Those who are subjected to the Zionist propaganda that permeates Western culture, and don’t have or don’t use the requisite intellectual self-defense, could be forgiven for viewing the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians as analogous to the relationship between the US and black people. This analogy follows from the liberal Zionist script: Israel is a democracy, albeit an imperfect democracy that has a race problem, just like the United States; and just like the United States, things are getting better for Palestinians in Israel.

The analogy is wrong. The status of Palestinians in Israel is more like American blacks in the mid-1860′s, after slavery was ended but before the 14th Amendment guaranteed them equal rights. Palestinians are second-class citizens, subject to all kinds of laws, regulations and practices designed to marginalize and exclude them from political and civil life. Israel is an apartheid state by the standard of the United Nations’ Convention on Apartheid.

The greatest source of political marginalization is something virtually never noticed in the West, even by leftists. It is the fact that only a small fraction of Palestinians are treated as Israeli citizens. We get so used to treating Israel and Palestine as separate entities, that we forget that Palestinians, as the indigenous people of Palestine at the time of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, are entitled to Israeli citizenship. That means all Palestinians – the residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the refugees, as well as those living in Israel. The arbitrary, illegal and systematic denial of Israeli citizenship on a racial basis is the most important instrument of marginalization. (It also makes it clear that Israel is not a democracy – but that’s a subject for another day.)

But even if we only consider Palestinian citizens of Israel, the level of marginalization is extreme. To begin with, Palestinians are legally treated as second class citizens. As documented most extensively by Uri Davis, Israeli Palestinians are subjected to an array of laws and regulations in such areas as eligibility for citizenship, land use, and army service, with the overall effect of giving the benefit of the laws to Jews and not to Palestinians. Most importantly for political marginalization, Israel’s election rules permit the government to disqualify political parties that advocate racial equality from participating in elections.

Israel’s racial supremacy has significant differences from American racial supremacy. For one, Zionists are outnumbered by Palestinians in a way that white Americans are not (yet) outnumbered by minorities, and its policies are therefore more aimed at keeping the minority in political control, while in the US, racial policies, embodied in the police and prison systems, are focused on economic control. (Though restrictive immigration policy is more in line with the kind of demographic warfare that Israel wages.) Another important difference is that the US is committed formally to racial equality, while Israel is formally committed to racial supremacy. That’s why Israel has all kinds of laws on the books that would be immediately ruled unconstitutional in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment if enacted in the US.

There’s one Israeli racial practice that’s not a law but is very important for keeping Palestinians politically marginalized, and that is the cooperation among Jewish political parties to exclude Palestinian individuals and parties from positions of power. There has been some progress recently, with the first appointment of a Palestinian-Israeli, Ghaleb Majadele, to the Israeli cabinet about a year and a half ago. But one other historic practice continues unchanged: Jewish Israeli leaders will not rely on an Arab party to hold the balance of power in forming coalition governments. Israeli leader Tzipi Livni has repeated this practice of late. In other words, Jewish political leaders in Israel would rather suffer political defeat than give Arab parties too much political power. That’s some serious racial supremacy.

In summary, Israel has a ways to go before it is as racially tolerant as the US. I’m calling 2037 as the year that Arab Israelis break through the political barrier in part as an aspirational, rather than a predictive goal. Achieving this goal will not just require a major cultural change among Israeli Zionists towards greater tolerance, it may also require the elimination of some of the legal apparatus that is used to systematically keep the Palestinians politically marginalized.

Valentine points out that McCain is ineligible for office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

Valentine argues that McCain took an oath as a Navy officer to support the Constitution of the United States, which would meet the requirements of the Section under the “officer of the United States” prong. He afterwards gave military secrets to the Vietnamese enemy, meeting the “aid and comfort” prong. The facts are easy to establish, as he has publicly admitted to them. According to the Amendment, he is therefore unqualified to be President, and for that matter Senator.

Unlike his Article II problem, however, this is not a total bar to him becoming President. He could become qualified if Congress decided by a 2/3 majority vote to remove his disqualification. Still, if one is already filing a Constitutional claim in state court, as I have suggested, there appears to be no harm in throwing this extra cause of action in.

Vote No on Prop 8!

Political battles are often nuanced fights, in which an issue is wrapped up with personal history, racism, sexism, mysterious backstories, internal power struggles, party politics, and more.  “Sides” are seldom clearly distinguishable as purely right or wrong, true or false.  Politics is a muddled business in this way.

But one fight going on in the U.S. – most notably in California – is really quite simple.

