How does Congress “repeal” a specific clause in Article II of the Constitution? Perhaps you or El Gato can explain. I am confused. I did not know Congress could simply repeal the Constitution. That would seem to make the Constitution worthless. Thanks for letting us know.
This clearly indicated a difference between citizen at birth and natural born citizen, and probably indicated that (1) the original understanding of the term did not include such persons (except perhaps those born while the father was serving in "the armies" but outside the country) , and (2) they then realized they couldn't modify the original meaning without a full Constitutional amendment.
Should read:
Then 5 years latter, they repealed that law, the correpsonding section of the replacement law dropped the "natural born" part and just left "citizens".
They didn’t. In 1790 after the constitution was adopted, the first congress passed a naturalization act that defined some specific cases to be treated as a “Natural Born Citizen”. However in 1795 they turned around and repealed the 1790 statue and replaced it with nearly identical language except the wording “Natural Born Citizen” was changed to simply “Citizen”.
Since it was the first congress, it’s thought that the 1790 statute might play a role in defining what the original intent of the term “Natural Born” was. But since they repealed that statute and changed the language just 5 years later, I think the repeal would also play a role. Still the most logical explanation is that the term refers to the “Natural Born” as defined in “The Law of Nations” which they would have been familiar with.