June 9, 2012

by Paul Hollrah

In a July 25, 1787 letter to George Washington, the Presiding Officer of the Constitutional Convention, John Jay wrote as follows: “Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Commander in Chief of the American Army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.”

Alexander Hamilton shared the future Chief Justice’s concerns.  In Federalist No. 68 he wrote: “These most deadly adversaries of republican government (cabal, intrigue, etc.) might actually have expected to make their approach from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.  How could they better gratify this than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”                                                      

So is it even remotely conceivable that, just five years and eleven months after the British surrendered at Yorktown, the Founders would have produced a constitution for ratification by the states that would allow an individual with divided loyalties… i.e., an individual with dual US-British citizenship… to serve as president of the United States and commander in chief of the Army and the Navy?  Absolutely not.  To believe that they would have done so requires a willing suspension of reason.

Accordingly, to prevent any person with divided loyalties from ever serving as president of the United States, the founders specified in Article II, Section 1 that every person who would serve in that office must be, not just a “citizen,” but a “natural born” citizen of the United States.

If we are to accept Barack Obama’s word that his father was Barack Obama, Sr., a citizen of Kenya, a British crown colony, he cannot lay claim to being a “natural born” citizen because, under Part 2, Section 5(1) of the British Nationality Act of 1948, he was born with dual US-British citizenship.  He held dual US-British citizenship from August 4, 1961 until December 12, 1963 (the day on which Kenya won its independence from Great Britain); he held dual US-Kenyan citizenship from December 12, 1963 until August 4, 1984, his twenty-third birthday (see Chapter VI, Section 87[3] of the 1983 Kenyan Constitution); and he has been a “citizen of Kenya by birth” from August 4, 2010 until today (see Chapter 3, Section 14 of the current Kenyan constitution, adopted by national plebiscite on August 4, 2010).

In December 2008, as Democratic electors were casting their votes for Barack Obama, Edwin Vieira, Jr., Ph.D., J.D., one of the country’s foremost constitutional scholars, had this to say:

“If Obama is not a ‘natural born Citizen’ or has renounced such citizenship, he is simply not eligible for the Office of President…   If, nonetheless, the voters, the Electors, or the members of the House purport to ‘elect’ Obama, he will be nothing but a usurper because the Constitution defines him as such.  And he can never become anything else because a usurper cannot gain legitimacy even if all of the country aids, abets, accedes to, or acquiesces in his usurpation.

“If Obama dares to take the Presidential ‘Oath or Affirmation’ of office, knowing that he is not a ‘natural born Citizen,’ he will commit the crime of perjury or false swearing (Article II, Section 1, Clause 8).  For, being ineligible for ‘the Office of President,’ he cannot ‘faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,’ or even execute it at all, to any degree.  Thus, his very act of taking the ‘Oath or Affirmation’ will be a violation thereof.  So, even if the chief justice of the Supreme Court himself looks the other way and administers the ‘Oath or Affirmation’ (as Chief Justice John Roberts did on January 20, 2009, and again on January 21, 2009), Obama will derive no authority whatsoever from it… (H)is purported ‘Oath or Affirmation’ being perjured from the beginning, Obama’s every subsequent act in the usurped ‘Office of President’ will be a criminal offense under Title 18, United States Code, Section 242…”

As a man who advertised himself as a “constitutional law professor,” Obama knew that he was ineligible to serve as president of the United States.  It is also clear that Nancy Pelosi and Alice Travis Germond, the chairman and secretary of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, respectively, also knew that he was ineligible to serve.  Why else would they have deleted from 49 of the 50 certifications sent to state election boards, the phrase, “… and that the following candidates for President and Vice President of the United States are legally qualified to serve under the provisions of the United States Constitution?”  Why were those words included only in the certification sent to the State of Hawaii which requires an unambiguous certification of eligibility under Hawaii Revised Statutes §11-113? 

One might also question why, as the Illinois State Senator’s rising star appeared on the horizon, congressional Democrats made two attempts in 2003 and two attempts in 2005 to amend the U.S. Constitution to eliminate the “natural born Citizen” requirement.  And why did each and every Democratic member of the 2008 Electoral College, having been forewarned that he was not a “natural born” citizen, ignore their constitutional responsibilities and proceed to elect him?

In terms of personal honor, their failure to do what was right and honorable was in stark contrast to the dedication to duty demonstrated by the 271 Republican electors who voted to elect George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000.  Given the closeness of that race, all Democrats had to do was to convince just three Republican electors to change their votes and the Electoral College vote would have ended in a slim 270-268 victory for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman.

