My point is simple. "Natural born citizen" is either based on Vattel or it is not. If it is, then Vattel's definition for the children of service members applies.
You can either have Vattel, or you cannot. You can't have half Vattel, and Half English Common law.
We have neither. We have United States law. I have no doubt that Vattel influenced the Constitutional Congress to a very great extent but over time our definition of Natural born Citizen has been asserted through practice and SCOTUS decisions/holdings.
Natural law is very logical: a child born in a nation of citizen parents is a Natural born Citizen. No legal statute is required to determine that child’s citizenship.
James Madison was the man who wrote the U.S.Constitution, and during his Presidency he had a very definite belief in what exactly constituted a U.S. citizen: a person born of U.S. citizen parents was therefore a citizen, and just the fact of being born in one of the original thirteen colonies didn’t equal citizenship. This was the definition, in fact, written into the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The naturalization of children born to U.S. citizens overseas was dealt with by the very first U.S. congress in 1790. Unfortunately, they got it wrong!
They included in the Immigration & Naturalization Act language to alert the State Department that Americans born abroad are “natural born” citizens” and are not to be viewed as foreigners due to foreign birth. These children were not granted citizenship via that US statute, rather automatic citizenship was stated as a fact that must be recognized by immigration authorities. These children were not citizens by any other means than natural law, and statutory law was written to insure that their natural citizenship was recognized.
Well, this was not a reasonable explanation. It fails to recognize that Congress only has powers over naturalization and cannot define “natural born Citizen”, which has nothing to do with naturalization.
If Congress wants to tell the State Department something, they don’t have to enact legislation to do it. But more important is that all of the following naturalization acts, 1795, 1802, etc., were also passed to naturalize the children of U.S. citizens born abroad. And the words “natural born” were repealed in the 1795 Naturalization Act and never returned again. Why? Because naturalization of someone’s citizenship, requiring a legal staute, is at odds with natural law.
It took the 14th Amendment AND the Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision to cement in place the idea that a person born under the jurisdiction of the United States could be a United States citizen at birth no matter the parent’s citizenship.