Don't trust people's words when you can check read the original. First, from the First Congress, March 26, 1790, Statute II, "And the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens:..." Experience prompts me to quote the rest of the paragraph, but that is a waste of time because of the footnote "(a) This act was repealed by an act passed January 29, 1795, chap. 20."
Did the Cato author not read the act? Levine, from whom I've learned much, cannot have missed this correction of the only mention of Natural Born Citizenship by Congress in our history. The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction, Article III Section 2 for interpretation of the Constitution. My assumption is that the 1795 and 1802 application of Article 1 Section 8, the Naturalization Provision, the grounds asserted as authority for the natural born citizen claim in the 1790 Act was reexamined and Congress realized their law violated the Constitution. The Act was certainly changed, signed by G. Washington, the term natural born citizen replaced with "citizen", the class of citizen which Congress had the responsibility for defining. The only citizen defined by the Constitution was a natural born citizen.
As in Wong Kim Ark, where Wong Kim was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents permanently domiciled in the U.S., Wong Kim was declared a "citizen", and Minor v. Happersett's clear exposition of Vattel's definition quoted and cited by Justice Gray. Again, read the explanation by expert, Mario Apuzzo, in his latest blog at puzo1.blogspot.com. Mr. Apuzzo quotes and explains a half dozen or so supreme court cases that should help people to understand why the definition Chief Justice Marshall found the most concise for natural born citizenship.
If we needed a reminder of why the "Dreams from My Father" are such an important consideration for protecting the first post-enlightenment representative republic, built upon the notion of sovereign individual rights, we have him now in the White House. HIs fathers were both Muslims, and one was socialist/communist. Senator Obama campaigned for his cousin, Odinga, while both were running for the presidency of their countries. Odinga's muslim cohorts openly threatened, and then burned about one thousand churches after Odinga lost his campaign for Kenyan president, forcing Kenya into a power sharing arrangement with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose representatives occupy many executive positions in the U.S. government.
Obama is the poster boy for why the author of the 14th Amendment, Judge and Congressman John Bingham, making slaves into citizen so that their children, born on sovereign U.S. soil would be natural born citizen, told us in two Congressional hearings where he explained the meaning of natural born citizenship, and why no one questioned it:
I find no fault with the introductory clause [S 61 Bill], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen….
Does anyone believe that either of Obama's fathers owed no allegiance to any foreign sovereignty?
In the Government’s brief for the Supreme Court in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the government’s attorneys argued the following: “Are Chinese children born in this country to share with the descendants of the patriots of the American Revolution the exalted qualification of being eligible to the Presidency of the nation, conferred by the Constitution in recognition of the importance and dignity of citizenship by birth?”
And Mr. Justice Gray, writing for the majority in Wong wrote: “[An alien parent’s] allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Coke, 6a, ’strong enough to make a natural subject, for, if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject’
“Subject’ and ‘citizen’ are, in a degree, convertible terms as applied to natives; and though the term ‘citizen’ seems to be appropriate to republican freemen, yet we are, equally with the inhabitants of all other countries, ’subjects,’ for we are equally bound by allegiance and subjection to the government and law of the land.’
…every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject, unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign state, or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.
The same rule was in force in all the English colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the constitution as originally established.”