Answer the question in his own words, like we've been asking him to.
He’s claimed pretty clearly, as far as I can see, that ‘natural born citizen’ does not and never did require two citizen parents.
Well, sure he's made that claim. What he hasn't done (as others in this debate have) is to make a convincing argument for why the Framers would have considered that to be a sufficient citizenship pedigree for the office of President.
If all he's going to do is post cut and pastes of historical citations, then he's not really involved in the conversation. Any of us can look up citations on Google if we want.
But that was my point--he's arguing what they did, not why they did it. If in fact they did what he says, it doesn't matter why.
I never started from, "This is what I think the Founders were thinking."
I started from, "This is what the Founders and Framers said and did."
You can't conclude what the Founders said and did by imagining what they were thinking. You can, on the other hand, eventually figure out what they were thinking by what they said and did.
But if you want to know what they said and did, you have to look at what they said and did.
Actually, if you want to know what they were THINKING, you have to look at what they said and did. You can't just imagine it. You can't just say, "Hey, this is what the Founders would have done, based on what YOU would do, or what you think they ought to have done.
The Founders and Framers didn't watch TV. They didn't read the same books you and I read. They read different books. They engaged in different discussions. They had a different relationship to the world. They were starting a country, not looking back on the founding of a country with 226 years of hindsight.
They lived in an entirely different world.
There were no cars. No television. No radio. No international phone calls. To travel from this country to any other took weeks, any way you cut it. If you went overland to the wilds of the north, it took weeks to get there. If you went overland to the wilds of the south, it took weeks to get there. If you went over the sea to England or France, that took weeks as well.
Part of the issue is that there was no such thing as international tourism in those days. Things like "anchor babies" were unconceived of, and inconceivable. Perhaps if they had considered anchor babies and 300,000 people traveling from London to New York (and vice versa) every single month, they would have made a different decision.
And perhaps not. They obviously were not very concerned at all about completely eliminating "all possible foreign influence," as the rules they set up for Presidential eligibility made it perfectly possible for someone to be born a natural born citizen (by whatever measure you want to use), live his entire life to adulthood in England or France, having spent his entire formative and educational years there, then return to the United States at age 21, and be elected United States President at age 35, having spent 60% of his life in a foreign country, and only 40% of his life here.
Or, theoretically, that same person could have spent the great majority of his life (say 40 out of 54 years) in foreign countries, and still been elected President.
In that case, he would have spent nearly 75% of his life overseas, and only about 25% in the United States. And still, the Framers of the Constitution tell us, such a person could be eligible to be elected President.
So if they weren't trying to eliminate "all possibility of foreign influence," what were they guarding against?
Well, first, they wanted the person to have some significant attachment to the country. Being born here, or otherwise being born a US citizen, guaranteed that, even if the person was educated abroad.
But most Constitutional scholars seem to think one of the primary motivations was simply to prevent ADULT royalty from some place like England from swooping in and buying up the Presidency with lots of royal glitz and money.
But... but... you say. Such a person could have just come over here, and had a child, and 50 years later, that child could have become President!
That's not necessarily true. Such a child would have had some real doubts cast on his eligibility, since children of FOREIGN ROYALTY were one of the historical EXCEPTIONS to the rule of natural born citizenship.
Even if it was accepted that the child was a natural born American citizen, who would do that? Who would leave the cushy comfort of their native country and come over here, and wait FORTY OR FIFTY YEARS (by which time they would almost certainly have been dead themselves) for the CHANCE that their child MIGHT grow up to be President?
NOBODY.
And as far as we can tell, nobody ever did.
So the rule they adopted was a perfectly sensible one. It fulfilled the purpose they set out for it.
You can say that in retrospect they might have adopted a different rule. "We're going to have anchor babies in 200 years, so let's say that citizen parents are also required."
But what they MIGHT have done, and what they actually DID, are two entirely different things.
And what they did made perfect sense to them.