I understood the McClame issue to be that he was born of two American parents, but on a US military base in Panama, and the Congress was declaring that being born on the base was like being born in the US. Am I wrong on this?
I don’t think the issues were at all the same with that Bat, Juano.
Except that he wasn’t born on the base, he was born in Panama.
Yes you are wrong, he was not born on the base but in a local civilian hospital.
Here’s the argument that McStain is not eligible:
“In 1936, the Canal Zone fell into a gap in the law, covered neither by the citizenship clause nor Revised Statutes section 1993 (passed as the Act of May 24, 1934), the only statute applicable to births to U.S. citizens outside the United States. As then-Representative John Sparkman explained in 1937: “the Canal Zone is not such foreign territory as to come under the law of 1855 [Revised Statutes section 1993] and, on the other hand, it is not part of the United States which would bring it within the fourteenth amendment.” The problem was well known; Richard W. Flournoy’s 1934 American Bar Association Journal article, Proposed Codification of Our Chaotic Nationality Laws, explained “we have no statutory provisions defining the nationality status of persons born in the Canal Zone . . . .”
Because the Canal Zone was a “no man’s land,” in the words of Representative Sparkman, in 1937 Congress passed a statute, the Act of Aug. 4, 1937 (now codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1403(a)) granting citizenship to “[a]ny person born in the Canal Zone on or after February 26, 1904” who had at least one U.S. citizen parent. This Act made Senator McCain a U.S. citizen before his first birthday. But again, to be a natural born citizen, one must be a citizen at the moment of birth. Since Senator McCain became a citizen in his eleventh month of life, he does not satisfy this criterion, is not a natural born citizen, and thus is not “eligible to the Office of President”
I report you decide. :-)