Had this been litigated, it would have made for fascinating case law. McCain was, per the 1937 statute, a citizen by virtue of his birth. But he wasn’t born a citizen, as no law made him a citizen at the time of his birth. Arguably, then, he was not a “natural born citizen” and thus not eligible for the presidency. As Gabriel Chin, the law professor who unearthed this, put it, McCain was born “eleven months and a hundred yards short of citizenship.”
