Will SCOTUS Associate Justice Gorsuch See the Obama Eligibility Case Differently?

HIGH COURT’S NEWEST MEMBER OPTS OUT OF “POOL” SYSTEM FOR CASE REVIEW

by Sharon Rondeau

(May 11, 2017) — In addition to appealing his case to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals last month, Obama eligibility/forgery lawsuit plaintiff Cody Robert Judy filed an application for a Petition of Mandamus with U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, the newest member of the high court nominated by President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, The Post & Email reported that Judy’s opening brief filed with the Tenth Circuit was posted, with the defendants having 30 days in which to respond.

The Supreme Court has not yet acted upon Judy’s petition, although a courtesy copy filed with the Tenth Circuit was publicly acknowledged on April 26.

A 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential candidate, Judy believes he has unquestioned “standing” to challenge Barack Hussein Obama’s constitutional eligibility and the methods by which he became a candidate who ultimately won two terms in the White House.

A 2012 ruling by a three-judge panel in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that a candidate for federal public office could challenge a fellow candidate’s eligibility prior to the election.

The root case of the matter, Judy v. Obama, 14-9396, was first filed in July 2014 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, making its way through the Tenth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court by early October 2015.  At that point, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied Judy in forma pauperis status, and he was forced to abandon the case for lack of funds.

Unlike other “eligibility” lawsuits, Judy’s latest claims that Obama, his political action organization OFA, and the DNC violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and Clayton Act and that a criminal component now exists in the marginalization of his own presidential campaigns.

In January, Judy refiled the case with new information gleaned from a December 15, 2016 press conference focusing on anomalies found in an image purported to represent Obama’s long-form birth certificate from the state of Hawaii released to the public on April 27, 2011.

During the presser, investigator Mike Zullo revealed that the conclusions of two outside forensic analysts matched his own which had deemed the image a “computer-generated forgery” early in 2012.

Long before Zullo’s investigation was launched in August 2011, Judy contended that neither Barack Hussein Obama nor Sen. John McCain met the definition of “natural born Citizen,” one of three requirements for presidential eligibility found in Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the Constitution.  In 2008, Judy therefore filed suit against both presidential candidates.

McCain was born in Panama to U.S. citizens, while Obama claims a birth in Hawaii to a U.S.-citizen mother and British-citizen father.  Judy believes that the Framers intended “natural born Citizen” to encompass only those born in the United States to citizen parents so as to preclude any issue of foreign allegiance in the nation’s chief executive.

The cases never received a hearing in any court.  Since 2008, Judy participated in or initiated 15 actions in an attempt to gain a judicial ruling as to whether or not Obama is eligible for the presidency as a “natural born Citizen.”

Judy’s current case and a previous one, 12-5276, reached the Supreme Court at different times.

In an interview earlier this week, Judy informed The Post & Email that unlike most of his new colleagues, Gorsuch has decided not to participate in a system wherein law clerks review submissions and render recommendations to the nine justices as to whether or not the cases merit a hearing.

The vast majority of requests are declined.

The system utilized by seven current justices of the Supreme Court, instituted in 1973, is known as the “cert pool” or “labor pool,” from which Associate Justice Samuel Alito also opted not to take part after receiving his appointment in 2008.

On May 1, Adam Liptak of The New York Times reported that approximately 7,000 cases arrive at the Supreme Court each year, while The Daily Caller reported the number to be closer to 8,000.

Liptak reported that the number of cases actually heard by the high court has been reduced from approximately 150 each year 30 years ago to “about half that many” today.

A blog post at FindLaw.com agreed with those figures.

In 2008, Liptak reported that in addition to then-Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, Alito, confirmed to the court in 2006, decided not to participate in the pool.

Each Supreme Court justice has four law clerks who are outstanding law school graduates.   Gorsuch was himself a Supreme Court law clerk from 1993-94.

Blogging at FindLaw.com, Atty. William Peacock wrote of the pool system, in part:

The concept isn’t without criticism. Delegating the cert. power to a team of inexperienced 25-year-old law clerks carries its dangers, as does putting the power of grant or deny in the hands of a single clerk. Though they obviously don’t make the final decision, their “grant” or “deny” recommendations do carry significant weight, especially considering the sheer quantity of cases that try to make their way onto the docket.

Judy described the law clerks in the pool as “all top of their class.  It’s really a big honor to work for the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Judy is hopeful that given Gorsuch’s choice to opt out of the pool, his clerks would look at his petition with greater care than might normally occur with the pool clerks.  “I was impressed with his being independent,” Judy said of Gorsuch.  “Also, in his Wikipedia biography, it says that he is really big on natural law.  That should be huge as far as his opinion on ‘natural born Citizen,’ because natural law is governed by nature’s law.  That’s where we get ‘born in the U.S. and the parents’ citizenship,” Judy said.

Judy said he has contacted reporters from all major news outlets about his case, but to his knowledge none has reported it.  He believes that mainstream outlets’ editors are likely responsible for quashing any story which might be of interest to the reporter.  “One of the hardest things for me to have done was to have been a presidential candidate and had to rely on myself as a reporter because these reporters could not be relied on,” he observed.  “You know,” he ended with a laugh.

“That’s where bloggers have come through, and that’s why I thought my letter to Drudge was so important asking him to feature a headline to the nation because editors or reporters, whoever’s at fault, are not covering the story,” Judy said.

Comparing the media’s choice to cover some issues and not others, he told us:

The media reported about the Fourth Circuit’s hearing on Trump’s travel ban which affects six countries, but this case covers more people than the entire populations of those tiny countries.  So which affects more people?  Six countries is pretty big, but this [case] is fraud upon the whole election process and a huge problem that we have to clear up.

Judy believes that Rep. Nancy Pelosi has played a large role in allegedly fraudulently certifying Obama as “legally qualified” to the State of Hawaii, whose law requires the wording to appear in its election certification documents but by signing another form lacking that wording for the remaining 49 states.

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Editor’s Note:  For more information on Cody Robert Judy’s legal actions, please see: