The Madison quotation has been used in legal briefs submitted in eligibility lawsuits and Obama ballot challenges since 2008. Its up to judges to decide if the quotation is out of context or not.
In his 1829 treatise, A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, William Rawle (1759-1836), who in 1791 had been appointed the U.S. Attorney for Pennsylvania by George Washington, wrote that:
“The citizens of each state constituted the citizens of the United States when the Constitution was adopted. ... [He] who was subsequently born the citizen of a State, became at the moment of his birth a citizen of the United States. Therefore every person born within the United States, its territories or districts, whether the parents are citizens or aliens, is a natural born citizen in the sense of the Constitution, and entitled to all the rights and privileges appertaining to that capacity. .... Under our Constitution the question is settled by its express language, and when we are informed that ... no person is eligible to the office of President unless he is a natural born citizen, the principle that the place of birth creates the relative quality is established as to us.”
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_4_citizenships23.html
In 1898 the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v Wong Kim Ark that:
“[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’
The court went on to say: “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.’
and the majority decision stated:
“…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.”
You cannot cite any authority on which Rawle relied for his personal opinion as to what a “natural born Citizen” is. And by the way, Rawle was just one of those “authorities” to whom Minor referred when it said “some authorities” (the Court did not even feel it merited mentioning their names) go further and consider as “citizens” those born in the country without reference to their parents. Note that our Supreme Court did not cite any case that so held but just referred to “some authorities” that took what the Court described as a doubtful position. ... Puzo 2009.
Nonsense.
The Declaration of Independence is a document with its roots in the law of God. Perhaps the best place to begin understanding how the Declaration serves in this capacity is to discern how the framers understood and applied its principles to the creation and formation of civil government. If we can understand how they took the Declaration’s principles and applied them to the formation of constitutions, then we too should be able to apply those same principles to any other legal difficulties that our constitutional governments may face.
The first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence sets the stage for the American revolution and its indispensable reliance on the laws of God, the Creator.26 It declares:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
By invoking the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” the 56 signers of the Declaration incorporated a legal standard of freedom into the forms of government that would follow. The theory of freedom adopted was simply that God’s law was supreme and gave freedom. The phrase “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” referred to the laws that God in his capacity as the Creator of the universe had established for the governance of people, nations and nature. These laws are variously described as the laws of Creation, God’s Creation laws or as the framers elected to refer to them, as the laws of nature and of nature’s God. This body of law, whatever it is called, can be ascertained by people through an examination of God’s creation, the text of the Bible, and to a certain degree, instinct or reason.