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This was discussed during the campaign and the clear consensus of constitutional attorneys is that being born on a U. S. military base meets the requirement of the U. S. Constitution. Besides it is a non-issue now because that is not a Constitutional requirement for the U. S. Senate.

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It doesn’t appear he was born on a US military base ... the Senate passed a NON-BINDING resolution saying he was a natural born citizen. Doesn’t establish that he was, and many legal minds don’t believe he is.

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“John Sidney McCain, III, is a `natural born Citizen’ under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States.”
—U.S. Senate Resolution, April 30, 2008.

On Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate unanimously declared John S. McCain III a “natural-born citizen,” eligible to be president of the United States. That was the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. The bad news is that the Senate resolution is a non-binding opinion that fails to resolve one of the murkiest, untested areas of the U.S. constitution.

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The Facts

Article two of the constitution states that “no person except a natural born citizen...shall be eligible to the Office of president.” Legal cases have been filed in at least three states—New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and California—challenging McCain’s eligibility for the presidency. You can read the New Hampshire filing, by a 49-year-old computer programmer named Fred Hollander, here.

The McCain campaign has consulted two leading jurists, Theodore Olsen and Laurence Tribe, on the constitutional issues. Olsen and Tribe were on opposite sides of the 2000 Bush vs Gore Supreme Court case, but they see eye to eye on the question of McCain’s eligibility for the presidency. They argue that McCain is a natural born citizen because the United States exercised sovereignty over the Panama Canal at the time of his birth on August 29, 1936, he was born on a U.S. military base, and both of his parents were U.S. citizens. The Olsen-Tribe opinion is available here.

Sarah Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University, who has made a detailed study of the natural born issue, says the question is not as simple as Olsen and Tribe make out. While she believes that McCain would likely win a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she says the matter can only be fully resolved by a constitutional amendment or a decision of the Supreme Court.

McCain’s birth on August 29, 1936, in what was then the Panama Canal Zone was announced in the English language Panamanian American, available here. The McCain campaign has declined to publicly release his birth certificate, but a senior campaign official showed me a copy.

Contrary to some Internet rumors that McCain was born outside the Canal Zone, in Colon, the document records his birth in the Coco Solo “family hospital.”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/citizen_mccain.html