There is mixed news on the birther front. On the one hand, an event that was heralded as being the largest birther gathering to date to be held on September 22 has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
On the other hand, we have leading officials of the state of Kansas saying that in response to a challenge from a citizen concerning Barack Obama’s citizenship, they are not convinced that he is a US citizen and thus may not put his name on the presidential ballot. The challenge was later withdrawn.
But all is not lost as long as undisputed Birther Queen Orly Taitz is around. She has alerted the Kansas secretary of state that she will attend the hearing on this matter on September 17 with incontrovertible proof that Obama is a citizen of Indonesia and also possibly Kenya and that he has forged all his documents that support citizenship claims, such as his social security card and his selective service registration. The indefatigable and peripatetic Orly (I feel like I know her well enough to call her by her first name) is attending similar hearings in Mississippi, Indiana, and California.
Orly is my own favorite dentist/lawyer/birther and the owner of the World’s Leading Obama Eligibility Challenge Web Site, whose chaotic layout accurately mirrors her thought processes. She failed in her bid to gain the Republican nomination for the California US senate seat, due to the skullduggery of Republican officials who did not want a true patriot to win, someone who would expose the whole rotten corrupt bipartisan cesspool that is hiding Obama’s secret attempts to hand the country over to Muslim terrorists.
I wonder what would happen if Kansas goes through and does not put Obama’s name on the presidential ballot. Kansas is a safely Republican state so the outcome would not be affected but it surely would be a huge embarrassment to the non-birthers in the state to be seen as the center of this lunacy.
Oh, Orly, Orly, you are so adorable.
Her name is Orly? How… appropriate.
As I commented on another blog, technically speaking, Obama’s name isn’t on the ballot (neither is Romney’s). What is on the ballot is a number of electors who are pledged to vote for Obama in the electoral college. If the electors are qualified for their proposed role, I don’t know that the Kansas officials have any authority to keep them off the ballot. As I see it, the only recourse that these officials would have is to obtain a court order preventing the electors from casting their votes in the electoral college for Obama, assuming his electoral slate actually carried the state, a very unlikely prospect.
I am not sure what you mean. When I have voted in presidential elections (at least in Ohio) the candidates’ names are on the ballot.
Obama’s name and Romney’s name are on the ballot but you aren’t voting for either of them. You are voting for a slate of electors pledged to vote for one or the other of them in the Electoral College. Technically, his name on the ballot is shorthand for the electors on his slate. In Virginia, the ballot makes clear that one is not voting for a presidential candidate but for a slate of electors. This is highly technical I admit but legally it is the case.
Well, that is of course true because of how the electoral college works but it is the name appearing on the ballot that is central to the voting process. If Kansas keeps Obama’s name off it, that would be a major issue and a huge embarrassment to the state.
That’s my point. It is my contention that they can’t keep his name off the ballot because it is only a surrogate for a slate of electors. Its the slate of electors that they are trying to keep off the ballot, and unless they can show that some or all of them are ineligible to be electors, they are dead in the water. The only legal recourse IMHO would be to obtain a court order preventing those electors from voting for Obama in the electoral college.
Yes, Orly Taitz has an unusual and hilariously appropriate name.
But how would a person in Kansas who supports the President go about voting for the electors pledged to support him in the EC, if his name isn’t there?
If, next to “Democratic Party Candidate” there is just a blank space, and the tally machines won’t recognize any efforts to select that space, how do I tell the state that I want those electors to speak for me at the EC?
But how would a person in Kansas who supports the President go about voting for the electors pledged to support him in the EC, if his name isn’t there?
Heh. Maybe it would list
(R) Romney/Ryan
(D) Electors chosen by the Kansas Democratic Party
Is that even possible? I mean, a Presidential candidate being excluded from the election in one state only?
American politics are weird.
Abraham Lincoln was excluded from the 1860 election by nine states, all of whom would shortly secede from the Union, kicking off the Civil War:
-- Alabama
-- Arkansas
-- Florida
-- Georgia
-- Louisiana
-- Mississippi
-- North Carolina
-- Tennessee
-- Texas
So from the Republicans themselves, we have examples of a Presidential candidate being excluded from the ballot. Only that time, the shoe was on the other foot.
You have to actually live in the US to truly appreciate how weird it is!
That is because we in the US don’t actually have national elections. There are federal level laws that restrict how the states can run elections, but basically we really have 51 (counting DC’s voting for President) individual state elections.
When I got my sample ballot and read the candidate statements, I actually laughed out loud. Orly’s proudly trumpted her credentials as birther-in-chief.
When I got my absentee ballot for the primary, I thought Orly might have had a chance. With California’s new open primary system, there were about twenty candidates all listed together, about half of them Repubs. Obviously Feinstein was going to move on to the general, so the question was who would be the second candidate. None of the other candidates were really big names in CA politics. Orly lucked out on ballot geography — she was the first Repub on the list. I thought she might get a big share of the apathetic, reflexively partisan vote.
Apparently not; she did embarrassingly poorly. Never fear, she has her law practice/dental practice/etc. to keep her busy.
…or as J.B.S. Haldane might have said:
WHAT?! A paucity of ticket sales for a Birther Event?
Quickly, someone hand me a Bible. It is surely a sign of the End Times.
I would love to see someone argue that preventing Kansas voters from casting ballots for electors pledged to a Presidential candidate who has been certified in every other state of the Union constitutes infringement on the voting rights of every Kansas voter.
Under the provisions of the 14th Amendment, it should be possible to reduce Kansas’ representation in Congress by the percentage of males over 21 whose rights were infringed. As this percentage of voters would be 100 percent, their Congressional representation would be removed entirely.
(Not that the Republicans from other states would allow that to happen.)
Careful, Mano… if you dis Orly, she’ll add you to her REEKO suit. I think she named 100 John and Jane Does, so there’s plenty of room for one more blogger.
But I LOVE Orly! Surely she wouldn’t sic RICO on her biggest fan?