Submitted by: Debbie Warren
Following are some excerpts from a Charles Rice article in the Steady Drip and the full article can be read here
Charles E. Rice is professor emeritus at the Law School of Notre Dame University in South Bend IN. He is the author of What Happened to Notre Dame?
Excerpts:
The courts are not the only entities empowered to deal with such a question. A committee of the House of Representatives could be authorized to conduct an investigation into the eligibility issue. The classic formulation of the Congressional role is Woodrow Wilson''s, in his 1884 book Congressional Government:
I suggest no conclusion as to whether Obama is eligible or not. But the citizens whom the media and political pundits dismiss as "birthers" have raised legitimate questions. That legitimacy is fueled by Obama''s curious, even bizarre, refusal to consent to the release of the relevant records. Perhaps there is nothing to the issues raised. Or perhaps there is. This is potentially serious business.
If it turns out that Obama knew he was ineligible when he campaigned and when he took the oath as President, it could be the biggest political fraud in the history of the world.
As long as Obama refuses to disclose the records, speculation will grow and grow without any necessary relation to the truth. The first step toward resolving the issue is full discovery and disclosure of the facts.
It is the proper duty of a representative body to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents. Unless Congress have and use every means of acquainting itself with the acts and the disposition of the administrative agents of the government, the country must be helpless to learn how it is being served; and unless Congress both scrutinize these things and sift them by every form of discussion, the country must remain in embarrassing, crippling ignorance of the very affairs which it is most important that it should understand and direct. The informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function...[T]he only really self-governing people is that people which discusses and interrogates its administration. (p. 198)
The investigative power of Congress has multiple purposes. "The ability to gather information has been regarded as a predicate to effective legislation and as important to providing a legislative check on executive actions. The Supreme Court has explained that Congress thus may conduct ''inquiries concerning the administration of existing laws as well as proposed or possibly needed statutes. It includes surveys of defects in our social, economic or political system for the purpose of enabling the Congress to remedy them.'' The power to investigate also includes ''probes into departments of the Federal Government to expose corruption, inefficiency or waste''..... The authority to investigate necessarily requires the power to compel testimony." Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law (2006), 310. (Internal citations omitted).
It is difficult to imagine, to borrow Wilson''s phrase, a more pressing "affair of government" than the question of whether a sitting president obtained his office illegally, and perhaps even by fraud.
An investigating body must not prejudge the case. Its concern must be, first, to put the facts on the record and then to consider whatever legislation or other remedy might be appropriate in light of those facts.
The House of Representatives is an appropriate body to inquire into the facts and legal implications of a President''s disputed eligibility for the office. The House itself has a contingent but potentially decisive role in the election of a president. The 12th Amendment to the Constitution governs the counting of the electoral votes as certified by the states:
Debbie Warren Comments: I know I have screamed these thoughts from the rooftops as have others. The most frustrating and most telling reality is that Congress does have the right and responsibility and yet have pushed it onto the courts and cost citizens 'who DO have standing, damn it' money, energy and time unnecessarily to do Congress' job. The only thing that can be concluded is that they, as a body, are part of the fraud. I just hate the name of the column...it should be Natural Born American Citizen. Why do people keep leaving off the Nat Born part? Debbie Warren
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