I could rehash what I have already written and make this longer, but all I really know is that the Defendant Barack Obama, presumably through his attorney, Stephen F. Rosenthal, filed a “Motion to Dismiss” in Pasco County, Florida Circuit Court yesterday (May 8) in the lawsuit styled Collette v. Obama, a suit for damages over Barack Obama being President and for injunctive relief preventing Obama from running for President in Florida. This follows the filing of Collette’s “Amended Complaint” on April 26. Previously the Plaintiff, Florida Democratic Executive Committee, filed a “Motion to Dismiss” based on the original complaint.
As soon as I get details of the new MTD, I will publish them.
I haven’t seen anything recent in the other Florida ballot challenge, Voeltz v. Obama, where motions to dismiss are pending.
Read more:
“Collette v. Obama”
Doomed.
I got an email from Jerry. He hasn’t received the MTD yet.
Isn’t Collette the MENSA guy? If those who in MENSA are geniuses let’s see if the genius mind can bring a ballot challenge forward?
Doc
Do you think Collette would come on RC Radio? He is MENSA so he would mentally crush me and should have no fear.
I never mention it, but I am a 25-year member of MENSA. If you can get Colette on, I’ d be happy to volunteer for a “battle of the Mensans.” Or something.
Andy Kaufmann would have approved.
Jerry doesn’t seem the kind of guy who is interested in crushing anyone. I can give you an email address privately.
Yes, Jerry is Mensa, as is his friend Sam Sewell. I was in Mensa too, but got bored.
My opinion is that Jerry’s problem is not a lack of intelligence, but that his legal views are the result of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. Jerry is digging into the law in order to find a way to force candidates to be “checked out” thoroughly as to qualifications. Jerry wants to have standing to bring his suit and so is motivated to read the law in such a way that he ends up having standing and he will view defeat as the result of having the wrong judge.
I dig into the law to understand what I am reading. It doesn’t matter to me whether he has standing or not, so I read the law on standing objectively.
Here’s a question for the lawyers:
Can a Motion in Opposition to a Motion to Dismiss be used as a back door Amended Complaint? To what extent can new issues, new legal theories and new causes of action be introduced, and when does the plaintiff have to file an amended complaint?
One recurring theme on pro-Bush and anti-Obama newsgroups and boards was an occasional claim by someone that they were a MENSA member. Ask them to quote something specific from a recent (or any) copy of IJ, notice that they have no idea what you’re referring to, let alone an answer, and move on.
Good one. They probably didn’t know MENSA from menses.
Not all those eligible feel the need to join.
My feelings about high intelligence are like what an old friend of mine said about religion. Since he never spoke about his spiritual side, people assumed he wasn’t religious. One day the subject came up, and he surprised me by saying that he was, but his outlook on it was this: “If you can’t tell anything about my beliefs by observing me, what is the point of talking about it?”
No, one cannot use an Opposition to a Motion to Dismiss to Amend their complaint. Under the Federal Rules, a Plaintiff may file an Amended Complaint without leave of court, any time before the Defendant files a responsive pleading. A Motion to Dimiss is a responsive pleading. At the point the Defendant filed his Motion, the Complaint is what it is. A Plaintiff can try to raise other issues in his opposition, but any defense attorney with his salt will simply bring up in his Reply (normal procedure is, Motion, followed by Opposition to Motion, followed by Reply in Support of Motion) that the issues raised in the Opposition were not plead in the Complaint, thus not properly before the Court. However, a Court has the option of either granting leave to amend the Complaint, or Dismissing the Case without prejudice, which allows the Plaintiff to start all over, and file a new complaint.
I’d come on now if you’ll agree that, if I win my case, you’ll have me back for twice as long, and you’ll promote that appearance twice as much as you otherwise would.
There’s no correlation, of which I’m aware, between IQ and fearlessness. Nonetheless, I have none about coming on.
So you’ll be on just the one time then. Got it. 🙂
“if I win my case”
Make it a billion times and throw in car titles, bank accounts and any other transferable assets.
And when he inevitably loses? Same stakes?
