Caught On Video: GOP Congressman Calls The Constitution A Distraction
(ACN) Congressman Jeff Flake got more than he bargained for at a recent Red Mountain Tea Party town hall forum in Arizona. When a member of the audience asked Flake whether or not he believes that Barack Obama is a legal President, Flake tried, in vain, to put the man in his place.
Flake: "I think he is our President. I think he is duly elected and I believe he is a citizen. And I do believe [his eligibility] is a distraction. And my job is to make sure we beat him in November."
Question: How can you sucessfully take Barack Obama to task for exceeding his constitutional authority when you believe that the Constitution is "a distraction?" Answer: You can't.
When politicians make self-contradictory statements, they call it triangulation. Normal people call it equivocation.
Rather ironically, Barack Obama won his first elective office by using every legal trick in the book to disqualify all of his political oppenents from the ballot. Would it stand to reason that the best way "to make sure we beat him in November" would be to challenge his qualifications for office?
Even if a Congressional investigation failed to yield the desired result, simply bringing the question of eligibility before the voters might prove to be a winning tactic. People are hesitant to vote for someone they believe may be ineligible, and politicians who seriously address the eligibility question (or, heaven forbid, simply go through the motions) can at least take the moral high ground and compelling convince the American electorate that they take the Constitution seriously.
And therein lies the rub. It would appear that Republicans either don't know how to win or don't want to win.
But the man who posed the question wasn't done. He asked audience members who wanted Congress to investigate Mr. Obama's eligibility to hold office to signify their agreement by standing and, as the video shows, nearly every member of the audience stood.
If anything, Flake's answer is a clear indication of what is wrong with our political system. The Contitution is very clear. Only a natural-born citizen of the United States of America is eligible to hold the office of President and numerous polls indicate that approximately half of all Americans question the eligibiliy of the man occupying the White House.
If one looks beyond the nuance of Flake's statement, his meaning is clear. Elections trump the Constitution and, moreover, upholding the Constitution is "a distraction."
Republican officeholders are scratching their heads, wondering why people are losing faith in our political system and why people doubt that Republicans have what it takes to lead. He may not realize it yet, but Flake essentially answered his own question.
Hat tip to our friends at The Western Center for Journalism for compiling the video.
Flake: "I think he is our President. I think he is duly elected and I believe he is a citizen. And I do believe [his eligibility] is a distraction. And my job is to make sure we beat him in November."
Question: How can you sucessfully take Barack Obama to task for exceeding his constitutional authority when you believe that the Constitution is "a distraction?" Answer: You can't.
When politicians make self-contradictory statements, they call it triangulation. Normal people call it equivocation.
Rather ironically, Barack Obama won his first elective office by using every legal trick in the book to disqualify all of his political oppenents from the ballot. Would it stand to reason that the best way "to make sure we beat him in November" would be to challenge his qualifications for office?
Even if a Congressional investigation failed to yield the desired result, simply bringing the question of eligibility before the voters might prove to be a winning tactic. People are hesitant to vote for someone they believe may be ineligible, and politicians who seriously address the eligibility question (or, heaven forbid, simply go through the motions) can at least take the moral high ground and compelling convince the American electorate that they take the Constitution seriously.
And therein lies the rub. It would appear that Republicans either don't know how to win or don't want to win.
But the man who posed the question wasn't done. He asked audience members who wanted Congress to investigate Mr. Obama's eligibility to hold office to signify their agreement by standing and, as the video shows, nearly every member of the audience stood.
If anything, Flake's answer is a clear indication of what is wrong with our political system. The Contitution is very clear. Only a natural-born citizen of the United States of America is eligible to hold the office of President and numerous polls indicate that approximately half of all Americans question the eligibiliy of the man occupying the White House.
If one looks beyond the nuance of Flake's statement, his meaning is clear. Elections trump the Constitution and, moreover, upholding the Constitution is "a distraction."
Republican officeholders are scratching their heads, wondering why people are losing faith in our political system and why people doubt that Republicans have what it takes to lead. He may not realize it yet, but Flake essentially answered his own question.
Hat tip to our friends at The Western Center for Journalism for compiling the video.
Ha ha -- you desperate losers. This ridiculous conspiracy theory is going nowhere.
ReplyDeletestick around and we will see
Deletewho the "desperate losers" are.
