The Truth About McCain's Foreign Birth

[thoughtone]

So much has been made about Barack Obama's birth status. Why does McCain get a free pass? Just more confirmation of the right leaning main stream media.

source: Nolan Chart.com

Topic: Ron Paul
John McCain Born in Panama, can he even be President?
The Constitution clearly states only those born in the United States may be President

by Robert Werden
(Libertarian)
Thursday, January 31, 2008

This is not open to interpretation or overturned by the 14th Amendment as it is very clear in the Constitution that the founders were being very specific on who could be the President.

The 14th Amendment was not written to change the rules of who could be the President, it was to determine citizenship. Citizenship does not allow just anyone to be the President. Only those born in the United States have that privilege.

Although John McCain was born in Panama many would argue that he was born in a US territory and is considered a US citizen. Being a citizen is not the litmus test the founders directed when they wrote the requirements to become the President.

A territory is not the United States. The United States is one of the 50 states. If Panama was a state things would be different. However Panama is a sovereign Country.

If this were the case, then we would have to allow all children born on US territories to be naturalized citizens. For example, if an Iraqi woman has an American service mans baby in a hospital in Iraq that happens to be a US Military base, then the baby would be born in US territory. This is not what the founders would have contemplated as a US naturalized citizen.

While this is probably an issue the courts would most likely rule that McCain is fully eligible to be the President, I my self would not vote for a person who is questionably walking a fine line on the founding fathers rule of Presidential eligibility.

 

[thoughtone]

source: The New York Times

A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue

Article Tools Sponsored By
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 11, 2008

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.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

 

[actinanass]

I see someone is bored...

 

[14damoney]

CLICK

 

[blackbull1970]

It dont matter where McCain was born, as long as his parents are US Citizen's that automatically makes him a citizen.

Peace.

 

[oneofmany]

There was some news coverage about this a while back but it died down. McCain is definitely a citizen but the beef stems from the ever-so-slight (but key) difference between being born an American citizen versus a natural-born American citizen. If the constitution was more closely followed, it would prevent McCain but rules are being bent, ignored or bypassed these days. It's no shocker that a minor (but legit) constitutional point is not hang-up these days.

 

[QueEx]

<font size="6"><center>
The Unknown John McCain</font size></center><font size="3">


By Eugene Robinson
August 22, 2008

WASHINGTON -- There's a candidate in this presidential race who remains a mystery -- hazy, undefined, so full of contradictions that voters may see electing him as an enormous risk. I'm referring to the cipher known as John McCain.

In fact, there are some basic things about McCain that apparently even McCain doesn't know. Asked Wednesday by reporters from Politico how many houses he and his wealthy wife Cindy own, McCain responded, "I think -- I'll have my staff get to you." The correct answer seems to be somewhere between four and seven, but who's counting?

I don't begrudge McCain his multiple residences or his $520 Ferragamo shoes. I understand that he was just being flippant and unresponsive when he said at the Saddleback forum last weekend that being rich meant having an income of at least $5 million a year. But it's a stretch, to say the least, for McCain to portray himself as a Regular Joe while painting Barack Obama as some kind of jet-set celebrity.

It's understandable that McCain would want to fuzz this aspect of his biography; at a moment of great economic dislocation and anxiety, people might question one's ability to feel their pain if they know that one's net worth may be somewhere north of $100 million. Much less comprehensible, and much more troubling, is McCain's habit of "Straight Talking" himself into the wilderness.

When it was pointed out that McCain's pronouncements on the economy often do not conform with his official positions, the candidate's chief economic adviser indicated that we should pay attention to the authorized version -- despite the fact that McCain "has certainly I'm sure said things in town halls" that might deviate.

In other words, don't pay such strict attention to what McCain says because he doesn't speak officially for his own campaign. No wonder he was so insistent in trying to lure Obama into a series of town hall encounters, where Obama might feel constrained by such irrelevancies as consistency and arithmetic.

I guess McCain's unreliability as a spokesman for himself on the issue that voters tell pollsters they care most about should come as no surprise, given his earlier confession -- since retracted, sort of -- that he doesn't really understand economics that well. He is supposed to be an expert on foreign affairs and national security, however -- and here, too, the cannon has come unbelayed and is rolling perilously around the deck.

"We are all Georgians," McCain said in response to the Russian invasion. It was an attempt to define the moment with a memorable line, reminiscent of JFK's famous declaration in Berlin. If McCain was just trying to burnish his commander-in-chief credentials while Obama vacationed in Hawaii, OK, fine, that's politics. If he was serious, though, he needs to clarify the unsettling implications of what he intended to be a stirring phrase. Precisely what was being stirred?

Not the hopes and ambitions of the people of Georgia; by then, they had already realized that despite all the Bush administration's freedom rhetoric, nobody was going to come save them. Certainly not war-weary American voters.

