"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Just Doin' Their Jobs

This one has popped up a couple of places today:

Apparently the SCOTUS is set to discuss whether it will hear the case of Donofrio v. Wells, which challenges Barack Obama’s citizenship.

More background here:

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.


It's instructive that Thomas is the one who passed it on -- the quieter ideologue on the right, if you'll remember.

It's really sort of astonishing, scrolling through the comments at The Swamp, to see how many people actually take this as a legitimate issue. I mean, it's obviously an attempt to discredti Obama's presidency before it even starts, and I'm not at all hesitant with suggesting that Thomas brought it to the Court for just that reason -- he is, as I noted, the quiet ideologue, but he's still a party hack. Even though one of the original suits was filed by Phil Berg, a Democrat (and it would be interesting to know who he supported in the primaries), it's tailor-made for the Republicans, who have already said they're gong to do everything they can to stop Obama's legislative agenda.

And it's also now a matter of the Constitution, which in wing-nut land only applies when you can use it against someone you don't like.

2 comments:

Ted said...

Seems the Supreme Court is waiting to hear from me before issuing a decision on Donofrio, so here goes: While the Court is more than loathe to enter this dispute, currently it has no choice (thanks to the audacious one — and I don’t mean Leo, I mean Barack) and the ONLY WAY to bring closure, knowing CLOSURE IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL before any Presidential inauguration, is to back the original intent of the Constitution, meaning, Obama is NOT an Article II “natural born citizen” (albeit Obama may or may not be a “citizen”, a question heated by the steadfast refusal of the DNC or any of the Secretaries of State to require his birth certificate, which the Court will now not have to confront).

Hunter said...

Oh, goody -- my first real wingnut.