A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/politics/11mccain.html?_r=5&adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1215867783-oKLBmw5uJSVkPeLu8Iasmg

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.

That would include, say, embassies. But otherwise NOT in any foreign land, regardless of one's parentage.
He is Constitutionally INeligible.

OTHERWISE, the Founders---acutely cognizant of their language---would have used the single word "citizen".

It means only you were born a citizen, as opposed to becoming one through naturalization.

easy mistake to make. But natural citizens are those born a citizen, regardless of where they were born. And its possible to be born a citizen outside "American soil"

He may be the worst person for the job, but he's eligible.
This argument is going to go nowhere...

I know. I am one. I was born overseas to an American father who promptly registered me with the American Consul where I was born. The American Consul then amended my father's American passport to include me.

I still have that passport and have used it to prove my natural born citizenship - which my father often told me made me eligible to become President.

could use IF they wanted to get rid of McCain. I think it would a complete disaster for them though. Republican voters and supporters of McCain would be livid and would see the ouster for exactly what it was. It's not like news of his birthplace is new -- we've known about it for a long time and the Republican already argued that it didn't disqualify him because it was a military installation.