#1 - The Preamble of the Constitution defines a natural born Citizen.
The Preamble does no such thing as define Natural Born Citizen, and even if it did, the Preamble is not an operational part of the Constitution. It was a stylistic introduction, added by the committee on style. It is a legal nothing burger.
The U.S. Constitution: PreambleThe preamble sets the stage for the Constitution. It clearly communicates the intentions of the framers and the purpose of the document. The preamble is an introduction to the highest law of the land; it is not the law. It does not define government powers or individual rights.
The Constitution is the Articles and Amendments thereto.
Whom else was the Constitution established to secure, if not the citizen People and their citizen children?
Just a few of the glaring examples of the Constitution protecting rights beyond just the citizenry, Amendment 5 starts, "No person...." Amendment 14 starts, "Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." These do not relate to citizens but persons. They are inclusive of non-citizens.
So, where are the examples of the Constitution protecting JUST the citizenry? It's in the eligibility clauses for the House and the Senate, and more exclusively, for the President; it's in the privileges and immunities clause; and it's in the voting rights amendments.
I quote the Preamble because I see it as a statement of declared intent by the Framers of the Constitution.
I read it as the Framers setting up the who and why of the Constitution. It's not a matter of law, it's a matter of mindset by the people who made the law.
In the same vein, I quoted the passage by Thomas Paine from two years later.
To me, the dispute is really about whether the phrase "natural born Citizen" was a term-of-art that was commonly understood at the time and therefore needed no further definition in the Constitution. Since it wasn't defined explicitly in the Constitution, we're still debating it 237 years later.
As a term-of-art, I point to Paine's chapter in The Rights of Man where he seems to be describing the Presidency as being limited to people who are not "foreigners" or "half a foreigner," but must have a "full natural or political connection with the country." Would you agree that "half a foreigner," as Paine put it, was a child of one non-citizen parent, and Paine was indicating that such a child could not be President?
Since that was a contemporaneous writing about the Constitution and the Presidency, I suggest that it was Paine's attempt to document the term-of-art as it was commonly understood at the time by comparing and contrasting it to European leaders.
That's why I started with the Preamble, to get into the minds of the Framers to glean their intent. Their intent was the "secure... liberty... to themselves and their posterity." That means something. That means that the Framers offered this Constitution to protect the national identity of the citizens of the United States and their future children.
Future aliens can become citizens (become We the People), and then their offspring (their posterity) can grow up to become President one day. That's what John Jay wrote in his letter to Washington, that's what Thomas Paine wrote in The Rights of Man, and that's what the Framers wrote in the Preamble to the Constitution.
-PJ