Proposition 8 is a constitutional amendment to the California Constitution that, if passed, “eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry”.  Voters of that state will cast ballots on November 4th to determine whether they wish to revoke a right for a segment of the population.

There is little nuanced about California’s Proposition 8 (and Florida’s Proposition 2 and Arizona’s Proposition 102).  These are refreshingly clear fights for full human rights of folks who happen to belong to the GLBTQ community.

The fight is about whether fear is going to continue to drive how we live, how we see each other, how we interact as a people.

The fight is about whether hatred is going to be the lesson taught to our youth, whether we’re going to teach them how to shun, whether we’re going to instill injustice in their hearts.

The fight is about whether religion will again be used, in an all-too-familiar way, to create an “other” who we can point our fingers at.  Christians will have to demonstrate whether they actually have read and understand the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, whether they accept or reject spiritual decay.

The fight is about whether the United States is a place where there exists a separation of church and state, whether we wish to become a theocracy, or whether our values truly are better than the foreign religious fundamentalists so often decried.

The fight is about whether citizens who proclaim the virtue of “small government” will actually realize that principle, whether they will respect a person’s right to privacy, or whether they will thrust a lengthened arm of the law into their own bedrooms.

Write to Marry Day!

The fight is about whether we will maintain the bondage on the dignity of each individual, whether we will repudiate our own civil rights, or whether liberty for one means liberty for all.

In essence, the fight is about whether we will be a civilized people, that uses our institutions to learn how to live together in peace, or use those institutions to create divisions and foster discrimination.  Rarely are people given such clear choices in the voting booth that will declare their equitableness, or their iniquity.  There is no nuance here, only the opportunity to embrace our own humanity.

But having a good legal argument is just step 1 for successful litigation when a Constitutional matter is at stake. You also need to clear the various hurdles set up by the judicial system to get the courts to hear your case, particularly the hurdles of ripeness, political question, and standing. So far, three legal challenges to the eligibility of Obama and McCain have been dismissed for lack of standing. See here, here, and here. (Richard Winger says – see the first link of the three – that there’s another McCain challenge that was dismissed for lack of standing. But I don’t know anything about it.)

Basically, the doctrine of standing dictates that only certain individuals are able to take certain controversies to court. Typically, you have to be a party that was harmed. If I steal money from Jeff, he can sue me for restitution, but his neighbor can’t. In other cases, a law might specifically say who can bring a legal action. An example is the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that the Ohio Republican Party doesn’t have standing to challenge Ohio’s Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, for alleged violations of the so-called Help America Vote Act. Even though the state Republican Party could be injured by illegal election-related acts committed by a Democratic official, the Court found that under HAVA only the Federal Department of Justice can bring such actions.

For the last three months I have been advocating an alternative approach that has been picked up, or perhaps independently arrived at, by election law scholar Daniel Tokaji. This approach calls for challenging McCain’s eligibility in state courts.

Many states have provisions for challenging elections based on a candidate’s eligibility. These include states which McCain has a good-to-excellent shot of winning, such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Indiana. These five states have 81 electoral college votes among them. The provisions tend to be narrow, and do not allow ordinary voters to contest presidential election results, but losing candidates are allowed to contest, and Indiana’s law allows county-level party officials of losing parties to contest. Subject to how the state courts interpret these laws, this may resolve the issue of standing. A party official who might be denied standing in federal court, as in Robinson v. Bowen, would have standing in state court if the state’s statute says she does.

It might seem odd for a state court to make a decision about a federal constitutional issue. But I don’t think there’s anything judicially improper in this. What the state level court would be doing is making a factual determination regarding whether the candidate is eligible under the federal constitution. It would not be contradicting federal judicial precedent, since the federal courts have never ruled on the issue (the district courts keep dismissing it on standing grounds). It might be thought improper because the state court might harm McCain by wrongly deciding a federal issue. But McCain would not be harmed, because he would be able to appeal this decision up to the U. S. Supreme Court.

It would therefore seem appropriate for those seeking to challenge McCain’s candidacy to do it through the state courts.

Virtually all the Obama supporters I’ve mentioned this to either explode with rage at my suggestion that they take up the legal challenge, or roll their eyes and tell me that the issue has been settled. A minority – generally, those with legal training – agree that there’s a potential challenge, but they aren’t interested because they believe that it’s not ethical to limit voters’ choices like I’m suggesting. This post outlines the case that there is a compelling legal argument that McCain is not a natural born citizen; that it is possible to legally challenge his candidacy based on his ineligibility; that the issue has not been settled; and that a court challenge is not an unethical course of action.

