For a long time, I thought that Orly Taitz was the most loathsome right-wing lawyer in the country. Well, it looks like fellow birther Larry Klayman is challenging the Mad Moldovan for that title. On Thursday, Klayman filed a petition calling for President Obama to be deported because he isn’t legally an American citizen.
This filing is the latest in a mountain of evidence that Klayman is a classic stopped clock. Last winter, Klayman convinced a federal judge that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records was unconstitutional. To date, it is the only time the NSA has lost in court. The NSA appealed that ruling, and Klayman came to Washington to prepare for oral arguments before a panel of the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals next month. While he was there, he fired off a petition to three Department of Homeland Security officials calling for a hearing into Obama’s citizenship status. If that request is ignored, Klayman intends to sue. In a column at WorldNetDaily, Klayman declares that Obama’s actions in office are rooted in the fact that he isn’t really an American at all, and calls for him to be “deported back to his native country” before he does any further damage.
The petition rehashes the standard birther line that President Obama is not a citizen because Ann Dunham gave birth to him in Kenya. It claims that since Barack Obama, Sr. was a Kenyan citizen and Dunham had not been “physically present in the United States” for ten years, including at least five years after the age of fourteen, Barack II couldn’t automatically claim citizenship through his mother under citizenship law of the time. Never mind that all available evidence shows Ann was “physically present in the United States” at least from 1956 through Obama’s birth in 1961. It also contends that Obama reentered the United States using falsified documents–the first of numerous frauds and misrepresentations that supposedly continue to this day. It also repeats the birther lie that Obama is using a fake Social Security number–though Klayman, unlike Taitz, has the decency not to give that number out.
Klayman’s sources have issues of their own. He cites a 2012 investigation into Obama’s birth certificate by Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio which declared the certificate was fake. Arpaio thus expected us to believe that Ann flew from Honolulu to Kenya during her summer break at the University of Hawaii, when she would have been well into her third trimester. No airline at that time would have allowed a woman that far into her pregnancy to get on board. She would have also had to get a vaccine for yellow fever, which is not given to pregnant women. He also expects us to believe that Ann hightailed it back to Honolulu within four days so she could register Barack’s birth in time for the newspaper deadlines–an implausible notion given what air travel was like in 1961. You would also have to believe that the Dunhams lied about Ann’s residency status so she could qualify for in-state tuition; no evidence of this has ever turned up. Another source is Lucas David Smith, who in 2009 claimed he’d found Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate and tried to hawk it on eBay. However, Smith has a criminal history that includes forgery and attempts to sell his kidney. What does it say about the credibility of someone who is willing to scrape this far down the barrel for evidence? Nothing good, to put it mildly.
The velocity with which this petition is rejected should create quite the breeze.? All told, this effort will have about as much success as Klayman’s attempted march on the White House earlier this year. The only difference will be that he’ll end up losing a lot more money. After all, if Klayman does follow through on his threats to go to court, he’d better have plenty of money on hand to pay the all-but-certain sanctions that will be issued for making frivolous filings.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
