Detain McCain!
Disclosure: I am not a lawyer or a judge. I don’t own a black robe – or a white one with a hood, for that matter.
Thus you can be reasonably well assured that I haven’t been paid to dress up somebody’s crimes in the costumes and cosmetics of hallucinatory constitutional precedent in order to make them look perfectly legal and otherwise acceptable, despite their perversion of cherished American freedoms.
I’m explaining this just so you know that everything I say will be even-handed and unbiased, which is a stunning achievement for a citizen living in a country being run by war criminals.
Here is my LLD-free legal opinion.
The Bush administration decided that the prisoners it is torturing at Guantanamo and elsewhere have no right of habeas corpus and no standing in U.S. courts because they are held not in an American prison but in foreign territory. Guantanamo is part of Cuba, though it’s under American control.
Now, John McCain was born at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, which is in Panama but at that time was also under American control. Thus, by the logic of Bush administration lawyers, he was born in a foreign territory.
So is John McCain eligible for the presidency?
He would have been, under the old rules, and I know the question has been hashed out and pretty much laid to rest in his favor – but that was before Bush administration lawyers began to dismantle the constitution, with the partial blessing of the Supreme Court and the whole-hearted blessing of the court’s four reflexive conservatives.
Lawyers for the Bush Justice Department adamantly insist that prisoners held at Guantamo are outside the sovereign territory of the United States, thus beyond the reach of our judicial system.
If persons held in a foreign territory have no access to U.S. Courts, why should someone born there have access to the Oval Office?
Under the original constitution – the one we were using before Bush, Cheney, Addington, Yoo, Gonzalez, craven congressmen, and right-wing justices ripped out a few of its vital organs — you didn’t have to be born in the U.S. to qualify for the presidency, as long as you were born to U.S. citizen parents. Alexander Hamilton’s problem was not that he was born in the British West Indies or that his parents weren’t married, rather that his mother was of French descent and his father was the son of a Scottish laird.
Under the present (and, one hopes, temporary) crippled constitution, things are different. Over a million citizens are now on the Watch List of people who get pulled aside for questioning and invasive searches at airports, many of them profiled simply because they are foreign born, or look like they might be, or have exotic names.
Obviously, one cannot campaign across the country for the presidency if he or she is badgered and detained at every airport.
So foreign-born citizens are clearly being denied the right to run for president, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, and John McCain is one of the chief advocates of such restrictions. When the Supreme Court ruled recently that 37 Guantanamo detainees have a constitutional right to challenge their detention, McCain called the decision “one of the worst in history.” He has also supported every unconstitutional grab for power made by Bush, Cheney, and assorted mouthpieces.
As I say, I’m not a lawyer. Neither is McCain. His unindicted co-conspirators – those apostles of criminal torture Yoo, Gonzalez, and Addington – they’re the lawyers.
In layman’s jurisprudence — aka the real world — it’s hard to see how any foreign-born vandalizer of America’s rule of law has any claim to eligibility for the presidency until we restore the original version of the constitution that he’s been helping to sabotage.
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He was born and raised in Hawaii, the only majority-Asian state in the union; he spent four formative years in Jakarta, the home of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, where he attended local schools and learned passable Bahasa Indonesia. The family with whom he’s closest — half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and her Chinese Canadian husband, Konrad Ng — are Asian American. So, too, are the most senior members of his congressional team — his Senate chief of staff Pete Rouse, whose mother is Japanese American, and his legislative director Chris Lu, whose parents hail from Taiwan.
I’m ready to vote for Trent Lott at this point
Evidence for Obama’s affinity with the Asian American experience runs true even as one delves deeper into his history. “A lot of aspects of the senator’s story will be recognizable to many Asian Americans,” says Lu, a Harvard Law School classmate of the senator’s who joined the team in 2005. “He talks about feeling like somewhat of an outsider; about coming to terms with his self-identity; about figuring out how to reconcile the values from his unique heritage with those of larger U.S. society. These are tensions and conflicts that play out in the lives of all children of immigrants.”
Comment by mike — July 30, 2008 @ 1:41 am
But he (Obama) believes most of what you believe. McCain believes most of what George Bush believes — an alien set of values in every sense of the word alien.
Comment by Al — July 30, 2008 @ 9:04 pm
PS
We cross-posted this piece on DailyKos and got 57 comments, the last of which (straightening out another comment which had misunderstood the post) was this:
“It seems to me that the intent of this diary was to point out that the Bush administration’s bizarre claim that the Constitution doesn’t apply at US bases overseas might have some unintended consequences.”
That and a few other bizarre anti-American, unconstitutional claims made by the outgoing Republicans.
Comment by Al — July 30, 2008 @ 9:19 pm
The above excerpt is from an article in SFGate titled
Could Obama be the first Asian American president?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/07/30/apop.DTL&hw=obama+asian&sn=001&sc=1000
Show Obama has some strange origins himself
Comment by mike — July 31, 2008 @ 12:59 am
Whether or not John McCain has the right to run for president is really a point, which, though moot, has already been decided in his favor, but I’m not sure by whom. The composition of his family, his formative years, his residence in Malaysia, etc. so doesn’t matter it’s not even funny. What does matter is whether or not he supports and defends the Constitution … which you actually have to swear to do before you can get an American passport. I assume McCain has a passport, but he may have misspoken himself when he agreed to that admittedly minor stipulation. (What the passport folks really care about is getting your hundred bucks and making sure both your ears are visible in your passport picture.) Anyway, it’s hard to see how someone can claim to support the Constitution when he says “Amen!” to assholes like Alberto Gonzales who actually claim before a congressional committee that Americans have no right to habeas corpus. (This would be of no consequence if Gonzales were just some Texas yahoo who didn’t happen to be the Attorney General of the United States when he said, basically, “Fuck the Constitution. What George Bush wants is what’s important. At least that’s what Cheney told me to say.”) I’ll bet you if you pushed McCain, he’d also claim that the 10th Amendment trumps the rest of the Constitution, but that’s another issue. One can only hope that with the nonsense of people’s family history out of the way, we may have a civil debate about the issues. Yeah, right.
Steve Alber
Comment by Steve Alber — August 5, 2008 @ 9:41 am
Amen to that, Steve. I just published your comment as our latest post, for greater exposure to our audience of trillions.
Comment by Al — August 5, 2008 @ 10:01 am