OBAMA ELIGIBILITY APPEAL IN ROY MOORE'S COURT
Newly elected state chief
justice has expressed doubt about qualification
Many
cases challenging Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility have come and gone,
but now an appeal has been filed with a state Supreme Court led by a newly
elected chief justice who has expressed doubt about Obama’s qualification for
office.
Roy
Moore was elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court last November, a
decade after he defied a federal order to remove a Ten Commandments monument
from the state Supreme Court building.
Now,
2012 Constitution Party presidential nominee Virgil Goode and Alabama
Republican Party leader Hugh McInnish are asking the state’s highest court to
force Secretary of State Beth Chapman to verify that all candidates on the
state’s 2012 ballot were eligible to serve.
Attorney Larry Klayman, founder of the Washington, D.C.-watch
dog Judicial Watch and now head of Freedom Watch, filed the appeal Tuesday
with the Alabama Supreme Court, asking for oral arguments.
“We are
hopeful that Chief Justice Moore and the rest of the jurists on the Alabama
Supreme Court will follow the law,” Klayman told WND.
Klayman
says he and his team “have great respect for Chief Justice Moore and his
integrity and legal acumen.”
“He is
one courageous and brave man. There are few in this country.”
The
case is an appeal of a dismissal by the Montgomery Circuit Court.
In his
brief, Klayman says “credible evidence and information from an official source”
was presented to Chapman before the election indicating Obama might not have
been qualified for Oval Office.
The
complaint argues Chapman failed her constitutional duty as secretary of state
to verify the eligibility of candidates.
Moore
is on the record questioning Obama’s eligibility.
In an interview
with WND in 2010, he defended Lt. Col Terrence Lakin’s demand that
President Obama prove his eligibility as commander in chief as a condition of
obeying deployment orders.
Moore
said he had seen no convincing evidence that Obama is a natural-born citizen
and much evidence that suggests he is not.
Moore
said Lakin “not only has a right to follow his personal convictions under the
Constitution, he has a duty.”
“And if
the authority running the efforts of the war is not a citizen in violation of
the Constitution, the order is unlawful,” he said.
‘Affirmative duty’
Klayman
asserts the secretary of state “has an affirmative duty that stems from her
oath of office under both the U.S. and Alabama Constitutions, to protect the
citizens from fraud and other misconduct by candidates.”
As a
result of her refusal to investigate the qualifications of candidates for
president, Klayman says, “a person believed to be unqualified for that office
has been elected.”
The
remedy, he said, “is to require each candidate to do what every teenager is
required to do to get a learner’s permit.”
“It is
to produce a bona fide birth certificate … and the Secretary of State is the
official to cause that to happen.”
McInnish
is a member of the Madison County Republican Executive Committee and also sits
on the state Republican Executive Committee.
Citing
the investigation of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case
Posse, Klayman says Chapman “gained knowledge from an official source that
there was probable cause to believe the Barack Obama had not met a certifying
qualification.”
The
appeal brief notes McInnish visited the secretary of state’s office Feb. 2,
2012, and spoke with the deputy secretary of state, Emily Thompson, in
Chapman’s absence.
Thompson,
the brief says, “represented that her office would not investigate the
legitimacy of any candidate, thus violating her duties under the U.S. and
Alabama Constitutions.”
As WND reported,
Arpaio and his team concluded that Obama’s long-form birth certificate was a
computer-generated forgery.
Klayman,
in a previous brief, argued the secretary of state, “having the power to
certify candidates, can surely de-certify – in effect disqualify – them if they
are found to be ineligible.”
In his
new appeal, Klayman points, as an example, to California Secretary of State
Debra Bowen’s rejection of Petra Lindsay on the 2012 California primary ballot
because she was 27 years old. The U.S. Constitution requires the president to
be at least 35.
In his
conclusion, Klayman argues the fact that the election is over does not make the
case moot.
“It
would be paradoxical beyond measure if the real and grave question of the
legitimacy of the de facto President, a question which lies at the very heart
of our American Constitutional Government, were left unresolved for want of the
simplest of documents, a birth certificate.”
If
either a bona fide birth certificate is produced or an admission is made that
it does not exist, he writes, “this most important of legal questions will have
been answered, the purity of Alabama’s ballot maintained, and the anxiety of
Alabama citizens stilled.”
If the
issue is not resolved, he said, citizens will be left with the impression “that
their government was dysfunctional and has ignored their real concerns.
‘Certain documentation’
In an
earlier step in the case one year ago, before a panel of Alabama Supreme Court
justices, one justice raised doubts about Obama’s eligibility.
The justices denied a petition filed
by McInnish seeking to require Obama submit an original birth
certificate before he could be placed on the state’s 2012 ballot.
“Mclnnish
has attached certain documentation to his mandamus petition, which, if
presented to the appropriate forum as part of a proper evidentiary
presentation, would raise serious questions about the authenticity of both the
‘short form’ and the ‘long form’ birth certificates of President Barack Hussein
Obama that have been made public.”
The
“certain documentation” is the findings of Arpaio’s investigation.
“The
Alabama Constitution implies that this court is without jurisdiction over
McInnish’s original petition,” Parker explained. “The office of the secretary
of state of Alabama is not a ‘court of inferior jurisdiction’ that this court
may control through the issuance of a writ in response to a petition.”
Now,
however, the case is coming from a lower court.
‘Obama violated the Constitution’
He said
Obama violated the Constitution when he bombed Libya, because the Constitution
stipulates only Congress shall declare war.
“No
president has the power to violate constitutional restraints of power,” Moore
said.
“The
Constitution is the rule of law, and [my job is] to uphold the rule of law.”
Government’s
job, Moore said, is to secure and protect those rights.
“There
is little regard for the Constitution in the courts today, even the U.S.
Supreme Court.”
Email this story
Printer-friendly version
