Obama Citizenship

Eligibility Update: Rush on Marco; Official Congressional Memo

By Phil

FL GOP Senator-elect Marco Rubio (NationalReviewOnline.com)

Eligibility is officially everyone’s responsibility.

This is now a truism.

Rush sparked a bit of “controversy” (not controversy around here, but that’s another story) by bringing up Senator-elect Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) potential eligibility as President by saying the following:

“I was told yesterday that I dashed the hopes of millions of people when I said that Marco Rubio was not born in America, and the reason I dashed the hopes of millions of people was because Marco Rubio, if not born in America, couldn’t run for president. I wasn’t aware that I said Marco Rubio was not born in America.”

…”We know more about where Rubio was born than Obama…”

…”He was born in Miami. So if you are among the millions whose hopes were dashed, and if you left yesterday’s program depressed and despondent and near suicidal, please come back from the brink. Marco Rubio can run for president. It was his parents that were born in Cuba. His whole family is exiles but he was born in Miami. There. See? I have revived the hopes of millions and have walked them back from the proverbial ledge.”…

…”I’m being told to be careful here…”

…”Liberal birthers may demand Marco Rubio’s birth certificate. If he did, he’ll produce it, I’m sure, but I’m not worried about it. If Obama’s taught us anything, it’s that the news media doesn’t care where our presidents are born. They don’t. Well, let’s see if it does. Let’s see if all of a sudden the media starts caring where Republicans are born. Up to now they haven’t cared where presidents are born. Let’s see if they now start caring.”

Of course, one could say that Rush doesn’t know for sure what he’s talking about, because nobody’s focus has yet been on Mr. Rubio’s eligibility for the presidency, because he’s been elected to the Senate, which doesn’t require a candidate to be a natural born citizen in this country.

Yet, will the demand be there by the liberals/progressives/statists to demand whomever the GOP nominee is to prove their eligibility (like they did with Senator John McCain (R-AZ)), or, worse, will they even care at all?

Referring back to the beginning of this post, eligibility has been confirmed to be everyone’s responsibility via an internal memo that circulated Congress back in April, 2009:

CRS- Members of Congress Internal Memo – What to Tell Your Constituents in Answer to Obama Eligibility Que…

The entire memo is worth a read; it’s written in reasonably layman’s terms so it’s not difficult to understand. It’s even reasonably sourced for the opinion that it purports.

In my opinion, here are the key, take-away points that can be generally gleaned from the document:

1. We finally have something official from the government that touches on presidential eligibility. For me, this has been something I’ve been waiting for — anything officially coming from the government to which one can objectively point in order to confirm/deny arguments;
2. The memo completely substantiates the fact that there is no law that requires presidential eligibility to be determined, nor to what extent such determination would exist. This is a point that some of us — including yours truly — have been making since I’ve realized nobody could point to any such law. Therefore, since the memo wholeheartedly agrees with this fact, it renders the balance of the memo nothing but unsubstantiated (in a Court of law) opinion;
3. The memo refers to the non-existence of evidence as evidence that Mr. Obama is qualified to be President. You will notice this when the memo begins talking about the alleged existence of documents on third-party Internet-based web sites that allegedly do not appear to be contradicted with respect to the alleged document’s claim of Mr. Obama’s birthplace. The memo relies on the current fact that since nothing appears to contract the alleged document, that must mean that the alleged document is true and can be sufficiently relied upon to substantiate Mr. Obama’s eligibility (once again, despite the fact that there is no such “controlling legal authority” (i.e.: law, nor law enforcement personnel) to make such a determination). From a court of public opinion standpoint, this is rather ironic due to the fact that many who oppose questioning this President’s eligibility would use this very same argument as the basis upon which to discredit such questioning. Such irony is due to the fact that the argument continues to rely upon facts not in evidence, or, at the very least, on allegations of unsubstantiated documentation that is not specifically filed with any government agency (because no law requires such filing to occur — the memo even admits that States only require a statement or “promise” that a candidate is legitimate to be filed for that candidate).
4. The memo is nothing more than a researched opinion that carries no specific weight in a Court of law, merely the court of public opinion. Once again, it’s worth noting that due to point 2, above, one must invalidate any ability to judicially rectify the eligibility question for the fact that no eligibility laws exist to prove or disprove a candidate’s eligibility. Therefore (and perhaps conveniently), there can be no judicial remedy to the question; the issue must be resolved in the court of public opinion — e.g.: during a campaign season.

The bottom line is that we now have evidence, in hand, that the only way anyone can currently determine presidential eligibility is to effectively do it themselves. That is, it must be garnered during the quote-unquote “vetting” process that we typically call a presidential campaign.

Further, this is a “legal analysis,” which is a formal way of saying that this is “some lawyers’ opinions as to what they think currently-existing law means with respect to presidential eligibility,” really meaning that it’s yet another opinion in the court of public opinion. Remember: no laws currently exist to enforce presidential eligibility, and legal analyses will never change that fact.

Not only this, but it’s also obviously true that everyone has been thinking about it, else there’d be no need for a memo.

-Phil

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Full post as published by The Right Side of Life on November 06, 2010 (boomark / email).