I saw a chart the other day that was said to contain information about every "birther" lawsuit that's been filed, and according to that chart, including appellate decisions the birthers' record is currently 0-157. I can't vouch for that number, but I do know that one was added to the loss column yesterday.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, my name appeared in a complaint (or a piece of paper with the word "COMPLAINT" on it, anyway) perpetrated by "birther" queen Orly Taitz. (See "Orly Taitz Is Trying to Sue Me, I Think," Oct. 1.) I noted that she had removed her own case to federal court—which any second-year law student should know a plaintiff cannot do—and now can report that Judge David Carter punted the case yesterday for precisely that reason. (Why, yes, I do have a copy of the order.)
Before the Court is a lawsuit ... against President Barack Obama and twenty-eight other Defendants. The gist of the lawsuit, to the extent a short description can capture its claims, is that the President is not a natural born citizen; that massive voter fraud has been and will be perpetrated; that officials in government are involved in those two conspiracies; and that various officials and journalists, along with participating in those conspiracies, have also separately violated the rights of the Plaintiffs through defamation and other actions appearing to sound in tort. Defendants include local, state, and national officials, journalists, media outlets, the Postmaster General, and a federal judge.
Among the Plaintiffs is Orly Taitz, an attorney who is also the group’s counsel. Ms. Taitz has brought previous lawsuits with some similarity to the present case. See, e.g., Drake v. Obama, 654 F.3d 774 (9th Cir. 2011) [which she also lost]. Plaintiffs removed this case from State Superior Court themselves. [cite omitted] That fact is fatal to this Court’s jurisdiction, and thus the Court will sua sponte dismiss this case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
"Sua sponte" means the judge did it on his own, in this case because the error was so obvious nobody had to file a motion to point it out.
It's a real challenge to list all the mistakes Orly made in this case in a reasonable number of words, and this doesn't even include the original state case, but here goes, to the best of my knowledge (quotations are from the court's order):
- After some initial proceedings in state court, which were not to her liking, she removed her own case to federal court.
- She filed a notice of removal in the state court, but not in the federal court.
- Instead, she filed a "First Amended Complaint" in federal court, which was not the same as the complaint she filed in state court. (If you're removing a case, it has to be the same case.)
- Actually, no one is really sure what she filed: "Perhaps some confusion is due to the fact that the manually filed First Amended Complaint had 'First amended complaint' crossed out. Someone wrote 'Notice of Removal' in pen above the crossed-out text, which then became the document’s title in the docket."
- She did not file whatever this was electronically, as the court's rules require.
- Because of the handwriting issue, when the court ordered her to go back and file "Docket #1" electronically, it meant the complaint but she thought it meant the notice of removal, which is what she filed electronically, thus having successfully confused everybody including herself.
- And what she filed was the notice she had filed in state court—meaning she never did file an actual federal notice of removal or an electronic copy of her new complaint.
- In the meantime, she was trying to serve this bogus complaint on the defendants; as far as I know, she did not serve any of the 29 defendants correctly.
- "At least one Defendant has reported that the paper copy of the complaint he received, which is the only copy to which he has access, is missing pages."
That seems like enough for now.
Again, I express no opinion as to her skills in dentistry. She may be a fantastic dentist. But she couldn't litigate her way out of a paper bag.
