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When I noted that Long had failed to mention Vattel, it was not to suggest that he rejected it, but instead to suggest that his research was such that he probably never found it.

Well, according to the Supreme court in the case of UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION et al., Appellants, v. MULTISTATE TAX COMMISSION (1978)

The international jurist most widely cited in the first 50 years after the Revolution was Emmerich de Vattel. 1 J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law 18 (1826).

I decided to look up James Kent's book. (Jeff cites James Kent as one of his supporters, but then he cites EVERYONE as one of his supporters.) Kent does indeed seem to claim that Vattel was dominant during this era. (There are 34 references to Vattel in his book, and only 6 for Blackstone.)

I'm kinda thinking that it is a stretch to believe Breckenridge Long was not aware of Vattel. Once again, I can only conclude that he regarded knowledge of Vattel as so commonplace that he saw no need to mention it. This is no different from discussing a point of English law without mentioning Blackstone. Everyone already knows Blackstone is an authority.

Long was a Democrat, a partisan with political ambitions of his own. His motives for raising questions about the eligibility of the Republican nominee in an election year are probably no more complicated than that.

Assailing his motives does nothing to undercut his actual argument. Do you have a critique of his argument?

Believing as I do that the NBC standard is a constitutional standard to be applied by constitutionally-selected electors free from any interference by our national judicial or legislative branches, I don't look to the Congress or to the federal courts for authoritative guidance as to the precise meaning of the standard.

Electors are not constitutional scholars. The nation is ill served by having ignorant Electors, and those who ought to be responsible for informing the electors as to the correct requirements, are themselves misinformed due to a false conflation of the term "citizen" with "natural born citizen". This misinformation can be traced directly to the inimical effects of the badly interpreted precedent of the Wong Kim Ark decision.

Too many people have simply equated the Wong ruling as meaning "Born a citizen = "Natural citizen", when in fact, the Wong decision rests expressly on the power of the 14th amendment.

Once again, natural citizens existed prior to the 14th amendment, and have no need of it's existence to BE natural citizens. They are a distinct class from those citizens who are only citizens as a result of the 14th amendment. (Anchor Babies, and then only as a result of a defective interpretation of the 14th amendment.)

Do you have a critique of his argument?

He crystalizes his argument on page 8:

"If, with full knowledge of the meaning of the phrase 'natural born,' the framers of the Constitution used those words to express a certain idea and to necessitate a certain qualification, then their meaning is the law of the land. That they did use them is undoubted; that they knew what they were writing hardly seems possible to doubt, in view of the contemporary expressions on the subject and the actual change in the phraseology of the proposed constitution."

I think that his argument could be made more persuasive had he quoted the "contemporary expressions on the subject" that he claims compel his conclusion that "natural born citizen" means not just citizen at birth, but citizen born in the United States to two citizen parents. His Hamilton quote does not compel a construction as narrow as the construction proposed by Long.

More fundamentally, in the effort to determine the precise meaning of "natural born citizen," he believes that we should focus on the opinions of some of the drafters. I believe that Justice Scalia (as quoted in post 362) is correct when he points out that, when interpreting terms in the Constitution, our focus should be on the opinions "of ordinary citizens in the founding generation."

I believe that anyone who wanted to bind the ordinary citizens of our country with an extremely narrow definition of "natural born citizen" (requiring two citizen parents in addition to citizenship at birth) were under an obligation to describe the boundaries of that narrow definition in the text of the Constitution. What is written is important. What is not written is equally important.

I don't dispute that, if a person wants to conclude that the term "natural born citizen" requires two citizen parents, the person can construct a rational argument to support that conclusion. I'm saying only that neither the text nor the relevant history compels that conclusion and that if another person wants to conclude that a "natural born citizen" does not require two citizen parents, that person, too, can construct a rational argument to support that less constricted construction.

So, I don't think that the Republican Party was attempting to put an end to constitutional government or to install a usurper into the White House when they selected Charles Evan Hughes (whose father was not an American citizen) as their 1916 presidential nominee. I don't blame them for having ignored the very narrow definition proposed by Long.

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Electors are not constitutional scholars.

Yeah, you're right about that (for the most part). Our founding generation did not establish a technocracy. Instead, it went for a "We, the people" plan.