Norton Thinks Supreme Court is Trying to Clear Frivolous Lawsuits Against Obama's Election Before the Inauguration

December 5, 2008

Washington, D.C. - Americans are known to be litigious, but Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), still a tenured law professor at Georgetown University Law School, said, "suing Barack Obama out of the presidency because of questions about his citizenship gives new meaning to the term ‘frivolous lawsuit'." The only case among many lawsuits challenging Obama's candidacy, in a number of different ways, to get to the Supreme Court was placed on a docket the Court uses to decide which cases to accept for briefing and oral argument. Most commentators give the case zero chance of being heard. Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father, and the President-elect has a Hawaiian birth certificate. Although never litigated, Norton said, "in this nation of immigrants, even the children of illegal immigrants are considered to be ‘natural-born' citizens if born in the United States." She said that the purpose of the 14th Amendment, which first carried the language, was to assure that slaves, who had never been counted as citizens, would be equal citizens.

The Congresswoman concluded, "We can only guess why this case is even being considered, but the reason is more likely than not to be to set aside these challenges by deciding not to take this case, and lay to rest manufactured doubts about the legitimacy of Obama's election before the inauguration. This was no Bush v. Gore, where in 2000 there was a genuine dispute, which the Court went out of its way to decide by stopping a ballot recount in Florida, and provoking one of the two or three most inflammatory decisions in the Court's history. In Bush v. Gore, the Court crossed the line when it engaged in the most serious act of judicial activism in American history, first by unnecessarily taking the case and then by rendering a decision that seemed political because of the split between the conservative and liberal blocks on the Court. Perhaps the Court is trying to make up for that controversial action by doing the opposite this time - removing doubt, not only about the legitimacy of Obama's election, but also about whether the Court will be tempted into political activism."