If I understand you correctly standing up for the Constitution is lunacy which seeks to destroy the country and not standing up for the Constitution, even though that is the heart and soul of your job, is fine by you!
Forgive me for finding that an utterly Orwellian concept.
You don't understand me in the least; and the only one seeking to undo the Constitution is you, who persists in taking the one view - out of several equally valid views - that would destroy this country, all for what appears to be a set of cheap little ideological trinkets.
And no, I won't forgive you for falsely, and knowingly, misrepresenting my position. You're a better person than that, as you've demonstrated in most other debates.
You're also ignoring - I have to assume consciously since you seem to have read much on legal theory - that it is standard in the common law to impose time limitations, particularly in equity, after which contestable issues are no longer contestable and the answer is set.
Let's try a hypothetical. I assume that you, along with most other people, believe that African Americans are not entitled to reparations for the damages done by American slavery, correct?
Why is that?
Suppose that tomorrow somebody - Bad Person - kidnaps you and forces you into hard labor at the wrong end of a whip, or a branding iron. As a result, you suffer terribly. Because of your sudden disappearance, your family also suffers terribly; they struggle mightily but end up losing their home and your wife and kids have to go live in a shelter. Your kids end up in ghetto-level public schools. Your son drops out of high school and takes up with a gang. Your daughter becomes pregnant by a man who disappears and also drops out of school to raise the baby. Tens years later your son, finally settling down after doing 8 years in prison for aggravated assault and grand larceny, marries the woman whom he'd already gotten pregnant. They live in a double-wide mobile home in an area where there is a lot of crime and your son works as a janitor. Their son also ends up taking up with a gang and eventually ends up spending life in prison for first degree murder. Your daughter's child ends up being a junkie, living in the ghetto with a string of abusive men. She has several children, all of whom end up in foster care. One of those children herself ends up having a child - your great grandson - who never amounts to anything and spends his life doing odd jobs and living in his car.
When you're rescued, do you have the right to seek damages from Bad Person? Obviously you do.
What about your wife? Yes. Derivative claims for damages are part and parcel of personal injury law, and she has a derivative claim for the economic and emotional losses she suffered because you were taken.
What about your children? Yes. They, too, have derivative claims for economic and emotional losses.
What about your grandchildren? No. Generally speaking the causal connection between your kidnapping and their misfortune is too tenuous, represents too long a chain of inferences, for them to have a cognizable claim for damages.
In other words, by dint of time claims for damages get cut off. There is injury without recompense. It's a fact of life. It's a fact of the law.
Just as there, it is perfectly legal and logical to say that a challenge to Obama as not being a "natural born Citizen" can only be brought prior to his election as president and once he has been elected, then the discussion is over. He is presumptively a "natural born Citizen" and that presumption cannot be rebutted after the election.
I could catalog volumes and volumes of other places in which legal rights - and Constitutional rights - get cut off after certain periods of time or after the claimant has taken some other action. As a simple example, suppose Johnny lives in Texas, was born there, always lived there, has never traveled outside the state, and only deals with locals. Suppose that one day he finds out he's been sued by Billy, a life-long resident of New York, in a New York State court, for stealing computer equipment from Billy's house in Yonkers. If Johnny files a motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, he's very likely to win and that will be the end of it. He won't have to defend against the suit. However, if he first files an answer to the complaint in which he denies the allegations, and does not at the same time file a motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, then he will have to defend against the lawsuit and if he doesn't will suffer a default judgment that Billy can then take down to Texas and use to seize Johnny's house. In fact, if Billy's evidence includes a security camera tape that captured someone who looks like Johnny, Johnny could lose if the jury believes that's him on the tape and if they disbelieve his counter evidence about never leaving Texas.
A travesty? Hardly. That is standard issue law on personal jurisdiction.
Then there is a concept called collateral estoppel. That doctrine, essentially, cuts of relitigation of issues that have already been fully litigated. In the plain vanilla variety it prevents a plaintiff from suing the same defendant for the same thing a second time after the plaintiff has already lost once. However, it has some more exotic permutations, including one that can be termed defensive estoppel in which a person who won on an issue in one lawsuit can use that win against completely different people who sue him in completely different lawsuits, if those lawsuits are brought based on the same facts, even if these other people never had a chance to have their say in the first lawsuit. How's that for justice? You lose your day in court against somebody you think hurt you all because somebody else sued that person and lost in an entirely different case. Happens more often than you might think.
There is nothing cowardly or orwellian about applying concepts like laches, or collateral estoppel, or cutting off claims for damages because the chain of causation has become a little too long; it's how the courts keep the world from getting itself completely off track.
The same reasoning is equally applicable to deciding whether Obama is a "natural born Citizen" and cutting off a case because, for example, it was brought too late - i.e., after the election - is right down one of the sweet spots of fundamental, time-honored common law jurisprudence.
And on the substance: you have certainly done a lot of thinking on your position, for which I congratulate you, but you have not proven beyond doubt that your theory is the only theory going. There are other theories - including the ones propounded here - that are just as valid as yours. In point of fact, there is another canon of judicial decision-making that weighs against your theory and in favor of one of the others. It builds off of the ancient canon that where there are two equally valid interpretations of a statute, then that interpretation is to be applied which does the least amount of violence to the rest of the statute, or to some other relevant value - such as the continuing ability of the federal government to operate. Brought to this arena, that canon implies that where there are two competing interpretations of the term "natural born Citizen" - and there are - then that interpretation which does the least amount of violence to things - in this case, that interpretation which does not bring the entire federal government to its knees - is to be favored over the other interpretation.
If the Supreme Court were to choose one of those others over yours, you are entitled to your disappointment, but you are not entitled to accuse the Court of cowardice nor of Orwellian dissembling.
