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Passing this on for discussion:

This issue has been raised before in the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater, born in Arizona territory not the United States, and George Romney, born in Mexico. But it was never resolved.

In 1964, the Supreme Court seemed to say, without deciding, that “natural born” meant born inside the United States. In an opinion on an unrelated issue, the court observed, “The rights of citizenship of the native born and of the naturalized person are of the same dignity and are coextensive. The only difference drawn by the Constitution is that only the ‘natural born’ citizen is eligible to be President.” But that language is not legally binding, and the Supreme Court has never ruled on what “natural born” means.

So, if that Malcolm X scenario were true, then ZERO would still not be an NBC if he was born in Kenya. There has never been a President who was born in a foreign country (Chester Arthur undetermined).

There were, however, several CANDIDATES running for office that were not NBC’s.

Also, if this scenario were true, and SCOTUS saw on ZERO’s BC that he lied about his place of birth, and created a forged birth certificate to hide that fact, then the Justices would be faced with a legal dilemma:

They would become witnesses to a felony, albeit after the fact, and intentionally keeping that a secret might place them in jeopardy of misprison of felony.

The federal misprision of felony statute is at 18 U.S.C. § 4, which provides: “Misprision of felony. Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

I seriously doubt that BOZO showed anything to SCOTUS.

Now, back to the “natural-born citizen” debate:

The NBC does not apply to people CAMPAIGNING for President, but to people SERVING as President.

The law states that no one, except a natural-born citizen, can BECOME President.

McCain’s NBC is still being questioned despite the NON-BINDING Senate resolution, which I’m sure Obama had a hand in drafting it, and the circumstances of his birth being entirely different: that both of his parents were serving in the military overseas and that he was born in a US possesion.

Here’s an article dated, July 11, 2008, from the NYT:

A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: July 11, 2008

In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”

The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, [A DEMOCRAT, *wink*] focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.

“It’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy,” Professor Chin said. “But this is the constitutional text that we have.”

Several legal experts said that Professor Chin’s analysis was careful and plausible. But they added that nothing was very likely to follow from it.

“No court will get close to it, and everyone else is on board, so there’s a constitutional consensus, the merits of arguments such as this one aside,” said Peter J. Spiro, an authority on the law of citizenship at Temple University.

Mr. McCain has dismissed any suggestion that he does not meet the citizenship test.

In April, the Senate approved a nonbinding resolution declaring that Mr. McCain is eligible to be president. Its sponsors said the nation’s founders would have never intended to deny the presidency to the offspring of military personnel stationed out of the country.

A lawsuit challenging Mr. McCain’s qualifications is pending in the Federal District Court in Concord, N.H.

There are, Professor Chin argued in his analysis, only two ways to become a natural-born citizen. One, specified in the Constitution, is to be born in the United States. The other way is to be covered by a law enacted by Congress at the time of one’s birth.

Professor Chin wrote that simply being born in the Canal Zone did not satisfy the 14th Amendment, which says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

A series of early-20th-century decisions known as the Insular Cases, he wrote, ruled that unincorporated territories acquired by the United States were not part of the nation for constitutional purposes. The Insular Cases did not directly address the Canal Zone. But the zone was generally considered an unincorporated territory before it was returned to Panama in 1999, and some people born in the Canal Zone when it was under American jurisdiction have been deported from the United States or convicted of being here illegally.

The second way Mr. McCain could have, and ultimately did, become a citizen was by statute, Professor Chin wrote. In Rogers v. Bellei in 1971, the Supreme Court said Congress had broad authority to decide whether and when children born to American citizens abroad are citizens.

At the time of Mr. McCain’s birth, the relevant law granted citizenship to any child born to an American parent “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” Professor Chin said the term “limits and jurisdiction” left a crucial gap. The Canal Zone was beyond the limits of the United States but not beyond its jurisdiction, and thus the law did not apply to Mr. McCain.

In 1937, Congress addressed the problem, enacting a law that granted citizenship to people born in the Canal Zone after 1904. That made Mr. McCain a citizen, but not one who was naturally born, Professor Chin said, because the citizenship was conferred after his birth.

In his paper and in an interview, Professor Chin, a registered Democrat, said he had no political motive in raising the question.

In March, Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard and an adviser to Senator Barack Obama, prepared a memorandum on these questions with Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general in the Bush administration. The memorandum concluded that Mr. McCain is a natural-born citizen based on the place of his birth, the citizenship of his parents and their service to the country.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Olson, whose firm represents Mr. McCain in the New Hampshire lawsuit, said Congress could not have intended to leave the gap described by Professor Chin. The 1937 law, Mr. Olson said, was not a fix but a way to clarify what Congress had meant all along.

Professor Tribe agreed. Reading the “limits and jurisdiction” clause as Professor Chin does, Professor Tribe said, “is to attribute a crazy design to Congress” that “would create an irrational gap.”

Brian Rogers, a McCain spokesman, said the campaign concurred and was confident Mr. McCain is eligible to serve.

In the motion to dismiss the New Hampshire suit, Mr. McCain’s lawyers said an individual citizen like the plaintiff, a Nashua man named Fred Hollander, lacks proof of direct injury and cannot sue.

Daniel P. Tokaji, an election law expert at Ohio State University, agreed. “It is awfully unlikely that a federal court would say that an individual voter has standing,” he said. “It is questionable whether anyone would have standing to raise that claim. You’d have to think a federal court would look for every possible way to avoid deciding the issue.”

Matthew J. Franck who writes for National Review Online had this to say about determining citizenship status:

“In my last analysis of this, I suggested that MoveOn.org or the Democratic party may bring a Constitutional argument/suit against McCain’s run for the Presidency on these grounds, but there may not be any group that has any sort of legal standing to raise this kind of question. “

Franck finished his analysis by stating:

“The Times article contains a fair amount of handwringing over the fact that there has been no authoritative Supreme Court ruling on this presidential eligibility issue—though near the end it recognizes the difficulty of determining who might have “legal standing” to raise the issue in a court of law. This is the simplest question of all. No one has standing. This is a quintessentially political question, to be settled outside the judiciary by the constitutional authorities responsible for choosing presidents.”

“If, next January, the joint session of Congress, presided over by Vice President Cheney, determines that John McCain is to be president by virtue of a victory in the electoral college, and either assumes silently or addresses openly (in case of a member’s objection) the question of McCain’s U.S. citizenship eligibility and holds in his favor, that will be an authoritative settlement of the matter—at least as far as McCain is concerned.

“No court of law could possibly have authority to gainsay such a decision. It never ceases to amaze me, though, how many otherwise sharp legal analysts consider constitutional questions to be unsettled until the Supreme Court has something to say on them.”

“While I have no doubt that McCain would emerge victorious should this question go before Congress or the Supreme Court, just the mere question among the public of having a Constitutionally illegitimate president could severely degrade the morale in the McCain campaign and cause irreparable damage.”