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I think this would be a good point... except for the fact that Justice Waite immediately follows up that sentence with:

As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first.

He therefore is thinking in terms of two "classes" or identifiable groups of people.

It's always good to check the context of the sentence.

Nonetheless, I do agree with your statement that the birther argument is impaling itself.

It is particularly impaling itself by claiming that Minor v. Happersett establishes a legal precedent for the birther definition of "natural born citizen" when the opinion in that case quite clearly contradicts their definition by directly stating that according to US law, the children born of US citizens abroad are natural-born citizens too.

And it states this in a UNANIMOUS Supreme Court ruling that directly quotes the Presidential eligibility clause of the Constitution: "...no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President.

It is therefore very clear that the whole Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett was well aware of the Presidential eligibility implications when they explicitly rejected the notion that "natural born citizens" are only the children born on US soil of two US citizen parents.

It is therefore very clear that the whole Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett was well aware of the Presidential eligibility implications when they explicitly rejected the notion that "natural born citizens" are only the children born on US soil of two US citizen parents.

They didn't "explicitly reject" anything. The court wasn't coming up with anything at all novel in this decision. They discussed that what made a natural born citizen wasn't solely being born within the jurisdiction of the Constitution, within U.S. territory (because the children born of aliens or foreigners on U.S. soil were certainly not natural-born citizens and perhaps not even citizens at all--that was the doubt they didn't feel a need to address in this case) but to parents who were both citizens of the United States, that is, as citizens subject to the jurisdiction of the Constitution, wherever in the world they happened to be at the time of the child's birth.

Based on then-current law, John McCain could have been born anywhere in the world, on or off a U.S. military base and still be a natural born citizen of the United States because he was born to two parents who were both citizens of the United States and, through their citizenship, subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Constitution.

This is not a condition enjoyed by Barry Obama because no matter where he was born, he was not born to two citizen parents and, therefore, cannot possibly be a natural born citizen since his parents were subject to the jurisdiction of two different nations. And since there has been no law passed in the intervening time to the contrary and no subsequent Supreme Court decision specifically contradicting the definitions employed by the court in Minor v Happersett, Barry Obama is just plain sh-t out of luck. The best he can hope for is to continue bobbing and weaving and obfuscating.

This does, though, give insight into why Chester A. Arthur was so anxious to cover up the fact that his father was not a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth, making Arthur ineligible to be president, just six short years after the Minor v Happersett decision, because he was not a natural born citizen. As an attorney appointed by Grant as the Collector of the Port of New York betwen 1871 and 1878 and having formerly been involved in civil rights cases, you can bet that he was intimately familiar with a major case on a major civil rights issue in the Supreme Court and the Court's explicit reasoning on the matter of natural born citizenship and how that related to his own history.

He therefore is thinking in terms of two "classes" or identifiable groups of people.

That certainly seems a reasonable reading. On the other hand, I don't see anything that requires the two classes to be mutually exclusive. One might, for example, talk of the class of animals called "dogs" and the class called "pets, or, as Waite does himself a bit later, "persons" and "females".

In any case, I see no way around the conclusion that "without reference to the citizenship of the parents" is inclusive of jus solis/jus sanguinis children and thus, either Waite was incredibly clumsy here in what he was trying to say, or he did understand that the latter class was inclusive of the former. This seems corroborated by his assertion "Some authorities go further", which certainly suggests an extension or expansion of the first, rather than the positing of something distinct and separate from it.