Hey, I’m not the one drawing a legalistic distinction between the idea of subject and citizen.
The concepts in common law that applied to subjects were transferred to the United States legal system under the term citizens, since our country has no subjects.
The idea that there is a distinction is due to a ludicrous claim that all common law references to subjects and their allegiance are not transferrable to the United States, since we don’t have subjects.
Hey, I’m not the one saying that a subject who owes allegiance to a person is identical to a citizen of a Constitutional Republic. If they aren’t identical in meaning, then the framers would not have “transferred” the definition from one term to that of another that shares only 66% of the same words.
Subjects were held to be in perpetual allegiance to the English monarchy.
Expatriation was and is a right that was given an extraordinary amount of consideration by our Founders.
Subjects could not renounce their allegiance, therefore expatriation was not possible. Once a subject of the King of England, always a subject of the king of England, no matter where.
Our Founders did in fact renounce their allegiance and were met with war because of the dispute over it, not once but twice.
The meaning of natural-born citizen and natural born subject do not equate, not then, certainly not to our Founders who were for the most part considered natural born subjects and were under the threat of imprisonment or death for challenging it, and not now.
The treatise that spells out legalities as far as citizenship under a constitutional republic was by all accounts quite popular with those same Founders. Lo and behold, it contains a definition of natural-born citizenship that has been cited nearly word for word by numerous Supreme Court justices and several prominent members of Congress when proposing Amendments dealing with citizenship.
Oddly, this definition is rejected by some, in favor of a term pertaining to a feudal relationship to a sovereign monarch, the very same monarch explicitly rejected by those Founders.
Strange.