When the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of Republican electors were published on the Internet, the death threats and the bribery offers began immediately.  Any three of the 271 Republican electors could have had $5 million deposited in Swiss bank accounts simply by entering the names Al Gore and Joe Lieberman on their ballots and paying a small fine for being “faithless” electors.  But that’s not what happened.  Every one of the 271 Republican electors did exactly as they had sworn to do; not a single one of the 271 electors yielded to the temptation.  (As a first-time elector in 2000, my first bribery offer came by telephone from London.)

So what do we do about Obama the Usurper, the perpetrator of what has been the most brazen (bloodless) coup in history?  As a nation, we are in a bit of a “pickle.”  We have a man sitting in the Oval Office with his finger on the nuclear button and his hand in the national cookie jar who has no right to be there.  Yet, those of us who insist on being on the right side of history… no matter how hopeless our cause or how slim our chances for success… cannot let the matter die.  We owe that not only to our children and grandchildren and to future generations, but to those who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the success of this greatest of all experiments in self-government.  Can we demand any less of ourselves?

When it is finally proven that he and his political handlers have used the nation’s most sensitive secrets to enhance his chances of reelection, will it be left to citizen grand juries to hear the charges against him and indict him?  And when he has been indicted on numerous charges, who will place him under arrest?  Obama will expect to have lifetime Secret Service protection, but Secret Service protection is made available only to legitimate former presidents, not to usurpers.

The task of bringing Obama to justice has little chance of success so long as he maintains the ability to manipulate public opinion through the mainstream media.  However, that support is beginning to show signs of strain as liberal thought leaders such as Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, and Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, have become bitingly critical.

In recent weeks he has alienated Roman Catholics and independents over the religious freedom issue; he has alienated a large portion of his black base over the same-sex marriage issue; he has alienated miners in the coal producing states by seeking to bankrupt coal producers and coal-fired power plants; he has alienated blue-collar workers in states from North Dakota to Texas over the XL Keystone Pipeline issue; he has alienated union bosses by failing to support their ill-conceived recall effort in Wisconsin; he has alienated motorists and truckers everywhere over high fuel costs; and he has alienated the military over politically-motivated security leaks and his insistence upon choosing battlefield targets from the safety of his White House “bunker.”

As the months pass and his defeat becomes a foregone conclusion, his former media apologists may begin to distance themselves from him; those he’s used and “thrown under the bus” will turn their backs on him; the late night comics will begin to use him as the butt of jokes; and it will become fashionable in the ritzy salons of New York and Hollywood to say really unkind things about him… proving once again that the sort of people who put him in the White House in 2008 are the sort of people who, once they’ve tasted their victim’s “blood,” will show him no mercy in 2012.  If and when that scenario is set in motion, we may yet bring him to justice.

In a 2010 speech to agency employees, EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz described his approach to regulating major oil companies.  He said. “It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean.  They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.  Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

When the day of justice arrives for Obama and his Chicago political thugs, those who enter the White House to administer justice will have far more than five miscreants to choose from and the political left will be far easier to manage during our years of political and economic revival.

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Postscript by the author –

A front page article in the June 7 edition of our local newspaper, the Pryor Daily Times, tells us a bit more about the sort of government that Barack Obama has brought us… the sort of government that likes to “crucify” major oil companies.  It seems the small town of Salina, Oklahoma, a town of 1,396 people on the eastern shore of Lake Hudson, just 15 miles north of where I live, installed a new municipal water system 13 years ago.  And although the residents of Salina are many years away from having their water system paid for, the EPA has recently ordered them to shut it down and scrap it.

Why?  It seems that the EPA has discovered traces of trihalomethanes, a by-product of chlorination, in the towns drinking water.  The EPA has informed the people of Salina that drinking two liters of water containing 100 parts per billion of trihalomines (0.0000001), every day for 70 years, could result in three additional cases of cancer per 10,000 population.  Of course, with a population of only 1,396, the people of Salina have a 7 to 1 chance of escaping without a single case of cancer related to drinking the local water.  Yet, the EPA has ordered Salina to scrap its unpaid-for water system and replace it.

It is truly alarming and it is only because of the quality of our people and the size of our economy that we’ve been able to survive four years with a man like Obama sitting in the Oval Office.  But we can’t afford to gamble another four years on him.  We must figure out how to remove him.

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