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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.

These provisions provide a mixed bag of things related to citizens or persons.

Art. 1, Sec. 2: "No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen."

Art. 1, Sec. 3: "No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the United States and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen."

Art. 2, Sec. 1: "No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States."

Art. 4, Sec 2.:

The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.
No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

Amdt. 19: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Amdt. 26: "The right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age."

The requirements for Representatives and Senators to be 7 or 9 years a citizen explicitly allows alien born, naturalized citizens to office. The requirements for President requires that one be born a United States citizen, and prohibits alien born, naturalized citizens from attaining that office.

For Senators and Representatives, it rather strangely states they shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen."

Art. 4, Sec. 2 shows one clause pertaining to citizens and two clauses pertaining to persons.

Amdt. 19 did not give women the right to vote. Where men are enfranchised, women must equally be enfranchised.

Amdt. 26 requires that citizens aged at least 18 years, but less than 21 years, must be enfranchised equally with those citizens age 21 or over.

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.

I note that the Preamble is not the law, and is not the work of the Framers. When submitting their agreed upon Articles of the proposed Constitution, the Framers submitted it to a Committee on Style to clean it up for style, withoout substantive change to meaning. It was the Committee on Style who decided it could use a Preamble. The Committee, not the Framers who created the Articles, wrote and added the Preamble to serve as an introduction for the Constitution Articles. So, the Preamble does not express the mindset of the Framers, but of the Committee on Style regarding what the Framers did.

In the same vein, I quoted the passage by Thomas Paine from two years later.

Nobody ratified the philosophy of Thomas Paine. His philosophical works are not the expressed will of anyone but Thomas Paine.

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.

We are not really debating it at all. It has been settled law for centuries. The Constitution was emphatically written in the language of the English common law, and it is a matter of historical fact that each of the original states adopted the common law system for their state. The only state to ever not do so is Louisiana whose state legal system was derived from when it was a French colony.

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?

As a term or art under the English common law which had been in effect in all thirteen colonies, and which was carried forth into the independent states, natural born meant precisely the same after independence as it did before. Changing subject to citizen effected no change to the term natural born. In either case, the People owed allegiance to the sovereign. The People of a monarchy owe their allegiance to the monarch who is their sovereign. The People of the states were vested with the sovereignty of the political community called a state. They owed their allegiance to their collective political community, not to a singular monarch.

There is no such thing as "half a foreigner" which implies the existence of "half a citizen." One is either a citizen or one is not. Being "half a foreigner" is akin to being half pregnant.

Whatever Paine may have indicated, or appeared to have indicated, is irrelevant. Nobody ratified the mutterings of Paine as part of the Constitution, and nobody adopted his writings as the statute law of the United States.

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.

Thomas Paine: “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

The world is not my country. My country has borders, even if the current administration makes believe the world is my country.

thomaspaine.org/pages/resources/did-thomas-paine-support-the-u-s-constitution.html

Did Thomas Paine support the U.S. Constitution?
He favored the idea of the Constitution to establish the government (it was his idea in 1783), but he strongly argued against the conservative and elitist nature of it. He attacked two major areas: a single executive, and a two-body legislature, one being smaller and more powerful than the other. He favored only a representative legislative body based on increased suffrage not based on property, which should be divided into two, then have separate votes taken and combine the total. He scoffed at the idea that 50 privileged men could defeat the will of the hundreds of other legislators. He also believed that the real strength of the Constitution lay in the ability to rewrite it at the will of the people. So he was no originalist. (See “Constitutional Reform” under Chronology). Paine was a founder of the modern concept of constitutions, where the people, not the government, create a constitution from which the government if formed. The government should have no role in the creation or amendment of the constitution. This concept is rarely followed, which has gutted the concept.

Thomas Paine played no role in the Declaration of Independence and did not attend the Constitutional Convention, instead choosing to go to France.

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.

The intent of the Framers, or the prevailing Federalists, was to infuse and centralize more power in the government. The Articles of Confederation worked too well at hamstringing the power of the Federal government. The post civil war Amendments were another power grab.

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.

All people born in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens of the United States. That is the organic law of the United States. A child born in an immigration detention center of two illegal aliens awaiting deportation is a natural born United States citizen at birth. The Senate debates on the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment make clear that this was the deliberate intent of the citizenship clause. It may be wise to revisit that and change it, but that has not been done.

John Jay styled his term as natural born citizen, underscoring the word born for emphasis. Say the term with emphasis as Jay applied and the intended meaning attaches.

The Framers wrote nothing in the Preamble as they did not write it. Neither did the Committee on Style insert the imaginary content in the Preamble.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, 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.

The Preamble does not even pretend to say a mumbling word about citizenship or two citizen parents, or natural born citizens, or naturalized citizens, or half-foreign citizens. For decades, alien white Europeans came to the United States and had children without being naturalized. Their children were always considered to be born United States citizens. The matter arose in the Senate debates on the 14th Amendment. It was observed that a large part of the German population of Pennsylvania would not be citizens had the children born of aliens been considered alien born.