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It sounds like a glitch in a 1936 law was the issue. According to Gabriel J. Chin, University of Arizona Law Professor, the glitch meant McCain was not a natural born citizen:

Senator McCain was born in 1936 in the Canal Zone to U.S. citizen parents. The Canal Zone was territory controlled by the United States, but it was not incorporated into the Union.
As requested by Senator McCain's campaign, distinguished constitutional lawyers Laurence Tribe and Theodore Olson examined the law and issued a detailed opinion offering two reasons that Senator McCain was a natural born citizen. Neither is sound under current law.
The Tribe-Olson Opinion suggests that the Canal Zone, then under exclusive U.S. jurisdiction, may have been covered by the Fourteenth Amendment's grant of citizenship to "all persons born . . . in the United States." However, in the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court held that "unincorporated territories" were not part of the United States for constitutional purposes. Accordingly, many decisions hold that persons born in unincorporated territories are not Fourteenth Amendment citizens.
The Tribe-Olson Opinion also suggests that Senator McCain obtained citizenship by statute. However, the only statute in effect in 1936 did not cover the Canal Zone. Recognizing the gap, in 1937, Congress passed a citizenship law applicable only to the Canal Zone, granting Senator McCain citizenship, but eleven months too late for him to be a citizen at birth.

I don't know anything else about Chin, and I'd be inclined to take Ted Olson's opinion on most things. This is just to understand where the question of McCain's status came from.

I personally wouldn’t have challenged McCain and offered my two cents on this thread as someone who does not believe Barry O. is NBC for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is a lack of proof and his own statement.

I wouldn’t have even waded into this thing a year ago until I saw his fake COLB. Especially, when I know he has access to or possesses at three Long Form BC’s, that many of us are familiar with.

Also, Barry O. and I are about the same age and there is some question of his adoption. If he had been adopted his BC will reflect that as “amended”.

This thread took a strange twist.