Today, all forms of citizenship are defined by statute.
Aye, there's the rub.
"Today" doesn't apply unless it is a Constitutional amendment to the definition of NBC as it was intended and used by the founders. Otherwise, of course, the Constitution is whatever the current session of Congress says it is.
As I argued upthread, the context of the founder's usage makes it clear they intended NBC in its highest form. The USSC in Minor (IIRC) stipulated the highest form was 2 parents and U.S. birth.
I didn’t mean to be snarky, but I know I come off that way sometimes. Sorry.
My point was and remains that as a straightforward legal matter, every type of US citizenship by birth is defined in the same statute and section. They can be distinguished by their conditionalities, but not by their quality. Every one of these citizens stands before the law co-equal with every other.
Except, for some, when it comes to the Presidency, there is a distinction to be drawn on the basis that a Natural Born Citizen is some sort of super-citizen sub-class of ‘citizen by birth’.
The people making this argument are not entirely without a case. Certainly, there has been a wide range of opinion on the subject in various court cases, but never a case that is squarely on point. Even in those cases where citizenship by birth has been denied to an appellant, in every case I am aware of the appellant had failed to qualify either for citizenship by birth under the conditionalities defined in the statute or failed to maintain his citizenship by fulfilling a post-birth requirement of the statute. There has been no case I know of where any citizen by birth, fully qualified under our laws, has had his or her citizenship abridged or denied in any way later in life. In fact, the cases I referred to above are often replete with commentary affirming that all citizens by birth stand equal in every way before the law.
I understand the originalist argument about the term natural born citizen, and it has some merit. However, it fails to persuade me, after studying this issue for a decade, because there is no persuasive evidence that the Framers held a uniform view of what the phrase actually meant. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that some Framers held to the view of Vattel, which is itself ambiguous as to the necessity of a jus soli component, but crystal clear about the absolute requirement fo a jus sanguinis component. It seems that others held to the English common law view, comparing natural born citizen as used in the Constitution to the ‘natural born subject’ spoken of in Blackwell.
Both these views find their way into later jurisprudence and commentary to disastrous effect, as in Wong Kim Ark, which elevated jus soli citizenship to a level I think never contemplated by the Framers, and which ultimately gave us anchor babies. There is a lot more that I could explicate, and I have on other threads, but suffice it to say here that I have concluded that the originalist argument on this matter is nowhere near the slam-dunk that some believe.
If there is no really definitive originalist argument demonstrating that there was a universal and precise understanding of the term ‘natural born citizen’, I think it is natural and appropriate that Congress has the power as the instrument of the sovereign We the People to define how we will determine with precision and certainty who are citizens by birth and who are not, just as we define other terms that are used in the Constitution without explicit definition, such as, for example, ‘resident’.
The only question really is, does ‘natural born citizen’ mean anything distinguishable from ‘citizen by birth’? I think that the Supreme Court would rule that it does not.