DUmmies debate if McCain is Eligible For Presidency

[dutch508]

babylonsister  (1000+ posts)       Fri Jul-11-08 01:38 PM
Original message http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6487512
Constitutional Law Professor: McCain Not Eligible For Presidency
 Advertisements [?]A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue

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.”
 

A 1936 picture shows the future presidential candidate John McCain in the arms of his grandfather John Sidney McCain in the Canal Zone. His father, John Sidney McCain Jr., is at left.


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.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/politics/11mccain....

from the times? ye-hah it must be true.

scheming daemons  (1000+ posts)      Fri Jul-11-08 01:42 PM
Response to Original message
1. As Democrats, we should NOT pursue this.....
 ....we *WANT* McCain to be our opponent.


He is a fatally flawed candidate. We do NOT want the GOP to have the opportunity to replace him with a better candidate.

We need to let this story die and not pursue it further.

That was Hillery's plan with barry...

Benhurst  (1000+ posts)      Fri Jul-11-08 02:11 PM
Response to Reply #7
10. Sure. 
 But I'm curious. Do you really think if Obama were somehow taken out of the race that McCain would win? I think, short of the party going insane and nominating Charles Manson, we'd still win. We have too many well-known players who could step into the position, and I don't think McCain would be helped much at all. McCain has many problems; but Bush is his overriding one, and that holds true no matter who his opponent is.

 
 

[Rebel]

Yeah, you morons run with that. Run on your opinion that a war hero who fought for this country and was a POW for 5.5 years, whose father was a retired Navy Admiral for the US Navy, whose grandfather was a retired US Navy Admiral, who has spent decades in the United States Senate, and who was born on a U.S. Military installation, isn't eligible. PLEASE!