McCain is not a natural born citizen

The argument for McCain’s lack of fitness was made by Gabriel “Jack” Chin, who argued that the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S.-occupied territory where McCain was born, was within U.S. jurisdiction, but outside of U.S. limits. This is significant because the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship at birth to (almost) anyone born within U.S. limits, and the immigration laws at the time granted citizenship at birth to individuals born to U.S. citizens outside of U.S. limits and jurisdiction, as long as their parents met certain residency criteria. McCain’s parents met the criteria, but because he was born within U.S. jurisdiction, the law didn’t make him a citizen at birth. And because he was born outside of U.S. limits, the Constitution didn’t make him a citizen at birth. He became a citizen at age 11 months, when Congress amended the immigration law to grant citizenship to those who, like McCain, fell through the legislative crack.

While Chin’s case is quite good, a plausible argument to the contrary has recently been presented. According to this argument, the words “limits and jurisdiction” in the old legislation does not refer to two separate concepts, but is rather a stylistic repetition of a single concept, like “cease and desist” or “hue and cry,” and that in fact they refer just to limits, not jurisdiction.

If this is true, then the legislation makes anyone born to U.S. citizen parents who meet the residency requirements a U.S. citizen at birth, and this would include McCain. It’s possible that this argument would carry the day in a courtroom, but I think it more likely not, for a couple of reasons. First, unlike “cease”, “desist”, “hue” and “cry”, “limits” and “jurisdiction” are legal concepts. Moreover “jurisdiction” is a old concept, and the fact that it refers to the area under a country’s authority or control – that is, that it extends beyond the country’s limits – would have been known in 1795, when the statute was written. It is unlikely that the drafters of the statute would have used “jurisdiction” when they meant “limits”. Moreover, Chin shows that Congress was aware at least since 1932 that children born to U.S. citizen parents in unincorporated territories were not being born as citizens, and that they acted to correct the deficiency in 1937, after McCain was born.

Assuming that McCain was not a U.S. citizen at birth, then he is not a natural born citizen. The adjective “natural” corresponds to citizenship. One who is “naturalized” is one who has gone from being a non-citizen to being a citizen. Its counterpart is “natural-born”, meaning a citizen from birth. There is a bit of redundancy in saying that someone is a “natural-born citizen”, since the information that she is a citizen is contained both in the word “natural-born” and in the word “citizen”. But there’s nothing linguistically wrong with this kind of partial redundancy. The meaning of “naturalized citizen” is not disputed, and contains the same redundancy.

Thus, McCain is not a natural born citizen. The Constitution’s Article II requires the President to be either a natural born citizen or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Jokes about McCain’s age aside, he was not around at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Therefore he is not eligible to be President.

Six Virginia State Police Chaplains were just forced to resign by the Kaine Administration because they prayed publicly “in Jesus name.” In response, 86 Virginia Pastors have taken a pledge to mobilize their people to vote, and now we’re standing up for Jesus with these chaplains.

That caught my eye, so I decided to dig a bit deeper.  Turns out no one was forced to resign.  They chose to.  (Washington Times):

At least six of the Virginia State Police’s 17 chaplains have resigned following a request they offer only “nondenominational” prayers during department-sanctioned public events and ceremonies, police said Wednesday.

The request was made by state police Superintendent Col. W. Steven Flaherty earlier this month and has been decried by Virginia House Republicans as a violation of the First Amendment and an attack on Christianity. One Republican delegate said chaplains were told they could not invoke the name of Jesus, but a state police spokeswoman denied the assertion.

To “require those troopers to disregard their own faith while serving violates their First Amendment rights and prevents them from serving effectively as chaplains,” said House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith, Salem Republican. “These men had little choice but to resign.”

To better understand the dispute we ought to take a look at one of the men behind it:

However, Delegate Charles W. “Bill” Carrico Sr., a former state trooper, said he has spoken with some of the chaplains, who said the colonel’s request was not put in writing and was treated as an order.

The chaplains were told that “they cannot reference the name of Jesus Christ,” said Mr. Carrico, Grayson Republican. “That’s against their beliefs and against the dictates of their conscience.”

Bill Carrico is the owner of In Jesus Name I Pray.org (registered on the 22nd to his state email address: DelCCarrico@house.state.va.us).  He serves in the Virginia House.  He recently attempted to run for the US House, and held off an aggressive challenge (and a close vote) from a Democratic challenger.  He also put forth a bill (which passed the state house and failed in the state senate) to allow religious prayer on public property:

Amends the current religious freedom provisions of the Virginia Constitution to “secure further the people’s right to acknowledge God”; to permit prayer and the recognition of “religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including public schools”; and to prohibit the Commonwealth and its political subdivisions, including public school divisions, from composing school prayers or requiring individuals to “join in prayer or other religious activity.”