What McCain successfully roiled was the nationalism and bitter nostalgia for great-power status that simmer below the surface of Russian public opinion. Strongman Vladimir Putin plays these sentiments like a violin. A candidate for president of the United States should not further strengthen Putin's hand -- and thus make the next president's job that much harder.

For months, McCain has been arguing for measures that would isolate Russia. He then called the Georgia invasion "the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War." If he doesn't want to help start a new Cold War, you can't tell from his loose rhetoric.

I'm leaving aside his mini-misstatements in which he confused Sunnis with Shiites or otherwise garbled salient facts about Iraq. What alarms me is the pattern of inconsistency. One day he's soothing, the next he's abrasive. One day he makes a flat-out pledge not to raise taxes, the next he says that everything is on the table as far as Social Security is concerned. One day the buck stops here, the next he's not authorized to speak for, ahem, himself.

It's true that John McCain has been around a long time. But do we really know what he'd do as president? Do we really know who he is?

eugenerobinson@washpost.com
Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group</font size>

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/the_unknown_john_mccain.html

 

[thoughtone]

There was some news coverage about this a while back but it died down. McCain is definitely a citizen but the beef stems from the ever-so-slight (but key) difference between being born an American citizen versus a natural-born American citizen. If the constitution was more closely followed, it would prevent McCain but rules are being bent, ignored or bypassed these days. It's no shocker that a minor (but legit) constitutional point is not hang-up these days.

Again why are people being so technical about Obama's life but give McCain a free pass? I saw the stories on Faux and CNN about McCain and Obama. They talked about McCain's infidelity after his wife was in a car accident. McCain was asked why he cheated. His response was that he didn't know but he took full responsibility. Wow, the media was involved in the bimbo patrol parading out any women that claimed Bill Clinton had an affair with and wouldn't let it go. Why aren't they holding McCain to the same standard. Hmmmm!

 

[thoughtone]

source: Huffington Post

News Orgs Investigate Possibly Fatal McCain '64 Car Crash

October 28, 2008 9:45 AM

For the past two months, a major American magazine and an allied news service have been engaged in a legal battle with the United States Navy over records that they believe show that John McCain once was involved in an automobile accident that injured or, perhaps, killed another individual.

Vanity Fair magazine and the National Security News Service claim to have knowledge "developed from first-hand sources" of a car crash that involved then-Lt. McCain at the main gate of a Virginia naval base in 1964, according to legal filings. The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public. And in documents suing the Navy to release pertinent information, lawyers for the NS News Service allege that a cover-up may be at play.

"Plaintiffs have also obtained documents showing that law enforcement officers were ordered back to the accident scene to retrieve personal physical effects. The Navy has never publicly acknowledged this information," one document reads. "This request involves federal government activity, as it addresses what may be an attempt by the Navy to protect by concealment the involvement of a former Navy officer, sitting Senator and Presidential candidate in a serious incident involving the injury or death of another human being."

The first request for information concerning duty assignment logs to Portsmouth Naval Hospital -- where McCain was allegedly brought after the accident -- came in the form of a Freedom of Information Act request on August 28, 2008. The Navy acknowledged receipt of the request and advised that it had located the relevant information a few weeks later, only to deny the FOIA on grounds that it didn't prove an "imminent threat to the life or physical safety of an individual" or satisfy the criteria of "a breaking news story of general public interest."

"The patient admission record logs that you seek are exempt from release," wrote G.E. Lattin, Deputy Assistant Judge Advocate General, "as information in personnel and medical files, as well as similar personal information in other files, that if disclosed to a requestor, other than the actual person in which the information is pertaining to or next of kin, would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

NS News Service and Vanity Fair appealed the decision and asked for expedited treatment of the case, as the end of the presidential election loomed. But the Navy denied that request as well.

"It appears to be a deliberate refusal to provide clearly releasable information concerning assignments to Portsmouth Naval Hospital," wrote legal representatives for the two news organizations. "Allowing the Navy to extend its time to respond beyond a date when the documentary facts of this matter would be available for public consideration prior to the national election on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 would violate the spirit, as well as the provisions of the FOIA."

Staff for National Security News Service and the company's lawyer both refused to discuss the proceedings. And there are only parcels of information concerning the story that can be gleaned from the court documents.

At a minimum it seems clear that Vanity Fair and NS News Service have launched an investigation "disclosing first-hand witnesses' recollection of an automobile accident in which then Lt. John S. McCain III was involved. Those witnesses specifically recall McCain's assignment to that [hospital] facility with the other person involved in the accident." This episode in McCain's life has, it seems, not been made public, and the plaintiffs suggest that the Navy may be attempting to actively restrict information about the incident.

"The subject matter of the documents is a matter of current exigency to the American public," reads a document filed by legal representatives for the news service, "because the requester is preparing a current news report addressing whether the Navy continues to conceal the involvement of a Navy officer in a serious automobile accident in July 1964."