“Nope, the founders had a commonly held definition for NBC and that was born in a country to two citizen parents.”
No. They used natural born subject and natural born citizen interchangeably for a number of years.
“If the writers of the 14th had wanted to say Natural-Born-Citizen, they could have done so.”
Had they done so, there would have been no improvement in understanding. By rephrasing it as they did, they put any attempt by a court to repeat Dred Scott out of reach. In essence, by passing the 14th, they gutted the Dred Scott decision - which used Vattel’s idea instead of the language of the Constitution.
>>...No. They used natural born subject and natural born citizen interchangeably for a number of years...<<
Nope. Vattel’s Law of Nations definition of NBC was the commonly held definition at the time of the framing of the constitution in the then (ahem) “civilized world”.
>>...Had they done so, there would have been no improvement in understanding...<<
There was no need, nor intent to “improve the understanding” of citizenship with the 14th Amend. Look into “why” the 14th Amend. was needed. The clue word for you is, “reparations”. It was not enacted to define who met Art-II qualifications for President. That was likely the furthest from their minds at the time. For one thing, they needed to confer “citizenship” upon recently freed slaves. If they wanted to magically bestow NBC status upon them (outside of the “natural” process) then they could have used the phrase, “natural-born-citizens” and removed all doubt. But they didn’t, because that was not their concern nor intent. So, they used the non-specific, generic “citizen” declining to specify naturalized, natural or otherwise.
Again, NBC is mentioned only once, and then only as a qualification for president. That is the context in which it was used, *NOT* as a qualifier for granting citizenship. The founders intent was to assure that subsequent Presidential candidates had no birth allegiance to any other nation except the USA. At the time, Vattel’s Law Of Nations was their ready-reference and defined NBC (as was commonly held at the time) as a citizen born in country to two citizen parents (jus soli *AND* jus sanguinis combined) which removes all possibility of any foreign birth allegiance. Vattel didn’t make that up out of whole-cloth, he recorded the then commonly held definition and well articulated the foundation for it.
Now you appear to think that just because some later black-robed scoundrels and politi-sluts felt the need to re-define citizenship somehow changes the founder’s intent. It simply does not and it flies in the face of simple common sense. So again, legalistically, in a court of perverted law, dual-citizenship foreigners *NOW* meet the qualification to become President. There’s nothing we can do about it but marvel at how inane and “wrong-headed” it has become; that it does not in any way, shape or form make it “right”, it merely makes it “legal”. If only more folks had the common sense to tell the difference.