"OR a citizen...at the time of adoption"
Someone pinch me...but isn't the Constitution itself drawing a distinction between "natural born" and "citizen"?
For those who were "mere" citizens at the time of adoption of the US Constitution, they were eligible to the presidency.
Afterwards, "Only" natural borns were eligible.
PM, BD, AG, BB -- am I reading this wrong? Have I forgotten something about grammar, sentence structure, meaning? Help me out here.
That’s the way it reads to me too, dear xzins!
Someone pinch me...but isn't the Constitution itself drawing a distinction between "natural born" and "citizen"?
It seems so to me, dear xzins. In this passage, "natural born citizen" refers to persons born of American parents whose families had long resided here, and "citizen" to immigrants from other nations who became naturalized citizens "at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution." That was a one-time event, pertaining to a single class of (foreign-born) persons then living in the country. Members of that single class were eligible to the Office of POTUS. However, in generations subsequent to the adoption of the Constitution, such a naturalized citizen was not eligible to hold the Office of POTUS (he did not "naturalize" at the time the Constitution was adopted). Only a person of genuine American descent, only an American by actual heritage, could do so — that is, only a "natural born" American citizen.
Unfortunately, English usage up to and around the time of the Founding Period was "comma happy." (One has only to read anything written by David Hume or John Locke to appreciate what I mean.) Had the above quote read in the following way, perhaps it would be easier for modern-day Americans to understand its logic as the Framers intended:
Article. II. Section. 1. “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of the President.Note all I had to do was delete a single comma to improve clarity for the modern-day reader.
I'm pretty sure folks can be found to quibble about the significance of that deleted comma. We call them "constitutional lawyers." They emanate from such places as Harvard and Yale....
Just my two-cents worth, FWIW.