ccj ctr constit jurisprudence
see eastman wingnuttery
chapman kochademic, OC
signed open ltr support cei on 1st amend rico BS
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an 12 23
department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith is requesting court records from a lesser-known case in California, and the dates of records requested line up with the dates that former Donald Trump attorney John Eastman took the stand.
Politico reported Thursday that Smith's team is asking for records from the State Bar Court of California pertaining to Eastman's disbarment proceedings. The far-right attorney has been in the Golden State defending his law license, which state bar officials are fighting to have stripped in the wake of Eastman's felony indictment in Fulton County District Court. Smith's team requested transcripts from October 30th, November 2nd and November 3rd. All three days correspond to days when Eastman was called to testify in-person. Bar officials reportedly asked Eastman about his conversations with Trump and other elected officials as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Smith didn't disband his grand jury after it indicted the former president. Because Eastman has been revealed to be "co-conspirator #2" in Trump's indictment, and because Smith's grand jury has gone quiet in recent weeks, Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney wrote that Smith may be planning to indict Eastman as part of his election interference investigation in Washington, DC.
Following Eastman's testimony in California in October and November, a judge made a "preliminary finding" that Eastman violated the ethics of his profession by assisting Trump in his efforts to overturn election results in the courts. In recent weeks, California bar officials have been presenting "aggravating" evidence that would be used in arguments to justify stripping Eastman's ability to practice law, possibly including the speech he delivered to a crowd of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
John Eastman is the author of the so-called "Eastman Memo" that laid out the plan for Trump's legal team to postpone Congress' certification of Electoral College votes, with the help of Vice President Mike Pence. According to the memo, Republican senators would lodge objections to certifying counts in battleground states President Joe Biden narrowly won, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada, citing the submission of an alternate slate of electors. At that point, Pence would cite the alternate elector slates as reason to declare those states' results in dispute, thereby declaring Trump to be the winner of the 2020 election. Eastman theorized that Democrats would object to Pence'e declaration, meaning that the final decision would be punted to the House of Representatives.
Eastman's memo then hypothesized that because the US Constitution stipulates that each state's delegation gets one vote in the House of Representatives, Trump would be elected president by the GOP-controlled House. At the time, Republicans had control of 26 state delegations, with Democrats only having control of 24. Eastman then proposed Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to have the military quell protests that would inevitably result from Trump's coup.
In addition to his role as one of Trump's attorneys, Eastman is a major player in the conservative legal world. The former law clerk to Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went on to become the Founding Director of the far-right Claremont Institute's Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, and remains a senior fellow at the influential conservative think tank. He's also the board chair of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes marriage rights for same-sex couples.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-sordid-record-of-john-eastman-the-latest-right-wing-lawyer-on-trumps-legal-team/
this week, President Donald Trump sought to join—in his personal capacity as a presidential candidate—a request made by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in an effort to overturn the results of the presidential election by disenfranchising those states’ voters. Many legal observers consider the Texas filing to be, in the words of election law expert Richard Hasen, “utter garbage.” But that hasn’t stopped more than a dozen Republican attorneys general from seeking to join the effort.
The lawyer representing Trump in his request to join the Texas effort is John Eastman, a law professor who has long advanced positions on the far-right fringe of the legal community on issues ranging from immigration to LGBTQ equality to separation of church and state. Eastman appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show this week to talk about the Supreme Court’s “original and exclusive” jurisdiction over disputes between states. He noted that the Court has asked defendant states to respond to Texas’s motion asking for Supreme Court permission to sue the four states. “My gut’s they’re going to take it and look at it on the merits,” he said.
Eastman, a former law clerk for the hard-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, directs the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute, which former Right Wing Watch investigative reporter Jared Holt called “an increasingly white nationalist think tank” in 2019. That year, Claremont made “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec a Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Lincoln Fellow....
820
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/newsweek-should-disavow-racist-insinuation-that-kamala-harris-is-not-a-citizen/
no lnx pix twt prof of law chapman u, sr fellow claremont inst
newsweek should disavow racist insinuation that Kamala Harris is not a citizen
Written by Jim Naureckas / FAIR August 14, 2020
Less than 24 hours after Kamala Harris became the first person of color to be chosen as a vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket, Newsweek ran an op-ed (8/13/20) insinuating that she was not a citizen and therefore ineligible to run.
