Page:Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement.pdf/45

 certified on the documents produced by the State of Hawaii, such contemporaneous official record of birth in Hawaii exists. The federal court in Liacakos v. Kennedy found that with no official foreign contemporaneous documentation, even a “delayed birth certificate” produced by the plaintiff, issued by the State of West Virginia 46 years after the alleged birth there, would provide prima facie evidence of “natural born citizenship.” That prima facie evidence, unrebutted by any official foreign documentation, along with collateral evidence of self-assumed and asserted U.S. citizenship, would thus be conclusive and establish “natural born” status by a “fair preponderance of the evidence.” In the case of President Obama, rather than any actual contrary documentary evidence, there have instead been several “theories,” allegations, rumors, and self-generated “doubts” and “questions” concerning the place and circumstances of President Obama’s birth which, as noted in court decisions, have been posited on the Internet and “television news tabloid[s],” and upon which a number of the lawsuits were based.

It may be noted that in addition to court dismissals based on lack of jurisdiction because of the failure of the plaintiff to show “standing” or to state a claim upon which relief may be granted, several of the cases regarding President Obama’s “eligibility” were dismissed on the basis of the lack of subject matter jurisdiction because, as noted by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, for example, the plaintiff’s alleged claim was “wholly insubstantial and frivolous” such that “federal jurisdiction is not extant.” Similarly, in Stamper v. United States, the United States District Court noted in dismissing an “eligibility” challenge of President Obama, that a federal court may dismiss a complaint “for lack of subject matter jurisdiction” when the “allegations of a complaint are totally implausible, attenuated, unsubstantial, frivolous, devoid of merit or no longer open to discussion,” and in dismissing the case found that the court “is not required to accept unwarranted factual inferences.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Berg v. Obama, in upholding the lower court’s dismissal of plaintiff/counsel Berg’s case, also noted “the obvious lack of any merit in Berg’s contentions…,” and in Kerchner v. Obama, ruled that “[b]ecause we have decided that this appeal is frivolous, we will Rh