A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue

By ADAM LIPTAK
In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”

The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.

“It’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy,” Professor Chin said. “But this is the constitutional text that we have.”

Several legal experts said that Professor Chin’s analysis was careful and plausible. But they added that nothing was very likely to follow from it.

“No court will get close to it, and everyone else is on board, so there’s a constitutional consensus, the merits of arguments such as this one aside,” said Peter J. Spiro, an authority on the law of citizenship at Temple University.

Mr. McCain has dismissed any suggestion that he does not meet the citizenship test.

In April, the Senate approved a nonbinding resolution declaring that Mr. McCain is eligible to be president. Its sponsors said the nation’s founders would have never intended to deny the presidency to the offspring of military personnel stationed out of the country.

A lawsuit challenging Mr. McCain’s qualifications is pending in the Federal District Court in Concord, N.H.

There are, Professor Chin argued in his analysis, only two ways to become a natural-born citizen. One, specified in the Constitution, is to be born in the United States. The other way is to be covered by a law enacted by Congress at the time of one’s birth.

Professor Chin wrote that simply being born in the Canal Zone did not satisfy the 14th Amendment, which says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

A series of early-20th-century decisions known as the Insular Cases, he wrote, ruled that unincorporated territories acquired by the United States were not part of the nation for constitutional purposes. The Insular Cases did not directly address the Canal Zone. But the zone was generally considered an unincorporated territory before it was returned to Panama in 1999, and some people born in the Canal Zone when it was under American jurisdiction have been deported from the United States or convicted of being here illegally.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/politics/11mccain.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1215800111-BJ41WXhHTAsrQ7oybs7UFg

Apart from the potential for disruption and the sheer entertainment value - how do people actually feel about it/

And if he were to be replaced...by whom...better for us? or dangerous?

I've been reading quite a bit of folks who say they were always told they couldn't run for President because they weren't born in the US and also about military men who sent their wives back to the US specifically for this reason.

an illegal immigrant!! :evilgrin:

McCain was born to American parents posted at the orders of the government to a US base outside the US.

If it was decided he isn't eligible, it will set a bad precedent that cause HUGE problems with any US Government employees who is asked to serve outside the US and wants to have children.

Congress has said he is eligible and I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that the SCOTUS would probably rule in favor of McCain because of the issue I mention above.

I'm not sure if it means anything to anybody nowadays, but our founding fathers decided this is what they wanted for their American President.

Its true it would be a public relations disaster because it doesn't seem fair, but if we overturn this for McCain, we should overturn it for everybody.

Would anyone say that John McCain is more American than Jennifer Granholm, Madeline Albright or Ahhhhnold?

If people don't care where a President was born, we should overturn the damned thing.

were not stationed outside of the US at the direction of the US government. As would any child born to parents who are living outside of the US at the direction of the US Government.

To put it in the historical terms that you brought up, here is a hypothetical,"Do you think John Quincy Adams would have been disqualified to be President if he had been born in France while his father sent there to be the US Ambassador to France?" (I know Adams was not ambassador to France, I am just providing an example.)

The US Government has a long history of stationing the families of US Government employees at overseas locations. It seems more than a little ridiculous to have the US Government say "We'll send US Government employees outside the country and pay for them to live there, but if any of their children are born in that country they aren't considered "US born citizens" and are not eligible to be President."

He shoots his self in the foot daily