Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who is best known over his fight to put a Ten Commandments monument in the courthouse rotunda, sided last week with birther activists who, according to The Huntsville Times, “wanted Alabama's Secretary of State to certify the birth certificate of each presidential candidate before allowing their names to appear on the general election ballot.”
Former congressman and Constitution Party presidential candidate Virgil Goode filed the lawsuit along with an Alabama resident Hugh McInnish, a conservative blogger and Republican party official. As we noted last year, the pair tapped birther leader Larry Klayman as their lawyer and predicted that Moore would aid their cause.
In his dissenting opinion, Moore wrote:
The Secretary of State has a duty under state law to examine the qualifications of national-convention nominees who ran in the presidential primary before placing their names on the general-election ballot. The jurisdiction-stripping statute forbids inquiry into the eligibility of presidential candidates once an election has occurred, but it does not preclude such an inquiry before the election.
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The plaintiffs sought a writ of mandamus from the circuit court ordering the Secretary of State to require from each presidential candidate a verified birth certificate. Presentation of a birth certificate is indeed a common means of determining age and citizenship. Although I would not prescribe the manner in which the Secretary of State is to verify eligibility of presidential candidates, I believe she has a duty as the chief presidential candidates, I believe she has a duty as the chief elections official of Alabama official of Alabama to implement the natural-born-citizen requirement of Article II, § 4, of the United States Constitution.
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This matter is of great constitutional significance in regard to the highest office in our land. Should he who was elected to the presidency be determined to be ineligible, the remedy of impeachment is available through the United States Congress, and the plaintiffs in this case, McInnish and Goode, can pursue this remedy through their representatives in Congress.
Justice Tom Parker, whose biography touts his work with James Dobson and Pat Robertson, issued his own dissent in which he insisted that the secretary of state should have specifically investigated President Obama’s eligibility:
I write separately, however, to clarify that I do not believe that the Secretary of State has an affirmative duty to investigate, on his or her own volition, all the qualifications of every proposed candidate, but that the Secretary of State's duty to investigate a potential candidate's qualifications arises once the Secretary of State has received notice that a potential candidate may lack the necessary qualifications to be placed on an Alabama election ballot. For the following reasons, I believe that, in the present case, the Secretary of State received notice sufficient to raise a duty to investigate the qualifications of President Barack Hussein Obama before including him as a candidate on Alabama's election ballot.
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As I noted in my unpublished special concurrence to this Court's order striking McInnish's petition for a writ of mandamus: "McInnish attached certain documentation to his mandamus petition, which, if presented to the appropriate forum as part of a proper evidentiary presentation, would raise serious questions about the authenticity of both the 'short form' and the 'long form' birth certificates of President Obama that have been made public."
On March 6, 2012, the Secretary of State was served with McInnish's petition for a writ of mandamus, including the attached documentation raising questions about President Obama's qualifications. That documentation served by McInnish on the Secretary of State was sufficient to put the Secretary of State on notice and raise a duty to investigate the qualifications of President Obama before including him as a candidate on an Alabama election ballot.
In his WorldNetDaily column yesterday, Klayman praised Moore and said that he won’t end his campaign to “remove this anti-American, pro-Muslim and anti-Judeo Christian president” until “the imposter in the White House” is “told to get up off his knees and come out with his hands up.”
To challenge a black president’s qualifications is to be branded a racist. Obama and his minions know this well and have milked his race at every turn to guilt white America, including its judges, into acquiescing to his continued destructive leadership bent on turning the country into not only a socialist pro-Muslim state, but one which is second rate in the world. And, to this end, Obama has succeeded. Today, our economy remains in shambles and Putin’s Russia is now the real superpower, having just seized a chunk of Ukraine – with more Hitleresque conquests on the horizon. As America’s power shrinks under Obama, Putin is bent on reconstituting the former communist empire of the Soviet Union. Thus, the stakes to remove this anti-American, pro-Muslim and anti-Judeo Christian president continue to rise.
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Last Friday, one of the few great judges in this land, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court – the jurist who was first impeached for displaying the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and then overwhelmingly elected by the people of the state to be their chief justice – had the courage to write a compelling dissenting opinion validating our challenge to Obama’s eligibility to be president. While seven of his nine fellow justices took the easy way out perhaps to show that Alabama is no longer the state once governed by George Wallace and rejected my ballot challenge, Chief Justice Moore without political correctness and without the disingenuous and cowardly sensitivity to Obama’s race, told it like it is. He ruled that Alabama did have a legal duty to verify that candidates for the presidency are eligible to serve as natural born citizens if elected
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We cannot quit. The imposter in the White House must be held accountable, and he should indeed be told to get up off his knees and come out with his hands up.
