You are getting two things mixed up. What you are talking about above is what it takes to be ANY citizen of the United States. For Barack Obama to have been born a citizen at all, he would need one parent to be a citizen and a resident of the USA for 5 years after the age of 16.
If those were not met and he were not born in the USA, he would not even be a citizen at birth. He would have had to naturalize at some point.
But the previous poster was trying to say that the definition of Natural Born Citizen is even trickier. We don't know if perhaps BOTH his parents needed to be citizens at his birth, or if he had to have been born with no allegiance to another land. The Constitution is not completely clear on what defines a Natural Born Citizen.
The Constitution is not completely clear on what defines a Natural Born Citizen.
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Mis-defining does not help. It is not “Natural Born Citizen”. It is “natural born Citizen”.
Only Citizen is capitalized because it was formal, specific, defined term in the Constitution. This was Citizen of the [one of] the United States. The adjectives of ‘natural’ and ‘born’ added normal refinement to the type of actual Citizen that qualified to be President.
Capitalization matters and it especially matters here. People keep looking for the magical definition of “natural born Citizen” and is common mis-represented derivatives of Natural Born Citizen, Natural-born Citizen, natural-born Citizen. But when you look that actual words and do not mis-represent them the definitions are simple to find. Go look up “natural” and “born” in the dictionary. That is apparently what the founders did.
See post # 74.