I don't about so-called 'birthers,' but the resolution utilizes criteria (two citizen parents) that Obama can't meet.
McCain has faced this issue since before he ran for president the first time. This time his principle legal help came from a firm, Kirkland and Ellis, whose senior partner sat on the Obama campaign committee while another Kirkland Senior Partner, Christopher Landau sat on McCain's “Justice Committee”. One of the legal papers produced to defend McCain, and carrying most of the same arguments used in Sen.Res.511 were available in 2005/2006, written by a young lawyer, Sarah Herlihy, who worked for Kirkland and Ellis. In fact she worked for Christopher Landau, head of McCain's Justice Committee.
Someone in this thread pointed to an Obot site carrying a scurrilous summary of 511. Sen.Res.511 is potpourri of obfuscation and outright lies. They point, as do most Obama defenses, to Wong Kim Ark, which doesn't declare anyone a natural born citizen, and simply clouds the issue by referring to British Common Law, as if it guided our citizenship. Herlihy and 511 carefully avoid John Jay, Ben Franklin, Wilson, Marshall, Madison, Waite, Bingham, etc. etc. Then they repeatedly state that “because John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone", when they know he wasn't, because he provided his birth certificate.
Even well known legal scholars and constitutional lawyers Larry Tribe (Obama’s constitution law professor) and Ted Olson participate, knowing that the U.S. did not have complete jurisdiction in 1936.
Was there a quid-pro-quo? Tribe desperately wants a supreme court appointment, he is 69 or 70, and had some ethics problems himself which would certainly prevent him from being confirmed by a Republican senate. Olson is on both sides. Perhaps someone knows more about him? I was always more impressed with his wife, who was killed in 9/11, than Ted.
More likely, there has been a well-drawn plan to move the U.S. far left of where it has been. Many of the activists, as we all know now, are proud of their card-carrying credentials. Ayers and Dorhn made a good career of it, just like Obama’s buddy Khalidi has made a career of being a mouthpiece for the PLO - all the way to Columbia, and John Holdren took his Marxism from Berkeley to Cape Cod, where he lives well with Theresa Heinz’ money and a title at the Kennedy School at Harvard. This is a conspiracy of the left which may have gone further left than many of its participants anticipated.
What is perfectly clear is that the left wanted to run against John McCain. They helped by providing legally meaningless senate resolutions. McGaskill tried to pass another legally meaningless statute making children of military natural born. She has staffs of lawyers who know a statue can't modify the Constitution. The left wanted McCain and provided the cover for his ineligibility. Why would they do that? Almost certainly they were providing cover to allow them to face McCain. If they didn't have other means of knowing that McCain would be their opponent (See John Fund's book "Stealing Elections"), they had the full support of the media, including FOX.