Quote:
Originally Posted by jon1856
Well, it seems as if this still has some legs to it:
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.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us...rssnyt&emc=rss
Why Senator John McCain Cannot Be President: Eleven Months and a Hundred Yards Short of Citizenship
GABRIEL J. CHIN
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law; University of Arizona Eller College of Management, School of Public Administration and Policy July 9, 2008
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=1157621#PaperDownload
As I posted before, in truth the only way this issue will ever be determined is if the Supreme Court rules on it.
As as the story indicates, that is highly unlikely.
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I'll look through Professor Chin's paper; however, in a battle of scholars, I'm guessing that the Tribe/Olson team probably got it right. Professor Tribe is the pre-eminent Constitutional Law Scholar in the US, and Olson isn't far behind. I can't imagine that their analysis was that faulty on such a crucial issue.
ETA: It looks, at least from the start, that the Professor has looked at the contradictions in case law and statutory law and decided to err on the side against citizenship. He glosses over the citizenship of McCain's parents at the time of his birth, by reference to statutes and decisions referring to citizens with no connection to the US. As his father was serving in the US Navy, I don't see the argument as being especially valid. He's heavily basing his argument on interpretations of Section 1993, without really exploring the parent/child issue as critically as I think he should.
I'll look through it more, but I'm just a law student, so my analysis may be completely wrong. MysticCat or one of the other GC lawyers would have a better handle on it than I would.