How about an apology and admission of error about the eligibility of the President?
Ha! Yeah. I know.
(1) No. Opposing a motion to dismiss merely offers a counterargument why the motion should not be granted. It is cannot be used as a bootstrap to amend.
(2) Any new cause of action may ONLY be raised in an amended complaint.
I will contact you through Doc C for the details. I am confident it will be a single appearance based on your conditions but you may come back a second time regardless of the outcome.
I agree. I read his post and thought “what’s in it for me?” 🙂
If there is to be a team opposing Collette, I would like to join in. Are you thinking of a structured debate format? Oh– and is he going to want to see my Mensa membership card beforehand, so he can make sure it’s not forged?
However, in OrlyLaw™, all things are possible to those who believe (and the judge is not a ebil communistic-marksist-overlytanist treasony judge or had been gotten to by the evil conspiracy in Misha’s basement).
Are those liturate layers or variegated strata?
At least make sure you have some sort of enforcible penalty that can be applied if (when?) he chickens out at the last minute like the guy in your previous debate.
Well I’d like to call in and chat a little — not so much a debate. We already had a debate in email sort of.
Well, the other guy was pond scum — what’d you expect?
I have forwarded contact information to you two.
With all respect, a motion paper is not a pleading, at least in federal court, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 7, although the misuse of the term “pleading” to mean “paper” is so deeply entrenched that that it’s rarely useful to raise the point.
And it is indeed possible to squash a motion to dismiss by filing an amended complaint; I’ve done so myself.
Based on Doc’s case summary in this article, that’s exactly has happened here, and the original motion to dismiss is now a nullity. Of course relief is only temporary unless you’ve fixed the problems. Based on what I recall from earlier articles, there are numerous unfixable problems with the complaint.
We’ll see.
I don’t know if he’s eligible. That’s the problem. Nobody really does.
I do. Congress does. He is.
Romney, on the other hand, we simply don’t know.
I know Barack Obama is eligible as well. Congress does too. Millions of American voters and the Electoral College knew it in 2008 and will have no doubt again in November.
You should revisit your understanding of the meaning of the word nobody, an absolute that is all-inclusive. Didn’t you imply you were smarter than average (i.e., MENSA)?
I’m not seeing it.
The “problem” is entirely yours and a small section of obstinate cranks who don’t want to understand the law, accept the will of the majority or face the meaning of credible evidence.
Your bizarre case is doomed and, like every other birther legal challenge, an annoying waste of time, money and other public resources.
This is sleazy, dirty politics and reprehensible.
To quote the Doc:
“What I am opposed to is the courts being peppered with lawsuits that are losers from the get go. Already 5 judges, federal and state, have ruled that Obama meets the definition of natural born citizen and Mr. Collette brushes aside all of the over one hundred dismissals of similar lawsuits, believing that all he has to do is find the right judge and he will prevail.”
(source: http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2012/04/thanks-for-all-the-help/)
Well you see whether you do or not is irrelevant. If you don’t believe he is eligible, you may withhold your vote.
But the Constitution grants to Congress the duty to qualify and certify the election of te President, and they were satisfied enough to certify his election. When Orly or Strunk or you say “Well he didn’t prove it to ME” well, sorry. There’s 300+ million people in this country, prospective President’s can’t go around proving themselves to every yahoo that claims ineligiblity. That’s why the duty was Constitutionally assigned to Congress. When birthers write letters to Congress – many of which have been linked here or on birther sites like ORYR – they get a response of “Thank you but Hawaii says he was born there.”
You may choose not to believe that, but under the Constitution, if Hawaii says he was born there and when, then every state and federal government body is going to take that as fact under the Full Faith and Credit clause unless there is admissible, compelling, and nearly overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Birthers have none but “what if” or “But this COULD have happened” with no evidence that such things actually DID.
Sheriff Joe can chant “forgery!” all he wants. But as long as he has no evidence of birth anywhere else, and Hawaii continues to say the President was born there, the birth certificate he is looking at could be written in CRAYON and it wouldn’t matter.
