PreambleWe the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In my opinion, "natural born" is not a third category of citizenship, it is an additional qualification to be president.
You will note that the qualification to be a Representative or Senator is simply "citizen," but the qualification to be President is "natural-born citizen."
Question: Why add the extra criterion if there are only two classifications for citizen?
Answer: Because "natural-born" is not a classification of "citizen," it is an extra qualification to be met for the citizens who wish to become President.
The Preamble of the Constitution says "We the People of the United States, in Order to... secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
There is your constitutional definition of natural-born citizen right there at the beginning of the Constitution: "...ourselves [We the People] and our Posterity [future children]."
Natural born citizens are the children born of We the People, for whom the Constitution was ordained and established to secure. How else would they "secure the Blessings of Liberty" except by limiting the qualification for the highest office in the land to the citizen children of citizen parents?
Posterity means our children and our children's children.
The Constitution was ordained and established to secure the blessings of liberty to our children, their children, and their children's children, and so on and on.
Article II Section 1 Clause 5 codifies it.
-PJ
The Constitution was ordained and established to secure the blessings of liberty to our children, their children, and their children's children, and so on and on.
Just noticed this while reading through "Rogers v Bellei."
“It is not too much to say, therefore, that Congress at that time [when Rev.Stat. § 1993 was under consideration] attached more importance to actual residence in the United States as indicating a basis for citizenship than it did to descent from those who had been born citizens of the colonies or of the states before the Constitution. As said by Mr. Fish, when Secretary of State, to Minister Washburn, June 28, 1873, in speaking of this very proviso,”“the heritable blood of citizenship was thus associated unmistakably with residence within the country which was thus recognized as essential to full citizenship.”
“Foreign Relations of the United States, Pt. 1, 1873, p. 259.”