Legal News

Clinton, Obama Agree: McCain?s a ?Natural Born Citizen?

By Ashby Jones

Well here’s something that John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently all agree on. John McCain is, in fact, eligible to serve as president.

On Thursday, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) introduced a non-binding resolution expressing that McCain qualifies as a “natural born Citizen,” as specified in the Constitution and is therefore eligible for the highest office in the land. The resolution was co-sponsored by Obama and Clinton. Here’s a report from ABC News’s Political Punch blog.

A February NYT article raised the question as to whether McCain, who was born in 1936 on a U.S. military installation in the Panama Canal Zone, satisfied the constitutional prerequisites to become president. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution requires a president to be a “natural born Citizen.”

“There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” Sarah H. Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively, told the NYT. “It is not a slam-dunk situation.”

Maybe not. But it appears lawmakers are doing all they can to try to put the issue to rest. “It is silly for anyone to argue that Senator McCain is not eligible to become president,” said McCaskill in a written statement. “I would hope that this is something we can all agree on, for goodness sakes.”

Meanwhile, all those whose curiosities about the Panama Canal area have been piqued by the report should check out this WaPo story from earlier this week. According to the story, the once “idyllic tropical posting for U.S. sailors,” is no longer. The area, which was gradually returned to Panama following a 1977 treaty, is described in the piece thusly: “Bored young men stroll around topless, sporting gang tattoos that boast of the number of people they have killed. Areas that were once softball fields have been taken over by rough saw-grass.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 11, 2008 (boomark / email).