(Note that Congress and some other entities are not, per se, bound by FFAC. They can investigate things if they so desire. However, without that whole “Evidence of being born somewhere else” thing, Republicans in Congress isn’t going to touch the issue because of what it will look like politically. They know it would be a political disaster to make a big issue of this and end with a determination that the President was born in Hawaii, when they’ve taken every single other President at his word re: eligibility).
But what YOU think doesn’t matter. He was legitimately elected AND found eligible by the only people whose opinion matters on this topic (Congress).
You are of course perfectly free to vote for his opponent; that’s your redress.
That you don’t grasp that elementary issue makes wonder if you truly belong to Mensa.
Nailed it! Thanks.
You REALLY know, Scientist, as you were a witness to his birth in Hawaii.
While few actually come out and say this, I understand the birther position this way:
“Barack Obama is not eligible, and we demand that investigation continue until it’s proven that he’s not eligible. If investigators fail to find evidence that Obama is ineligible, then the investigators must be replaced by ones that will find the evidence. Failure to find evidence is proof of how powerful and clever Obama and his defenders are in hiding evidence and faking evidence. If courts do not find Obama ineligible based on Constitutional definitions, additional lawsuits must be filed until a court is found that will declare him ineligible. If courts do not, then better legal theories must be found and if that fails it is the courts that are to blame, either incompetent or corrupt.”
I think any reasonable person can see that such a person so-described is incapable of being proved wrong to their satisfaction.
I say that Mr. Collette’s position, “I don’t know if he is eligible,” differs only in the details from what I laid out above, just replace “not eligible” with “unproven.”
It’s been over 3 years now. 5 judges have ruled on the natural born citizen question. The news media has been up and down this issue; CNN went to Hawaii and did a two-part program on their investigation.
I cannot accept “I don’t know if he’s eligible” as a responsible position given the facts. By stretching a point, it may have been responsible in 2009, but not in 2012. It seems to me analogous to the child who stubbornly keeps saying “why” no matter how carefully you explain something to them. I’m not saying that birthers are stubborn children, just that they act as irrationally as stubborn children. It appears that the actual mechanism behind birtherism are things like confirmation bias rather than stubbornness. Nevertheless, like a stubborn child, there are limits to how much one will humor them. We’ve seen these limits reached by the Court in New York in the Strunk case.
You mean Obama, not Romney? Yes, I was present at Obama’s birth in Hawaii. I was not present at Romney’s birth in Michigan (or Ontario, who knows, since he has never shown a birth certificate?)
So, expounding on my previous post, here’s a question for you, Mr. Collette:
What will it take to convince you that he is eligible, noting that Presidents (or prospective ones) cannot be expected to go around sending documents to thousands or millions of voters?
The body given the responsibility in the Constitution to certify the election of the President – Congress (NOT the courts) sees no problem with his eligibility, and anyone that writes to Congress is told in no uncertain terms that he is eligible.
The opposition party, which freely opposes every single thing the President attempts to do, says he is eligible.
The State of Hawaii says he is eligible.
A number of Secretaries of State in recent election challenges have said he is eligible (while others, depending on the state, have said that their duty to put candidates on the ballot is ministerial and does not ride on eligibility).
In the past few months half a dozen courts, at both the federal and state levels, have explicitly said he is eligible.
You believe none of those bodies. Not one. As Doc C said, you just say “Oh yeah…well…I STILL don’t think (or don’t know if) he’s eligible, so NYAH.”
A solitary voter is never going to be just given, by a court, leave to go get a birth certificate because it means ANY voter could force a Presidential candidate to deliver one to THEM, and that’s an undue burden and a horrid invasion of privacy. Things like this are precisely why it is Congress (as opposed to state governments) that certifies the election of the President – so that individual states can’t say “Well, we don’t like the winner so we’re not going to recognize the results!”
Which, by extension, means birthers would not believe anyone they want to look at the original BC (courts, forensic document examiners) if those said “it’s legit”.
Their whole motivation is the belief in the “smoking gun”, in this case the frail hope that Obama would already fail at being able to show anything.
