McCain’s 12th Amendment Mêlée - Maybe, Maybe not.

Imagine the disruption if McCain is elected, and sworn in as President and then he is declared ineligible because of the 12^th Amendment, and Hillary Clinton finagled her way to the Democrat nomination, and demands to be seated – what a fracas.

Wednesday night the Senate unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States. But, the resolution has no legal standing and is only opinion. At least three pending cases are challenging McCain’s right to be sworn in as president. McCain was born to U. S. parents in a U. S. military hospital, on a U. S. base while serving in the U. S. Navy assigned to the then U. S. Panama Canal Zone.

Article II of the Constitution states that “no person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of president.” The problem is that the Founding Fathers never defined exactly what they meant by “natural born citizen,” and the matter has never been fully tested in court. The same question bubbled up in 2000 but when he failed to get the GOP nomination it fizzled and disappeared.

According to an article in the May 2^nd Washington Post, “Curiously enough, there is no record of McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone Health Department’s bound birth registers, which are publicly available at the National Archives in College Park. A search of the “Child Born Abroad” records of the U.S. consular service for August 1936 included many U.S. citizens born in the Canal Zone but did not turn up any mention of John McCain.” There is a copy of a birth certificate citing his birth in the Coco Solo “family hospital.” Coco Solo was where his Dad’s submarine was based.

McCain’s case hasn’t been the only one. Hoover’s Vice President Charles Curtis was born in the territory of Kansas in 1860, a year before it became a state. The 12th Amendment requires that vice presidents possess the same qualifications as presidents. Barry Goldwater, who was born in the territory of Arizona in 1909, three years before it became a state was nominated but didn’t win. Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, ran for President in 1968, even though he was born in Mexico. Since neither Goldwater nor Romney won the presidency, the “natural born” clause was never tested.

A 1986 Supreme Court ruling states that the United States “exercised sovereignty” over the 10-mile-wide area between 1904 and 1979, when it was handed back to the Panamanians and most think that settles the issue. But, not everybody agrees.