The second half being a cover.  His real concern is in pushing Christianity further into the political mainstream.  Bill Carrico believes this is a Christian Nation (emphasis mine):

Patrick Henry once said “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was not founded by religionist, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason people of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom to worship here.”

Bill has an unsurprisingly poor understanding of the consitution:

Other religions have the right to worship here, however just because they are offended by what we were founded upon doesn’t give them the right to take away our constitutional freedoms.

The separation of church and state is no where in the constitution and was a letter from Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist suggesting that the state should never be allowed to run the church.

The first ammendment to the constitution clearly reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

Arguing this is a Christian nation runs directly counter to the spirit and letter of the first ammendment.

The dispute on its surface is an argument over whether public officials can offer demoninational prayer in an official context.  Underneath is a strategy by Dominionist politicians to paint America as a Christian nation, which serves as a political foundation for easing more theocratic laws into the books.

(One wonders how would the same chaplains react if it had been a Hindu prayer in an official context?)

Those contradictions aside, what is really meant by “experience”?  It appears that many believe that wisdom and competence accrues simply by virtue of sticking around the capitol for a long time.  But there are other connotations the term has taken on, particularly with the emergence of Sarah Palin onto the political scene (I’ll leave the quibbling over whether governorship in Alaska rates as being in the political scene).  Democrats, even many leftists, are now decrying Palin’s lack of “experience” as a fatal flaw of her candidacy.  But I think the attribution is disingenuous, and that “experience” is being used in place of “ideology” and “race” (in the case of Obama).

The Contradictions of Sarah Palin

In Palin’s case, critics are actually being unfair in accusing her of inexperience.  Her background is still incomplete, but we know the following: She comes from what appears to be a working class family (her mother a secretary and father a school teacher) and attended public school.  She worked as a reporter while raising a family.  She became involved in politics at a local level, eventually becoming the mayor.  Within 20 years of graduating from college, she won office as the governor of Alaska.

Palin did these things – as a woman – in a remote part of the country.  Although possessing white privilege, as well as privileges based on her religion and sexual orientation, it is remarkable in this country that a woman raising a family ascended through civic ranks in such a fashion.    She was not born into the ownership class of the United States; not born into wealth, nor a prestigious family, and didn’t benefit from powerful connections gained from attending elite schools.  We can (and damn well better) challenge her ideology, but we should not challenge her lack of time spent in Washington as something that makes her less than qualified.

“Experience” Means Nothing

“Experience”, as interpreted literally in the political dialogue, is virtually irrelevant.  Frankly, we shouldn’t care if a candidate has been a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations or Foreign Affairs when it comes to international policy.   We shouldn’t care if someone has been elected 20 times to their seat in the House.  Winning elections and sitting on committees to not inherenly impart wisdom or even comprehension.  John McCain still doesn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a, and he’s been in the Senate for 21 years.

We shouldn’t reject Palin because she doesn’t have experience.  We should reject her, however, because she is a terribly ignorant candidate, unfamiliar with even the most basic institutions of U.S. government.   We should reject Palin because she is a tokenistic attempt to garner female support based on identity politics.  We should reject Palin because she was chosen because of her radical right-wing ideology and lack of respect for the rights of others.  We should reject Palin because she is a hypocrite who would likely increase the failures of the Bush administration. And the list goes on.

And if we had any other choice, we should reject Obama – not because he lacks experience – but because he is an unprincipled corporate candidate who says what is needed to be elected.  We should reject Obama – if we had a better option – because he is not an anti-war candidate, but in fact a long-time supporter of the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations and because he actively pledges to escalate war.  If we weren’t forced to choose between him and a Republican slate that would reverse judicial gains won by generations, we should reject Obama as violating his Constitutional oath by refusing to challenge the illegalities of the Bush administration.  And the list goes on.

Who We Need

We don’t need experience in a president.  We need a sane, rational, compassionate person with a willingness to respect national and international law.  We might be better off choosing a citizen, at random, who isn’t financed by lobbyists, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, oil companies, and who isn’t surrounded by advisors who come from centers of power and wealth in the country.  In this sense, “experience” has also come to mean, among other definitions, being approved by sectors of the ownership class in the country.  The nominees from both parties are far too corrupt, far too owned, to view the world in a common sense fashion.  Would it really be a worse system to pick 10 citizens at random, put them on the national stage, let them speak their minds, and let the country choose the best of them?