Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah writes in his April 20 WorldNetDaily column:
In the latest legal challenge of Obama’s eligibility last week, Obama’s campaign counsel, Alexandra Hill, argued in a New Jersey hearing against a request to produce the birth certificate as evidence in the case.
Rather than simply produce the document Obama claims is legitimate, with an image posted on the White House website, Hill argued that New Jersey law does not require Obama to present a valid birth certificate to establish his qualifications under Article 2, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution to be on the New Jersey Democratic Party primary ballot.
She further told Judge Jeff S. Masin: “We do not believe the president’s birth certificate is relevant to this case.”
Did you catch that?
The president’s birth certificate is not relevant to the case.
The judge agreed.
He explained that New Jersey law does not require Obama to produce any proof he is eligible to be president to be placed on the primary ballot.
New Jersey law, he explained, allows a nominating petition endorsing a particular person for president to be filed without the consent of the person endorsed. Masin said, “There is no obligation upon the person endorsed to prove his or her qualification for office.”
Once again, we have another official ruling that shows there is simply no mechanism in the United States of America for establishing the constitutional eligibility of a president or a presidential candidate.
Farah seems not to understand how the judicial system works in such a lawsuit. In this case, Hill took exactly the same approach any lawyer would do -- invoke the relevant law. For this lawsuit, that meant pointing out that there is no need for Obama to submit a birth certificate since New Jersey law does not require presidential candidates to prove their eligibility for office before being placed on the ballot. The lawyer made a proper request, and the judge properly granted it.
And, Farah being Farah, he portrays the justice system working as designed as some sort of conspiracy.
Indeed, as Dr. Conspiracy points out, the Constitution does not permit any mechanism to challenge eligibility through a legal process to begin before the election -- that's when voters themselves make the decision. After the election, the 20th Amendment provides a mechanism to challenge an election through Congress and the Electoral College.
Meanwhile, Farah inadvertently proves that he and WND have never approached the birther issue from a effort to find the truth but, rather, treated it as a witch hunt designed to entrap Obama:
It was in the midst of all this that I got a call from Corsi one morning. He told me his sources were telling him Obama was so desperate he was going to release a phony birth certificate to quell the controversy.
Within a week or 10 days, Obama did just that.
Obama, counting on a compliant media not asking any questions, not looking at the actual document, not questioning why he withheld it for so long, issued a bogus birth certificate. He didn’t overestimate the semi-official, state-sponsored press.
The document has been deemed fraudulent by virtually every forensic expert who has examined it. It has been characterized as a forgery by the only law enforcement investigation that has looked into it.
After WND’s forensics experts examined the document, the optimistic Corsi told me: “Now we’ve got Obama right where we want him. We forced him to release a fraudulent document. Now he will have to live with it.”
Of course, none of WND's "forensics experts" -- in fact, Corsi has admitted that no genuine credentialed forensic document examiners would touch it, and the the only two "experts" with forensics experience to have been quoted by WND both never claimed the document is a fake -- examined the actual "document" of Obama's birth certificate. They examined a PDF scan of it. And as we've detailed, the cold case posse "law enforcement investigation" didn't do any actual investigating at all, instead simply regurgitated WND conspiracy theories.
Farah ends up proving that latter point as well by quoting the head of the posse "investigation," Mike Zullo, as sounding as conspiratorial as Corsi (with whom he wrote about on the so-called investigation):
“What is emerging in the various state legal challenges to including President Obama on the presidential ballot appears to be an attempt by the White House to divorce itself from the Obama long-form birth certificate released,” said Mike Zullo.
Zullo questioned why the White House did not instruct Hill to champion the birth certificate as legitimate.
“The White House appears to be acting as if the Obama birth certificate is of no consequence in establishing the fact of Obama’s birth,” Zullo continued. “Instead of producing the birth certificate to the New Jersey secretary of state and arguing to Judge Masin that the document was legitimate, Obama’s legal counsel did everything she could to keep the document from coming into evidence. Why?”
Apparenly Zullo knows even less about the legal system than Farah does. And that's the way Farah probably likes it.
