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You will see different accounts, some involving the several law suits brought by Democrats when McCain ran for president in 2000. I'll summarize what the issues are. But the point is, there are clear and never resolved issues around McCain's eligibility, of sufficient importance to warrant a legal brief by the very liberal plagiarist (who was exonerated by Elaine Kagen) Larry Tribe, for whom Obama was a research assistant at Harvard, and the attorney now attacking California's law according marriage only to a man and woman, Ted Olson (whose remarkable wife Barbara killed on the 9/11 plane crashing into the Pentagon, must be turning over in her grave). The Tribe/Olson brief is attached to the Senate Hearings for Senate Res. 511. The brief is typically dishonest, referring to The 1790 Naturalization Act, which attempted by statute to include children born of U.S. Citizen Diplomats and Military as natural born citizen. Tribe and Olson fail to note that it was reversed by the 1795 naturalization act.(I haven't read it for a while; it may only refer to diplomatic corp, but is moot in any case)

Had Congress wanted to change it, they had two hundred twenty years to pass an amendment. Many amendments were attempted, five in the decade between 2000 and 2010, but none left Congress. The risks involved are real, and the Congress was correct in not amending the Constitution to make Schwarzenegger or McCain eligible. That McCain has put us through this attack shows that he does not have the integrity we need in a chief executive.

At least everyone knows Obama dreamed of his father's objectives, creating a Muslim Marxist Utopia out of his native country. We don't really know if the U.S. is Barack’s “native” country, but that is constitutionally irrelevant. Barack has told us “I am a native born U.S. citizen.” He may be telling the truth. If he is telling the truth, he has told us he is ineligible because one assume he would tell us he is natural born, native born as well has have two citizen parents, if he were. He has told us he is ineligible. But through his operatives, James Carvill among them, promised riots if he is rejected for his ineligibility. Acquiescing to the threat will be shown to have created more dangerous consequences.

First, McCain probably was born in Colon, not the Canal Zone. A birth certificate was released long before the Obama fiasco shows Colon Hospital, including signatures, doctor's names, etc. etc. This is long before the boom in certification and certificate publishning on the Internate. Secondly, the Canal Zone was not a territory over which the U.S. had sovereign jurisdiction. That status for the Canal Zone was addressed in 1937, a year after McCain's birth. If we were to study and agree on a machanism to insure the allegience of the most important figure in our government, while allowing presidential candidates not born on our soil, that sounds just. But we have a Constitution written by very smart and very careful citizens; amending it is intentionally difficult, and requires two thirds of both houses and three quarters of the states. The best summary of that issue is in Professor Geoffrey Chin's paper, “Why John McCain ....” It is available on the Internet. Chin is a liberal Democrat.