Whatever happened to that citizenship challenge?

The one that made it to the Supreme Court, alleging that Barack Obama is not eligible to serve as president of the United States? It hardly got much coverage in the media, and nothing since Justice Thomas decided to take it into conference.

You have to search for any follow up on that, though the WSJ law blog can usually be counted on, and did carry this blurb.

Unfortunately for the petitioner in the case, the Supreme Court expressed seemingly little interest.

This is what I expected. 

As we noted, Justice Thomas picked up the petition to hear a lawsuit filed by New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio after it was denied by Justice Souter. Justice Thomas referred it to the full court, which decided to distribute the case for the justices’ conference.

In the petition, Donofrio reportedly conceded that Obama was born in Hawaii, as Obama claims. But Donofrio contended Obama was not a “natural born citizen,” as required by Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution, because he was not exclusively a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth. Obama’s father was a citizen of Kenya, formerly British East Africa, so Obama was a British citizen as well.

Today, SCOTUSblog reports that the Court denied Donofrio’s request. SCOTUSblog notes that this marks the second time in recent weeks that the Court turned aside such a challenge. In neither instance did the Court offer a reason for turning down the applications.

We can’t read anything into that, because the Court is not required to comment on cases they turn down, or their reasons for doing so. And they commonly don’t.

But the question remains…..why hasn’t the Obama team put this to rest by producing the vaulted birth certificate in Hawaii? It should be a simple open-and-shut matter.