I posted the CURRENT applicable statute only to establish that is states clearly that if you’re born in the United States you are a citizen at birth.
Other parts of the statute have changed, yes, but they are not why I posted the statute.
The point is that because “natural born citizen” is never defined, we have to think about what it meant. No reputatable lawyer today believes that two parents are needed for a child born in the U.S.
And the statute itself tells us plainly.
After all, are you going to sit there and tell me that a citizen at birth is not a natural born citizen???? Of course not. That would be absurd. “Natural born” means BORN. Citizen at birth means BORN in the U.S. Citizen at birth = Natural born citizen.
The Supreme Court uses those terms interchangeably.
True, it has never ruled explicitly on the question, but you and I will be long dead before it ever does, if it does.
I have changed the long s’s (which look like f’s) into short s’s, so that the text is easier to read.
This is the URL to Chapter 10.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch10.asp
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England
Book the First : Chapter the Tenth : Of People, Whether Aliens, Denizens or Natives
page 354
...
THE first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it. Allegiance is the tie, or ligamen, which binds the subject to the king, in return for that protection which the king affords the subject.
...
pages 361-362
...
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.
John Marshall thought it was defined, in The Venus, 12 U.S. 253, and referred the nation to Vattel’s Law of Nations. Secretary Michael Chertoff seemed to think there was a definition, and so stated in his comment appended to Senate Res. 511. in 2008 John Bingham thought it was defined, and his repetition of the Vattel definition is in the Congressional Record (I think its 1867, but I'm too lazy to look it up again).
It depends upon what the meaning of is is. Associations between the symbols and definitions (I refer to “natural born citizen” as a symbol) must be made somewhere. If made in more than one place, there can be confusion. But about “natural born citizen” according to Bingham, there has never been doubt. John Marshall and many many others in court proceedings have pointed to Vattel’s Law of Nations as our common law. That can be argued, but the citations are there. Certainly, when we organized not under a crown but under a constitution, the British Common Law was not our principal dictionary. Marshall and Bingham were explicit about Vattel as the source for the definition. Can you find any other definition available to our founders of “natural born citizen?” Blackstone defines natural born subject, but clearly, a U.S. citizen is different from a British subject.
The USSC, if it does its job, will have to clarify this because there are so many willing to dismiss the precedent.
I have read many of the legal briefs proposing an amendment to the definition. The latest was floated by Oren Hatch in 2005 or 2006, to try to make Scharzenegger eligible. I've read that there have been more than 24 attempts to change it. Most people want to allow foreign born, like McCain, to be included. The frequent justification is that we are now a globalist world. Some, like Sarah Herlihy, claim we are racist, and inherently suspicious of foreigners. Obama is the poster boy for why ignoring our founders is perilous, with a non-citizen Marxist Muslim father, who could have cared less if the US were attacked - as long as he wasn't there.