Can John McCain legally be president?

[Vista Sucks!]

Turns out McCain was born in Panama.

Quote »McCain, having been born in the (Panama) Canal Zone, will if elected become the first president who was born outside the current 50 states. This raises a potential legal issue, since the United States Constitution requires the president to be a natural-born citizen of the United States.[/quote]I remember some questioning Obama's eligibility for the presidency. So how come no one has talked about McCain's eligibility?

[Cold_Zero]

Yes, he was born on a Military Base, while his father was servicing in the United States Navy. And if I recall correctly the Panama Canal Zone was a posession of the United States at the time. This has already been through the Constitutional Legal Scrutiny and both McCain and Obama are legally qualified to become the President of the United States.

[Vista Sucks!]

A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue

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.

The second way Mr. McCain could have, and ultimately did, become a citizen was by statute, Professor Chin wrote. In Rogers v. Bellei in 1971, the Supreme Court said Congress had broad authority to decide whether and when children born to American citizens abroad are citizens.

At the time of Mr. McCain’s birth, the relevant law granted citizenship to any child born to an American parent “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” Professor Chin said the term “limits and jurisdiction” left a crucial gap. The Canal Zone was beyond the limits of the United States but not beyond its jurisdiction, and thus the law did not apply to Mr. McCain.

In 1937, Congress addressed the problem, enacting a law that granted citizenship to people born in the Canal Zone after 1904. That made Mr. McCain a citizen, but not one who was naturally born, Professor Chin said, because the citizenship was conferred after his birth.

In his paper and in an interview, Professor Chin, a registered Democrat, said he had no political motive in raising the question.

In March, Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard and an adviser to Senator Barack Obama, prepared a memorandum on these questions with Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general in the Bush administration. The memorandum concluded that Mr. McCain is a natural-born citizen based on the place of his birth, the citizenship of his parents and their service to the country.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Olson, whose firm represents Mr. McCain in the New Hampshire lawsuit, said Congress could not have intended to leave the gap described by Professor Chin. The 1937 law, Mr. Olson said, was not a fix but a way to clarify what Congress had meant all along.

Professor Tribe agreed. Reading the “limits and jurisdiction” clause as Professor Chin does, Professor Tribe said, “is to attribute a crazy design to Congress” that “would create an irrational gap.”

Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman, said the campaign concurred and was confident Mr. McCain is eligible to serve.

In the motion to dismiss the New Hampshire suit, Mr. McCain’s lawyers said an individual citizen like the plaintiff, a Nashua man named Fred Hollander, lacks proof of direct injury and cannot sue.

Daniel P. Tokaji, an election law expert at Ohio State University, agreed. “It is awfully unlikely that a federal court would say that an individual voter has standing,” he said. “It is questionable whether anyone would have standing to raise that claim. You’d have to think a federal court would look for every possible way to avoid deciding the issue.”

[Cold_Zero]

Leading up to McCain clinching the Republican Nomination, there was a committee put together to evaluate if he would meet the natural born requirement for the Presidency. He does by both the Constitutional Scholars and Congressional advisors. The reality is this, he was born on a US Military Base aka US soil of a Mother and Father who are US Citizens, while his Father was serving in the US Navy. They can speculate all they want, he is what the Constitution calls a "Natural Born Citizen" of the US.

[HashiriyaS14]

^^I agree.

I don't think any of the criticisms along this vein are valid for either candidate, both are perfectly eligible.

People always drag out nonsense like this as the election nears.

[marlin29311]

Of course he doesn't think he can be president - he's a left wing nut. You can skew the constitution in anyway you want to move it to if you really try. Hell, I can say it's constitutionally illegal for you to own a gun.

I'm kind of dissapointed - isn't this the stuff that the right wing usually trys to play? Now the dems are resorting to it?

[AZhitman]

Old News Fails.

[CakeDaddy]

Of course he doesn't think he can be president - he's a left wing nut. You can skew the constitution in anyway you want to move it to if you really try. Hell, I can say it's constitutionally illegal for you to own a gun.

I'm kind of dissapointed - isn't this the stuff that the right wing usually trys to play? Now the dems are resorting to it?

oh! oh! Here we go! Name calling!!! The show is about to start?

[marlin29311]

oh! oh! Here we go! Name calling!!! The show is about to start?

There was no name calling in my post - a google search for the professor that made the analysis shows his record of being slanted to the left - for example, he's pro illegal immigration among other things as well.

If you are trying to prevent someone from attaining something, wouldn't you do what you could to prevent it? Since he is an expert in the field of law and the constitution, he is allowed to leverage his postition to make the interpretation say what he wants - people do this all the time, hence my arguement about how I can say it's illegal to own guns.

The second statement is a generalization in regards to previous political fo-pa's that happen around the country - generally the right finds all the little nit-picky things like this to prevent the left from attaining power, and this is an example of that situtation reversed.

[Jesda]

John McCain is asian, ironically.

[HashiriyaS14]

John McCain is asian, ironically.

Didn't some group at your school decide that you were black?

[Jesda]

Didn't some group at your school decide that you were black?

Yes, but the servers at my favorite restaurants think I'm Mexican.

[Cold_Zero]

Should we start calling you Chameleon, now?

[AZhitman]

Should we start calling you Chameleon, now?