After rejecting the first two cases to get to a full conference of the Court last week, the Supreme Court will consider another case alleging that Barack Obama is ineligible to be President at it’s conference on Friday:
[Leo Donofrio, whose case was dismissed after the Court's conference on Friday has his eye on the Wrotnowski v. Connecticut Secretary of State case. He worked on this case.
Says Donofrio
“If [Wrotonowski’s] application is also denied then the fat lady can sing. Until then, the same exact issue is before [the Supreme Court] as was in my case. [Wrotonowski’s] application before [the Supreme Court] incorporates all of the arguments and law in mine, but we improved on the arguments in [Wrotonowski’s] quite a bit as we had more time to prepare it. “
The docket report for Wrontonowski’s case can be found here and, as Dave Weigel notes, shows that the case was referred to conference by Justice Scalia on Friday after having been denied by Justice Ginsburg two weeks ago.
While this may sound strange or nefarious, this explanation over at Hot Air makes the most sense:
A commenter in Headlines speculates that they’re doing this to stop the petitioners from refiling their petitions with a new Justice every time they’re rejected by another. For instance, Souter denied Donofrio’s petition initially; Donofrio immediately refiled with Thomas, who then dumped it on the Court to be denied summarily. Wrotnowski’s petition was initially denied by Ginsburg and then refiled with Scalia, who’s now gone the same route. It may be that the liberal wing of the Court simply won’t deign to refer this matter to a full conference whereas the conservatives are willing at least to go that far in the interests of clearing the cases off the docket as fast as possible.
It should also be noted that another case making similar arguments, which was also dismissed along with Donofrio’s was initially referred to Justice Thomas, who denied, it was then refiled with Justice Kennedy, who referred to the Court for conference on December 5th. It seems clear that what the Justices are doing here is cutting these cases off quickly rather than giving the Plaintiffs a chance to refile with each individual Justice.
The other case contesting Obama’s eligibility currently pending before the Supreme Court is Philip Berg’s case, which has yet to be set for conference.
The Wrontonowski case will, quite obviously, be dismissed after Friday’s conference just as Donofrio’s was, and I would expect that Berg’s won’t be far behind.
Hopefully, the Supreme Court will have disposed of all these onsense cases by the end of the year.
from itooktheredpill.wordpress.com:
The truth is that the Supreme Court did NOT “deny cert” to Leo Donofrio yesterday. The truth is the Supreme Court did NOT “turn down” Donofrio’s case yesterday. The truth is that Leo Donofrio’s case is still “PENDING” at the Supreme Court, and the court only denied the application to stay an election.
I believe the election that Donofrio had been trying to stay was the November 4th election (he hurriedly filed his case on November 3rd to do so).
So, it is logical that the court would, on December 8th, deny an application to stay an election that already happened on November 4th.
Donofrio’s case is still PENDING.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2008
ORDERS IN PENDING CASES
08A407 DONOFRIO, LEO C. V. WELLS, NJ SEC. OF STATE
The application for stay addressed to Justice Thomas and referred to the Court is denied.
…
CERTIORARI DENIED
[Note the ABSENCE of Donofrio's case here]
Donofrio’s case is NOT listed under CERTIORARI DENIED.
Everyone should take another look at the order list from the SCOTUS yesterday.
Not only was Donofrio’s case NOT denied certiorari, but a third case (Cort Wrotnowski vs. Susan Bysiewicz, Connecticut Secretary of State) was referred to the Court by Justice Scalia – distributed for conference this coming Friday:
Dec 8 2008 DISTRIBUTED for Conference of December 12, 2008.
Dec 8 2008 Application (08A469) referred to the Court by Justice Scalia.
It sounds like Donofrio may have called this correctly earlier today:
On the chance that SCOTUS was looking at both my case and Cort’s case, I must stress that Cort’s case does not have the same procedural hang up that mine does. It may be that without a decision on the Judicial misconduct allegation correcting the NJ Appellate Division case file, SCOTUS might have been in the position of not being able to hear my case as it would appear that my case was not before them on the proper procedural grounds.
I did file a direct appeal under the proper NJ Court rules, but the lower Court judge refused to acknowledge that and if his fraudulent docketing was used by SCOTUS they would have a solid procedural basis to throw mine out.
Friday could turn out to be a very, very big news day.