Supreme Court To Consider Obama Birth Certificate Case

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Dec 4, 2008 5:05PM

Yesterday we explored what we thought was a benign attempt by a fringe political group to raise a ruckus over Barack Obama's birth certificate. Boy, were we wrong. While we're not putting on our tinfoil hats, it definitely has earned our attention. There have been several lawsuits filed regarding the release of Obama's birth certificate, including one by former Obama opponent Alan Keyes, and now one of the cases has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court will consider tomorrow whether or not to hear a lawsuit brought by Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells, a suit originally intended to delay the election.

The most famous case questioning Obama's citizenship was filed in Pennsylvania in August on behalf of Philip J. Berg and sought to enjoin the Democratic National Committee from nominating Obama. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to accept the case. Earlier, a federal judge rejected it for "lack of standing"—ruling that Berg had no legal right to sue. In cases like this, judges sometimes believe the matter is best left to political institutions, such as the Electoral College or Congress, said legal scholar Eugene Volokh of the University of California at Los Angeles.

The remaining case with the highest profile is Donofrio vs. Wells. Because it was distributed by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to other justices for conference, it gained undue importance for people unschooled in how the court works, Volokh said.

Many petitioners seeking stays of pending events have their cases distributed to the full court, he said. Of those, Volokh found that 782 were denied in the last eight years while just 60 were heard—and not all of those ultimately were successful.

Many sites, including PolitiFact and FactCheck, have explored the case and it's hard to believe that such an extensive conspiracy could stem from a birth certificate. If anyone was going to raise a stink about it, wouldn't it be the party Rove ran? Sure, maybe we're naive, but we just find it hard to believe that Obama has gotten this far with a fake birth certificate. As the folks at PolitiFact put it:

It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over.