Of course the whole discussion is nonsense. There are two ways to become an American citizen: birth or naturalization. McCain is a citizen (if nothing else, he was a naval officer, which requires citizenship, and he has a passport). McCain was never naturalized. Therefore, he was a citizen at birth.

Matt Franck over at Bench Memos obviously knows way more about this than any of us, but I’d take issue with one of the points in his discussion of this. He writes that no one would have standing to raise the issue in a court of law: “This is a quintessentially political question, to be settled outside the judiciary by the constitutional authorities responsible for choosing presidents.” Well, this should be true, but given our judiciary’s shameless penchant for simply making things up, I wouldn’t just assume that it couldn’t end up in court.

BTW, the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey found that there were 2.2 million people living in the United States in March 2007 who were born abroad but were citizens at birth. They are counted among the native-born.