The U.S. Senate's Got McCain's Natural-Born Back

onMay 5, 2008 at 12:21 PM

John McCain doesn’t have the interesting gender or diversity points that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have, but he does have some immigrant cred. He was not born in one of the United States of America, and there are “at least three pending cases… challenging McCain’s right to be sworn in as president.”

The Senate is willing to consider him a “natural born citizen” — but the senators’ opinion doesn’t really matter. From the Washington Post:

The Senate has unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States.

That is the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, then under U.S. jurisdiction. The bad news is that the nonbinding Senate resolution passed Wednesday night is simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional debate that has preoccupied legal scholars for many weeks.

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That’s right. This decision may not be up to some lawyers turned politicians. It may go to the legal big boys. SCOTUS, baby.

Sarah H. Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University who has studied the “natural born” issue in detail, said the question is “not so simple.” While she said McCain would probably prevail in a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she added that the matter can be fully resolved only by a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court decision.

This is not the first time this debate has made news. Back in February, we reported on articles in the New York Times and WSJ Law Blog.

We conducted a poll then asking whether you agreed with the statement, “John McCain is a ‘natural-born citizen’ entitled to serve as president.” Since we’re certain that all ATL readers are highly-educated legal scholars and thorough researchers, the 65 percent of you who agreed with the statement must be right. We’ll let SCOTUS know stat.