The piece, by former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman, disregarded almost two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence to pretend that there is an actual debate over the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which appears in the 14th Amendment passage that grants automatic citizenship to people born here:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Newsweek: Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility
Newsweek (8/12/20) gives a platform to a fringe legal theory that holds Kamala Harris is not actually a US citizen because her parents were immigrants.
Long before the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, however, the Supreme Court made it clear that children born to residents of the United States were citizens. In Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor’s Snug Harbor, an 1830 case, the Court declared:
Nothing is better settled at the common law than the doctrine that the children even of aliens born in a country while the parents are resident there under the protection of the government and owing a temporary allegiance thereto are subjects by birth.
Generations later, in the 1898 ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court spelled out its understanding of what the 14th Amendment means for citizenship, listing all the categories of people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US:
The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.
(Indigenous Americans were recognized as citizens by Congress in 1924, removing one of the very few exceptions to the birthright citizenship rule.)
Most of a century later, in Plyler v. Doe (1983) the Court reaffirmed that “jurisdiction” is to be understood in “predominantly geographic sense.” The ruling held that “no plausible distinction with respect to 14th Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”
In 2018, when President Donald Trump threatened to issue an executive order that he claimed would strip US citizenship from the children of unauthorized immigrants, the Congressional Research Service (11/1/18) summed up the legal situation:
At least since the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the prevailing view has been that all persons born in the United States are constitutionally guaranteed citizenship at birth unless their parents are foreign diplomats, members of occupying foreign forces, or members of Indian tribes…. Because none of these exceptions permits the denial of birthright citizenship based on the alienage of parents who are not diplomats, the case is most often interpreted as barring the federal government from accomplishing such denial through any means other than a constitutional amendment.
Newsweek: Eastman's Newsweek Column Has Nothing to Do With Racist Birtherism
Contrary to Newsweek‘s editors’ note (8/13/20). the column it ran is entirely in the spirit of racist birtherism.
Are there lawyers who believe that the Supreme Court could and should overturn the 122-year-old precedent of Wong Kim Ark and find some new ground for declaring certain US residents not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States? Yes, and they are generally regarded as fringe theorists, motivated by a desire to denaturalize millions of US citizens, overwhelmingly people of color, who are every day recognized as full-fledged Americans for purposes of paying taxes, serving on juries, registering to vote—and running for office. That Newsweek chooses to give a platform to this xenophobic legal quackery is dismaying.
Newsweek‘s global editor in chief Nancy Cooper and opinion editor Josh Hammer published an editors’ note (8/13/20) hours after Eastman’s op-ed appeared, saying that “some of our readers have reacted strongly to the op-ed we published by Dr. John Eastman, assuming it to be an attempt to ignite a racist conspiracy theory around Kamala Harris’ candidacy.” The editors assert:
His essay has no connection whatsoever to so-called “birther-ism,” the racist 2008 conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing then-candidate Barack Obama by claiming, baselessly, that he was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya. We share our readers’ revulsion at those vile lies.
Eastman’s column, they claim, “is not an attempt to deny facts or to make false claims. No one is questioning Harris’ place of birth or the legitimacy of an obviously valid birth certificate.” But it is an effort, based on the most far-fetched legal speculation, to assert that Harris is literally not an American because her parents were immigrants. It is the exact same impulse that prompted hatemongers like Donald Trump to question Barack Obama’s right to run for office, motivated by the identical racist ugliness.
ACTION ALERT: Please contact Newsweek‘s editors and demand that they retract the op-ed insinuating that Kamala Harris (like millions of other Americans) is not a US citizen.
CONTACT: You can contact Newsweek here or via Twitter: @Newsweek.
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John Eastman
Constitutional Law Professor/Appellate Attorney
Orange County, California Area 500+ connections
Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
University of Chicago Law School
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Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and Former Dean
Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
Aug 1999 – Present 21 years 1 month
Associate Professor (1999 to 2002)
Professor (2002 to present)
Interim Associate Dean for Administration (2006-07)
Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service (2006-07, 2011-present)
Dean and Donald P. Kennedy Chair in Law (2007-2010)
Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence
Founding DIrector
Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence
1999 – Present 21 years
The Center for constitutional Jurisprudence was founded by Dr. Eastman in 1999 as the public interest law arm of the Claremont Institute. Its mission is to restore, through strategic litigation, the principles of the American founding to our nation's jurisprudence. The Center represents clients and appears as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States and the lower federal and state courts in matters of constitutional significance, defending the core structural provisions of...
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