

WND has reported on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's status as a "natural born citizen." The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

Some of the lawsuits question whether he was actually born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.

Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. The cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.

Taitz' latest challenge to Obama's eligibility is a Quo Warranto case submitted to the U.S. attorney general, a legal standard that essentially allows citizens to demand on what grounds someone in authority exercises that power.

She has 10 state representatives and about 130 members of the U.S. military signed on as plaintiffs in the action.

But now Taitz is raising concerns about manipulation of her case at the Supreme Court. She asserts docketing information about her case "was erased from the docket of the Supreme Court on January 21st, one day after the inauguration and two days before [the case was to be heard]."

"Only after numerous phone calls from outraged citizens, members of the media and state representatives, the case was re-entered on the docket … shortly before the hearing. … No explanation was provided by the Supreme Court to this occurrence."

She noted the same clerk told another attorney it was a computer malfunction, but it affected none of the other cases on the docket.

Taitz also renewed her questions about a closed door meeting between Obama, the subject of the pending case, and eight of the nine justices, before the hearing on the case.

Taitz said when Scalia told her to get the four votes needed for the case to have it heard, he also reflected an absence of knowledge about some of the issues she would have expected him to know about.

"He had no knowledge about any cases brought in front of the Supreme Court that challenged Obama's eligibility for president," Taitz wrote.

"The only reasonable explanation is that the clerks of the court did not provide the case to the justices at all or summarized them in a light that is unfavorable to the petitioners, which is prejudicial to the plaintiffs," Taitz said.

She said when she was talking to Scalia, she specifically mentioned other cases on the same subject, brought by Berg, Wrotnowski and Donofrio.

"He had a bewildered look on his face, he kept saying – 'I don't know, I don't remember, I don't know, I don't remember,'" she said "Scalia seems to be one of the most decent judges on this court. I think he was telling the truth. Could it be that the cases were handled by … clerks?"

Because of the indications of "sabotage" inside the court, she said she would try to hand-deliver the petition to Chief Justice John Roberts today when he speaks at the University of Idaho at Moscow.

The petition also will be posted on her DefendOurFreedoms.us site, she said, and it is being mailed to other justices on the court.

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