Sorry if this has been answered HawkHogan. I may not have time to get caught up with such a busy thread, so I'll try to address what are sure to be nonsense responses to a frequently addressed topic. Some of our more more persistent Obots are being pulled out of hibernation, tired perhaps with caressing Carps. It is encouraging to see such interest in a question Anita Dunn and her husband may have thought they had successfully buried.
Definitions for terms in the Constitution are not found in the Constitution because our framers were bright men, and knew that words evolve over time. Madison explained that, and Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who wrote the brilliant Minor v. Happersett decision, explained it clearly. Besides the writings of our first congressional historian, Dr. David Ramsay, and Thomas Paine, the first court case I've read is Chief Justice John Marshall's contribution to “The Venus”, 12 US 253, from 1814. He cites Vattel’s Law of Nations as the most concise source. “The natives, or natural-born-citizens, are those born in the country to of parents who are citizens.” Marshall was quoting the common-law of our republic, from by far the most cited legal source in American jurisprudence between 1789 and 1821, Vattel's Law of Nations (From S. Ruddy in Grotian Society Papers, 1972)
Precedent was established by Minor v. Happersett, reciting the same definition, but without mentioning Vattel, because Waite was well aware he was creating positive law. The previous twenty five or so quotations of the Vattel definition were not essential to the decision of the court, and thus did not establish precedent. Minor v. Happersett did.
The only other president who was not a natural born citizen, and not “grandfathered” by the “citizen at the signing and 14 year resident requirements, was Chester Arthur, whose ineligibility was discovered by a maverick attorney Leo Donofrio, who became so disgusted with the hypocrisy and dishonesty of those in his profession that he resigned from the bar and canceled his licenses to practice in three states and before the Supreme Court.
Donofrio found, among those few documents Chester Arthur didn't manage to have burned before he died, his father's naturalization papers, filed when Chester was 14. Like Obama, Arthur was born to a British(Irish) father, a pastor, who ministered congregations in the US for twenty years, married a citizen, but didn't care to file citizenship papers.
Arthur appointed Horace Gray to the Supreme Court, and Horace wrote a decision, Wong Kim Ark, which was dangerous to Arthur because Wong Kim. was born on US soil, but to domiciled alien parents. Had the plaintiffs known that Arthur had citizenship problems, and that a decision could affect Justice Gray's tenure, not to mention possible prosecution, particularly given one court that argued the Wong Kim was a natural born citizen, they might have asked for Gray to be removed from the decision. But no one knew about Arthur's father. Gray's meandering decision, quoting Minor v. Happersett to cover his behind, Gray wrote a confusing treatise on British citizenship law before deciding that Wong Kim was not really a natural born citizen after all, but was a citizen by the 14th Amendment. This was the case the opened the door to Anchor Babies, and possibly, because Gray was covering possible discovery of Arthur's ineligibility (My reading of Donofrio's interpretation of the deceitful citation of a Binney paper in WKA). The simple answer, only Chester Arthur and Barack Obama are not natural born citizen.
You and a few others raise the intelligence of FR and provide the much needed civics and history lessons our public school indoctrination replaced.
I am grateful for the education!
This really isn't a hard concept and there are many similar concepts in our daily lives that explain the common sense.
We get a taste when we buy or sell a car or home and sign a title or have a title search to determine the trail of ownership and our right to buy/sell it free and clear.
We also understand undivided allegiance. For example, would Ahmadinejad say that if an Iranian muslim mother and an Iranian muslim father have a child born in Iran, he'll trust that is child an Iranian muslim based upon the circumstances of birth?
Yes. He would have not reason not to trust that that child is a natural born Iranian muslim by mother, father and country. All factors agree.
Is the same true if an Iranian muslim woman marries an Israeli jew and has a child in Israel?
Would he say that child an Iranian muslim and trust that child's faith allegiances to country?
And what if that same child were born in Iran? Does it matter? Yes, it would to Ahmadinejad.
The only pure, undiluted allegiances of faith and country he'd most likely unconditionally trust are in the first case only.
That's the purity of a natural born citizen. Not hard to understand at all.
Use any combinations of nationality and faiths and run them past the most hard core judge and you'll get an education in understanding undivided, undiluted loyalty.
It's not hard for someone to understand why the FFs did what they did unless they just don't want to and/or they have some other agenda, such as we see on these threads.