Article Two, Section 1, Clause 5 of the US Constitution states:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Wikipedia, concerning John McCain, states:
McCain was born on August 29, 1936 at the Coco Solo Air Base in the then American-controlled Panama Canal Zone.
So if he was born in the Panama Canal Zone is he eligible to be President of the United States?
The United States grants citizenship based on where you were born (born here, you’re in) and/ or to whom you’re born (kids of citizens are citizens, no matter where the birth happens).
John McCain’s dad was, IIRC, an officer in the Navy. Commissioned officers must be citizens. Kids of citizens are citizens.
“Natural born citizen” means “citizen by virtue of the circumstances of your birth”. Being born on American soil (or hopefully in a hospital, because being born on soil would be unhygienic) is the most common way to be a natural-born US citizen, but it’s not the only way.
I’m honestly surprised that someone may not know being born to an American parent makes one an American.
But even if McCain’s parents had been, say, local employees at the base, for the sake of argument, would that still count as “American soil”? Being a US military base and/or the US-controlled Canal Zone? What about embassy grounds?
The “natural born citizen” qualification set in the constitution is a little murky: Wikipedia says:
Perhaps this is a case where primacy must be accorded to the text, structure, and history of the constitution, rather than any modern day notions about what constitutes ‘natural’.
How hard can it be to ask judge Scalia for his opinion?
I believe that strictly speaking a child born abroad of at least one US citizen parent has to apply to be recognized as a natural born citizen. There is something called the “Consular Report of Birth Abroad” that needs to be duly processed. Eg, it ain’t official until you have done the paperwork.
True, but it’s not applying to be a citizen, it’s merely registering that you are one. I know many farangs who simply take a record of the hospital birth of their child here to the embassy and voila! The baby gets a passport and accepted as a citizen. Just about any Western embassy, not only for the US.
Sorry to bump an old thread, but I don’t think people gave this question due consideration. This is currently a hot debate among constitutional law professors. There really is something to this, even if prudentially no court would ever touch it.
The Constitutional requirement of “natural-born” citizenship is separate from the statutory scheme which provides citizenship to people like John McCain. It isn’t at all settled that the way Congress currently defines “natural-born” is consistent with what the framers meant by “natural-born” in Article II. Indeed, there are good arguments for why the framers did not intend *jus sanguins *citizenship (that is, citizenship by blood) as a means of becoming “natural-born”–after all, their intention was that no one born abroad except those already in the US at the time of adoption could become citizens.
The question, academic though it may be, might come down to the status of the Canal Zone at the time of his birth.
