The more one looks, the less it looks like John McCain is eligible to run for President. The problem is simple: although born to two US citizens, McCain was not born in the United States, and thus, he's a naturalized citizen, not a birthright citizen. Plenty of people will say differently, of course. But McCain's always had a hefty chorus of yea-sayers, no matter what line of garbage he's spewing at the moment. And this time out, it appears to be pretty much more of the same.
Not to worry, however. The bottom line of all this brouhaha--carefully kept to the margins, of course--is that McCain's ineligibility to run for President is not the sort of thing that ordinary citizens peons are allowed to challenge. In legal parlance, they (that is, you and me) lack "standing." Which is to say, it won't hurt any of us particularly, so we don't get to sue. Presumably, only someone like Barack Obama would actually have standing to bring suit.
This is yet another example of how a set of laws supposedly applicable to our political ruling class actually has no impact whatsoverer.
What's more, something virtually identical happened back in 2000. In violation of the 12th Amendment, the GOP ran two Texans on its ticket. Cheney claimed to have turned himself back into a Wyomingian just in time to make it all legal, but the legal ruling supporting him (in Jones v. Bush) started out by denying standing to the Texas citizens who sued to challenge the charade.
The message here is simple: go away. There is no law for you. The law belongs to the King. Of course, that's not what standing is supposed to do. But it is how it works in today's increasingly anti-democratic America.
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."
Of course, the Times shifts quickly into denial mode:
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.
Ah, yes! A "constitutional consensus". Nothing to see here, folks. Move along now. Don't disturb your betters.
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.
Of course, we're talking John McCain here. Not Yasser Esam Hamdi, or Jose Padilla, or Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. Those losers? John McCain gets law. They don't even get a second thought. You don't get a second thouhgt.
What? You think you're going to get a Congressional resolution saying, "Joe Blow can be President"????
This is just another way in which the political class takes care of its own, a way in which all the Versailles Democrats are on the same side as the Republicans, and diametrically opposed to you and me.
Just one more little fact to keep in mind the next time they try to appeal to you for... whatever.
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