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A complaint has been filed asking Pennsylvania state officials to set aside Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential candidacy, because he cannot meet the state’s eligibility requirements.
It’s another case in what is developing into a long list of states in which Obama’s candidacy is being challenged legally. A complaint recently was filed in Indiana, and Georgia’s dispute already is moving to the appellate level. Cases also are reported to be developing in Mississippi, Alabama and other states.
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The Pennsylvania case was raised by Dale Laudenslager and Charles Kerchner, whose previous legal challenge to Obama’s term in the White House also was based on eligibility concerns and reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices refused to look at any evidence.
According to a report from the team whose members filed the complaint, Kerchner asserted that after years of research, it “has been determined” that Obama is not eligible to hold the office president because he is “not a natural born citizen” under the requirements of the U.S. Constitution.
Candidates for the U.S .Senate and U.S. House only must meet the requirement of being a “citizen, while a president must be a “natural born citizen.”
Kerchner, who works through the Protect Our Liberty website, said Obama is ineligible because of his father.
“Until candidate Obama came along, no president since the founding generation has had a foreign-born father who never immigrated to the U.S.A.,” he said.
He noted Obama’s father never was a U.S. citizen or tried to be one. He returned to his native Kenya after a few years of school in the U.S.
“Candidate Obama was born a British subject/citizen via his foreign-national, non-U.S. citizen father and basic U.S. citizen via his mother and thus was born with dual citizenship and not sole allegiance at birth to the U.S.A.,” he said.
“A dual citizen at birth is not a ‘natural born citizen of the United States’ to constitutional standards,” Kerchner’s report said.
He said the correct definition of a “natural born citizen” is “someone born in the country from parents that are both U.S. citizens (born or naturalized).”
“The Founders reasoned that unity of citizenship and sole allegiance at birth to one nation and only one nation was a prerequisite to the office of president,” his report said. “This requirement was entered into the U.S. Constitution for national security reasons as a ‘strong check against foreign influence’ and allegiance claims via birth status on the person who would be the commander of our armies.”
Kerchner explained that while the accurate assessment is that a “natural born citizen” is the offspring of two U.S. citizen parents, “Obama slipped through the vetting system cracks as to his constitutional eligibility in the 2008 primaries.
“But he will not be permitted to do so in the 2012 primaries,” he said.
There remain questions about Obama’s citizenship status primarily because he has withheld so many documents that ordinarily would be available about a sitting president. Those include his passport and school records, records from his term as a state lawmaker and documentation on whether he was adopted by his mother’s second husband, an Indonesian.
In a letter to the chief clerk’s office in Pennsylvania, attorney Karen L. Kiefer submitted a “Nomination Petition Objection.”
“In Pennsylvania, the Department of State printed candidates ‘packet of required qualifications and instructions’ provided by the Pa. Secretary of States’ office, Jonathon M. Marks, commissioner and the Department of State website acknowledge the U.S. constitutional authority and state that to be eligible … for the office of president of the United States, a candidate must be a ‘natural born citizen.’
“Obama, who is not a ‘natural born citizen’ of the United States, has filed a nomination petition” even though the petition requires a person to have parents who were citizens at the time of the birth, she argues.
“Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was a foreign national at the time of his birth and candidate Obama admits in his book, “Dreams From my Father,” at page 215, that in mid 1960s ‘the government (Kenya) revoked his (father’s) passport, and he (Obama Sr.) couldn’t even leave Kenya,’” the report said.
“Candidate Obama’s father was never an immigrant to the United States, nor a permanent resident; Candidate Obama’s father never filed for or attained U.S. citizenship status; therefore, candidate Obama fails to meet U.S. constitutional and Pennsylvania requirements for the office.”
“Obama … has declared he is eligible for the office of president, and, therefore, has the burden of proving to this honorable court the truth of the matter,” the challenge explains.
The submission includes an analysis by attorney Mario Apuzzo, who handled Kerchner’s court case.
He explained, “The Founding Fathers emphasized that, for the sake of the survival of the constitutional republic, the office of president and commander in chief of the military be free of foreign influence and intrigue. It is the ‘natural born citizen’ clause that gives the American people the best fighting chance to keep it that way for generations to come. American people do not have the constitutional right to have any certain person be president. But … they do have a constitutional right to protect their liberty by knowing and assuring that their president is constitutionally eligible and qualified to hold the office.”
Even Obama is aware of the natural-born citizen problem, the submission contends, based on the fact he co-sponsored a Senate resolution regarding Sen. John McCain, determining although McCain was born outside the boundaries of the U.S. while his father served in the military, he is a “natural born citizen” because he was “born to American citizens.”
In Indiana, there is an interesting curve in the eligibility dispute, as state officials there recently removed from office the state secretary of state over eligibility issues.
The image that Obama released as his birth documentation, which has been challenged by computer, imaging and document experts as a fraud:
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