How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

In the 1930s, Congress addressed this issue. As a House report put it, “the citizenship of persons born in the Canal Zone of American parents, has never been defined either by the Constitution, treaty or congressional enactment.” After debate, Congress passed a statute making them citizens. It applied not only to future children but, retroactively, to anyone who’d been born in the Canal Zone to a citizen parent in the past. The law passed in 1937. John McCain was born in 1936. 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.”