LOL! Fair enough. I just didn't want you to think I was ignoring you since I was responding to other posters.
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But generally speaking, yes, a naturalized citizen is one made so through some government-established process.
Agreed. I would like a bit of clarification on a part of it, though.
and I think most consider that the Fourteenth Amendment declared some citizens to be natural born citizens.
So does the 14th, in your opinion, create NBC's?
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A natural-born citizen is one who is a citizen from birth--it means the same thing as "born citizen" or "born a citizen." I define it that way because everything I've read on the subject makes the most sense that way.
Okay, a natural-born is someone who is a citizen at birth.
Do you believe their are any other criteria [such as parentage] that must be met, or is simply being born in the country sufficient?
Okay, a natural-born is someone who is a citizen at birth.
I agree with Ha Ha Thats Very Logical on this. See post 325.
Do you believe their are any other criteria [such as parentage] that must be met, or is simply being born in the country sufficient?
I believe being born a US citizen is sufficient. I believe the Founders and Framers intended all persons born on US soil from that moment forth (remember they didn't have international tourism in those days) to be considered natural born citizens, whether their parents had naturalized or not, and I believe, based on the law passed by the first Congress, and based on what I take to be an age/residency hint in the Presidential eligibility clause itself, that they intended for children born US citizens to US citizens abroad to be eligible as well.
I also believe they intended to extend eligibility to persons who had been born on US soil around the time of the Revolution and carried back to England by their parents, to be able to say, at age 21, "I was born in America and it's a new land, and I want to go over there and take up my American citizenship and be an American," and return here, and have the opportunity to cast their lot in with us and eventually be able to run for President if they so chose.
Some of that might possibly be reading a little bit more into the history than is there. But I kind of don't think so. I tend to believe, based on my own reading, that those were the intentions of the Framers.
MT, I have debated w the same group you are engaged w, and it is a singular waste of time. You nailed the problem upthread when you said they resort to interminable legalisms as opposed to engaging on a more basic, give-and-take level. There is a reason for that. Namely, their position is so absurd/insane that they cannot and never will boil it down in simple, honest terms.
If they ever did, it would go something like this:
‘Sure, the Framers understood that the ‘magic-dirt’ test of natural bornness carried risk. Foreign enemies could hatch a brat on US soil & later run him for the highest office. If he won he could/would destroy the US in a single term. But hey, we’d have gone out on a high principled stand: namely, that we neither discriminated against the foreign parents nor against a citizen w foreign allegiances (by virtue of their birth, as opposed to ideologically). After all, what is more important, preserving and protecting the Republic, or not hurting the feelings of foreigners & their kids? The Framers clearly, OBVIOUSLY elevated the feelings of foreigners (& their issue) above the preservation of the Republic; anybody who doesn’t get that is obtuse.’
This is precisely what they’d have to say, if they ever engaged on a genuinely logical, rational basis. That is why you get the endless legalistic, dishonest and endlessly repetitious cut and paste routine. Because anyone who breaks it down to its bare essentials can see that the Framers were not idiots & would never have willingly turned the country over to an enemy w foreign allegiances & the goal of destroying the country. That is a proposition so ludicrous no magic-dirt cultist can or ever will enunciate it. To do so would fall under the category of ‘losing the argument’, so they avoid it—i.e.: the truth—at all costs.
Hence the frustration you feel, as these fundamentally dishonest individuals retreat to their magical make-believe universe where Obama’s gleeful destruction of the USA isn’t happening, and where everything is going to be hunky dory after the next election, or possibly the one after that. They give their pathetic little pep talks about how the US has withstood worse than Obama, and tell us to buck up because everything is going to be just fine when pie-in-the-sky time rolls around—really it is, take their word for it.
No, it’s not ever going to be fine again. The USA, w the full backing of the magic-dirt crowd, put into its highest office a man who hates the country and whose reign has one goal: to destroy the USA. He isn’t seeking, as a liberal, to replace the free market economy w a socialistic utopia; he’s seeking, as a man w professed primary foreign allegiances, revenge against the Colonialist superpower that oppressed the continent to which he pledged his first loyalty: Africa. As POTUS, he is in a unique position to first cripple & then destroy his hated enemy, and he’s already succeeded. Anybody who doesn’t see this is either not paying attention or is a liberal. Period.
To sum up. The magic-dirters are saying that the Framers’ purpose in enshrining the right of foreigners to spawn our presidents was to clear the way for Obama to ascend to the highest office and destroy the country. I.e.: they recognized that a person w innate & self-stated primary foreign loyalties would qualify for the office under their terms, and that if such a person won an election they would use the office to destroy the Union—and they were fine w that. They considered the annihilation of the USA a sm price to pay for not discriminating against a person just because they happened to have foreign allegiances by birth.
That is the magic-dirt position in a nutshell. Plus, as an aside, they really don’t care that much that the USA is history. So long as Obama was not discriminated against, the collateral damage is no big deal. ‘Oh, so the entire country is collateral damage? No problem; at least we didn’t hurt Little Barry’s feelings, and that’s all that matters.’
You've used the present tense, and right off I can't think of any way the 14th acts currently to create NBCs. As for the past, I do think the intention was (among other things) to establish that freed slaves were NBCs. But this Bingham character we hear so much about said that the introductory clause was "simply declaratory," which implies that they were already something. I don't know exactly what they were considered to be in between the 13th and the 14th.
Do you believe their are any other criteria [such as parentage] that must be met, or is simply being born in the country sufficient?
It is sufficient.