Opinion: Ticket Replay: Supreme Court refuses to debate Obama citizenship
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During the next week or so from time to time The Ticket will republish some of our favorite items from this past political season. This one originally appeared here on Dec. 8, 2008, but the Court’s decision certainly has not halted the passionate debate over whether the president-elect was born in the United States or not, which would make him ineligible to become president on Jan. 20.
(UPDATE: Alan Keyes stoked the Obama birth certificate controversy anew in February 2009. See Ticket coverage here.)
As predicted in The Ticket earlier today, the Supreme Court has dismissed without comment a New Jersey suit seeking to block the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama over allegations he’s not a natural-born American.
Not that the ex-senator, who’s named about half his Cabinet and heads for a lengthy Hawaiian vacation soon, seemed the slightest bit worried over the suit.
The main contentions have been that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a fake because he was born in Kenya, and because Obama’s father was Kenyan, which was British at the time, Obama has dual citizenship, which isn’t native-born American.
The same, now defunct suit by Leo Donofrio of New Jersey charged that John McCain is not a native-born American either so couldn’t become president. (His father, a career Naval officer, was stationed in the Panama Canal Zone when McCain was born.)
Even fewer were worried over the McCain possibility, given his parents’ American citizenship and the location of birth being a U.S. Navy hospital on a U.S. military base in a then-U.S. territory.
Not to mention the minor implications of the Nov. 4 voting. (And, frankly, some have doubts about the citizenship of anyone in New Jersey.)
The court’s dismissal means that the minimum four justices did not deem it worthy of an actual hearing. Another suit by Philip Berg of Pennsylvania remains at the court, arguing that not only is the Hawaiian certificate fake but that because Obama attended Indonesian schools that required local citizenship, he is also Indonesian.
But it looks increasingly like it’s up to the ‘reader comments’ sections of numerous blogs, including The Ticket, to continue the argument and settle the legality of the upcoming inauguration.
--Andrew Malcolm
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