Even if that were possible and feasible, what would the voter do with it? He can’t judge it for himself because he isn’t an expert. He can’t give it to an actual expert because he wouldn’t believe said expert saying “it’s legit” either.
So again this would be based simply on the delusion that the document had such a glaring sign of being forged that they could see it with their naked eye.
And after all is said and done, the goalposts would simply be moved to “even if the BC is original and untampered with, who guarantees the information on it is correct, we need more confirmation” etc. ad infinitum et nauseam.
Which is, of course, what ex amoeba David Farrar has been saying recently, after his loss in Georgia – that sure, Hawaii says he was born there, and maybe the people saying they have seen the records are telling the truth, but how do we know those records are accurate?
The answer is, of course, one, because there’s no reason for them not to be, and two, because there’s no evidence that they are wrong. Orly may say that her job is simply to produce “doubt” and then she gets DISCOVERY but a vital record held by a state is not impeached by saying “Well, sure, the records say he was born there, but couldn’t it have been POSSIBLE to sneak away to Kenya without her husband, give birth, and fly right back without being listed on any flight register in the country?” Well sure, that’s POSSIBLE, lots of things are POSSIBLE, but to impeach the record there’s going to be have to be a lot more than an endless list of “These other things COULD have happened, and it should be up to you to prove they didn’t.”
I wrote about a solution to this logistical problem here:
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2008/12/obama-announces-national-natural-born-day/
Total BS, a majority of Americans have no doubts about his eligibility.
70 Million voted for him without a doubt in their mind.
That’s incorrect. The “nobodies” may not not know, but the “somebodies” really know he is eligible.
Doc’s quote:
I understand the birther position this way:
“Barack Obama is not eligible, and we demand that investigation continue until it’s proven that he’s not eligible. If investigators fail to find evidence that Obama is ineligible, then the investigators must be replaced by ones that will find the evidence. Failure to find evidence is proof of how powerful and clever Obama and his defenders are in hiding evidence and faking evidence. If courts do not find Obama ineligible based on Constitutional definitions, additional lawsuits must be filed until a court is found that will declare him ineligible. If courts do not, then better legal theories must be found and if that fails it is the courts that are to blame, either incompetent or corrupt.”
Doc- great summary of the real mentality. I may have to steal that to respond to Birthers at some point.
I asked him that here in Doc’s “Bivens, Bivens and Bivens, oh my!” article. He responded a few times. He said he would believe a court that examined the original birth certificate and all 400 years of law on the subject, conveniently set forth in his pleadings. He claimed the cases listed in the String Cite were lower court rulings with no binding precedent value and that the Wong case was not on point, just dicta.
He is just another Birther, he can’t possibly be wrong, the courts and judges don’t understand, etc.
Having been an attorney for a number of years, I am glad to say that most of my bad law school memories have faded from my mind. It’s funny, but when I graduated from law school I was pretty sure I knew everything there was to know about the law. Now, I know how wrong I was – and how ignorant I truly am. Most of my classroom memories are gone, since they weren’t “fun” memories to keep. I do recall a few things, however. I can recite the Rule Against Perpetuities as though it was tattooed on my fanny. (“Wait a minute – it is!”) And I can recall a few things from Civil Procedure, such as the Erie case and a few other cases. But, the one thing I’ll never forget from Civil Procedure is the lesson our professor taught us, seemingly from Day 1: “A MOTION IS NOT A PLEADING!” He kept telling us that, over and over – A motion is not a pleading! Funny how simple it seems now, but it was difficult to grasp back then. Thus, an attorney who plans to make a motion to dismiss the Complaint will generally serve and file an Answer before – or contemporaneously with – the Motion to Dismiss, thereby preventing the Plaintiff from amending the Complaint without prior approval from the court.
Oh, and all the Birthers remind me of how I was as a neophyte lawyer: cocksure of themselves and not recognizing how ignorant they really are.
But for the birther bigots, blind hatred will keep them in the dark and afraid of the dark.
Following up on this story, the MTD from Obama’s attorney was based on the original complaint, not the amended complaint. The new MTD is being prepared, and I’ll publish it when it’s available.