February 29, 2008
Natural Born Presidents
Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois.
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Mike Huckabee was born in Hope, Arkansas. (Oddly, the same place where Bill Clinton was born nine years earlier.)
John McCain was born in Coco Solo, in the Panama Canal Zone, Panama.
Article II, section 1 of the United States Constitution requires that “[n]o 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.”
Is a person born outside of the fifty states, in a United States military installation within a foreign country, a natural born citizen?
This article reports on the issue, concluding that most likely a birth in a military installation makes the child a natural born citizen. Notably, Theodore Olson is in the process of preparing a legal analysis for Senator McCain. The issue is one that surely fascinates academics, but realistically, I do not know how such a case would move forward. Someone would have to have standing to sue McCain. Who would that be? Any citizen? It would probably be politically risky for his opponent to bring the case. It would make a case for the case books, though!
The Write Bailiwick 
Paul said,
March 24, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I actually saw a historical analysis of this question recently, which indicated that the term “natural-born” describes the manner in which a citizen acquired his obligations to the sovereign, and did not itself have any geographical component. Thus, an Englishman born in Kent to English parents would have an obligation to the king (and thus be an English citizen) naturally, by the very nature of his birth. So too would an Englishman born of English parents (traitors and others who had forfeited their citizenry excluded) overseas, as the common law regarded nationality, like family, to be a matter determined at birth based on paternal legitimacy. That doctrine alone would encompass Americans born in the Canal Zone, even in the absence of various federal laws having the same affect.