[El Gato]

You are right, Congress has passed no law creating a difference between “citizen by birth” and “natural born citizen”. So why do you keep insisting that they are different things?

They have no power to create natural born citizens, only naturalized ones. Thus persons not meeting whatever the common law criteria for "natural born citizen", such as the child of a citizen mother and a non-citizen father, born outside the country, could be a citizen at birth under the law as it now exists and as it existed when Obama was born, but the common law would have that child not be a natural born citizen.

[little jeremiah]

I appreciate your explanations.

[mlo]

"They have no power to create natural born citizens, only naturalized ones. Thus persons not meeting whatever the common law criteria for "natural born citizen", such as the child of a citizen mother and a non-citizen father, born outside the country, could be a citizen at birth under the law as it now exists and as it existed when Obama was born, but the common law would have that child not be a natural born citizen."

Congress does have the power to decide how citizenship is conferred. But that doesn't matter if Obama was born in Hawaii, because then these other things you bring up are irrelevant. You are talking about a child born outside the US.

If Obama was born in the US then he is a natural born citizen. His father or mother or Congress have nothing to do with it.