“No more time anyone made a citizen via statute is not a natural born citizen (NBC) as NBC was understood in 1788.”
The understanding of what “natural born subject” meant in the 1700s had been shaped by acts of Parliament over the centuries. What makes you think the people who had lived with that understanding didn’t accept that future Congresses might shape a future understanding of NBC?
The Constitution only makes mention of two ways a person can be a citizen - birth and naturalization. It used NBC for one, and “naturalized” for the other. Ted Cruz is a citizen who has not been naturalized - something that takes place AFTER someone’s birth. Thus, it only leaves on category for him to fill.
Blackstone, writing on the meaning of NBS in 1765 - so over 20 years before the US Constitution, giving the definition which the Founder’s had lived with thru their adult lives - said:
“Yet the children of the king’s embassadors born abroad were always held to be natural subjects: for as the father, though in a foreign country, owes not even a local allegiance to the prince to whom he is sent; so, with regard to the son also, he was held (by a kind of postliminium) to be born under the king of England’s allegiance, represented by his father, the embassador. To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. III. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband’s consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants. But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception; unless their said fathers were attainted, or banished beyond sea, for high treason; or were then in the service of a prince at enmity with Great Britain.
The children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such. In which the constitution of France differs from ours; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien.”
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_4_citizenships1.html
Notice the Founder’s definition of NBS was one that allowed modification by the legislature: “ But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off”.
When Congress changes a definition, they are not acting as a body naturalizing anyone. They are defining what they consider a born citizen to be, and there remains two categories of citizen: born, and naturalized. That had been done for hundreds of years before the Constitution, and the definition the Founders lived with included those modifications - made by adjusting the definition.
For Ted Cruz to be a NBC, the only change to the definition would be to continue what Parliament had already started - to allow a woman to pass on ‘natural allegiance’ and not just the man.
there is a good discussion here http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3381836/posts?q=1&;page=101
Well off to do a little work, bye for now.