Only an ignorant moron makes stupid statements like you. If you had taken any time at all to explore obama's elegibility you would know he's been lying about everything. You don't want to know the truth!
DeleteHey other anonymous prove the theory false, show me and every other doubter the documents. The burden of proof is on you and the cheater in chief. Put up or STFU.
ReplyDeleteIf we let this situation ride, we are, in effect, repealing our Constitution. Is that what we want? If Article II, Section 1, has no force or effect, then who can say that any provision (including the Bill of Rights) of our Constitution has any force or effect? We would have no protections at all. Wake up, people. You're about to throw away our liberty.
ReplyDeleteanother way to put it is to say that you're about to put us in slavery
DeleteOK, all of you Arizonians in the 6th district, start getting people together to Primary Flake, he needs to be removed from office at the next election. This article is your Campaign Slogan.
ReplyDeleteThis is really disappointing because I thought Flake was someone we could count on to uphold conservative, limited government values. Instead, it looks like he's yet another Republican who seems to be in on the conspiracy to hush any attempts to vet Obama's eligibility.
ReplyDeleteThe Constitution is just a "distraction" now. How sad considering how fiercely men have died for it ove rthe past 200+ years.
We're screwed, folks! It's only a matter of time until this country is run by a dictatorship. The American people are too stupid, ignorant, and affluent to protect their own freedoms. They'll eventually get what they deserve.
This clown is phoney, from his name to his claim to being a man.
ReplyDeleteHis whole life is phoney. The birth certificate has been found in kenya and given to members of congress
including nancy plastic face.
Only a matter of time until someone in authority takes accepts the constitution as a real document and acts.
Re: "The birth certificate has been found in kenya..."
ReplyDeleteYou are referring to one of the three forged "Kenyan birth certificates", the latest of which was from a guy called Lucas D. Smith, who claimed to have gotten it in Kenya but has constantly refused to show proof that he had ever gone to Kenya. And who used US date formats on the document (month/day/year) and not the British formats used in Kenya (day/month/year).
For those of you who still believe that Obama could have been born somewhere else than in Hawaii, a question for you:
I’ll bet that you know (but, actually, you may have forgotten) that the US government requires, and has long required, that a child being carried into the USA must have some kind of official travel document to be admitted. This is usually a US passport for the child. Or, it could be the fact that the child is entered on the mother’s US passport. Or, it could be a US visa for the child on a foreign passport. Without one of those, we would not let the child into the country.
So, IF Obama really had been born in Kenya (or in any country other than the USA), he would have had to have one of those documents–wouldn’t he? His family would have had to show the passport, wouldn’t they? To show the passport, they would have had to have applied for the passport or the visa for Obama. And, if Obama really were born in Kenya (or another country), they would have had to have applied for it in the US consulate or embassy there, wouldn’t they?
Such applications are FILED by the US government. The documents exist in multiple files, the actual application itself, communication about it with Washington, entries in the passport file, entries in the application file, entries in the places where the child is carried into the USA. The Bush Administration was in charge of the State Department and the INS for eight years before Obama was elected. Don’t you think that they would have checked the claim that he was born outside the USA?
All they had to do was find one of those files and McCain would win the election.
Well, they never did. There is no such file.
So the question is, do you think that the Bush Administration was part of the plot?
Do you think that the files, the documents, the application for the documents, the communications about the documents were all lost or hidden? Remember, they are in multiple files, the file of the passport holder, the files of applications for passports, the files in the US embassy in foreign countries, the files in the State Department and in the INS (which would have checked in Obama at an entry point if he had actually traveled in 1961)–and yet no document has been found. Why not?
The absence of the travel document, plus the Hawaii birth certificate, plus the confirmation of the facts on it by three Republican (and several Democrat) officials, plus the birth notices in the Hawaii newspapers in 1961, plus the witness who remembers being told of the birth and writing home about it (to her father, named Stanley, about the unusual event of a birth to a woman named Stanley). All this is evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii. Oh, and by the way, Obama’s Kenyan grandmother NEVER said that Obama was born in Kenya. That was the first of the birther lies. She said repeatedly in the taped interview that he was born in Hawaii. And she said in another interview, with the Hartford Courtant newspaper, that the first that her family had heard of Obama’s birth was IN A LETTER FROM HAWAII.