Soooo . . . I looked that up. Hmmmm . . . pretty ambigious for me, but OK, I can see how you write that. After reading the story, I get that Senator McCaskill would have put that ammendment forward regardless where McCain was born, and she would have been correct. A child of a military family HAS to be born on base to be elgible? Not particularly fair as she says.
The account of the story I am reading is from the New York Times. They write:
When questions arose in 2008 about whether Senator John McCain was a “natural born citizen” qualified to be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was stationed, his Senate colleagues were outraged. They bristled at the very thought that there could be any doubt whatsoever that the respected Republican lawmaker and war hero from Arizona was eligible under the Constitution.
Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, was so worked up at the idea that on the day The New York Times published the article examining the issue, she arrived at the Capitol with corrective legislation written in longhand on a yellow legal pad.
“In America, so many parents say to their young children, ‘If you work hard and you play by the rules, in America someday you can be president of the United States,’ ” Ms. McCaskill said at the time. “Our brave and respected military should never have to spend a minute worrying whether or not that saying is true for their child.”
The Senate passed a nonbinding resolution declaring that “John Sidney McCain, III, is a ‘natural born citizen’ under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States.”
Whether that bipartisan resolution would have carried the day legally was never tested, and Mr. McCain lost the presidency to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who was a co-sponsor of the McCain resolution.
Since the courts are almost certain to punt on the issue and call it a political question, and the Senate counts Electoral College votes, the Senate was signalling how it would decide the issue.