Legal residence of the parents has no significance. And the 14th Amendment does not address the subject of natural born citizenship.
Article 2, section 1, clause 5 of the Constitution requires the President to be a natural born citizen. The term “natural born citizen” is defined by natural law prevailing at the time the Constitution was written. Neither Rubio nor Cruz are eligible to serve as POTUS.
Dave3200: The term “natural born citizen” is defined by natural law prevailing at the time the Constitution was written.
Isn't Natural Law supposed to be eternal and unchanging? If "natural law" varies with place, time, and public opinion, what differentiates it from any other man-made construct? What is the value of appealing to it?
The term "natural born citizen" is defined by what it meant at the time the Constitution was written.
And it had a definite, specific meaning.
The phrase "natural born" only occurs in ONE context before and at the time the Constitution was written.
Only one.
That of the common law.
And by the common law, all persons born in a country, with very limited exceptions, were - by natural and divine law - members of that country.
Generally speaking, if you were born in England, you were a member of that nation.
And if you were born in a colony, you were a member of that colony.
Because God ordained authorities, and set governments in place. So if you were born under a king, you were subject to that king. If you were born in a realm, you were a member of that realm.
There were a few exceptions, however. If you were born the son of a king or queen who happened to be visiting another country, then your country was that of your royal parents. Also, if your parents were official ambassadors, or members of an invading army, then you were not part of the place where you were born, for similar reasons as that of the children of royalty.
As time went on, the common law, and the Parliament, began to carve out a couple of foreign-birth exceptions as well. First, it was deemed that children of the king, born abroad, were English subjects. Well, that was simply in accordance with the exception that worked the other way around.
Then they decided to grant subjecthood to children born abroad of ordinary English subjects. This wasn't quite consistent with the original doctrine, but quite often people would go abroad, have children, and the children would return to England and live their entire lives there.
So such children were regarded as natural born subjects of England as well.
The same rule was adopted by not one or two, but by all thirteen of the original Colonies, and was in force in all the American States at the time the Constitution was written.
In the first major US citizenship case, Judge Lewis Sandford of New York (Lynch v. Clarke, 1844) reasoned that since the Constitution spoke of natural born citizens, and of citizenship in general, then there must have been an assumed rule for exactly who was and was not a citizen.
He concluded that since the common law rule was in force in every one of the 13 States at the time of the writing and adoption of the Constitution, that was our assumed national rule applied by the Framers and ratifiers of the Constitution.
The US Supreme Court, in 1898, cited Sandford's reasoning approvingly and reached the same conclusion.
That the Framers of the Constitution also believed Congress had the ability to state who, born abroad, was additionally to be regarded as a "natural born citizen" (and thus eligible to the Presidency) is obvious from their actions in the First Congress.
The First Congress and first President promptly passed a law which stated that the children born abroad to US citizens were to be considered as natural born citizens also, as long as their father had ever resided in the United States. (The qualification was obviously included to prevent the creation of generations of American citizens who had never lived here.)
In 1834, James Bayard published A Brief Exposition of the Constitution of the United States. At that time, he stated clearly that it wasn't necessary to be born on US soil in order to be a natural born citizen and eligible to the Presidency. One only had to be a "citizen by birth."
In other words, Bayard specifically stated that people in Ted Cruz's situation were eligible to be President.
Chief Justice John Marshall, the "Great Chief Justice" who dominated the US Supreme Court for 35 years starting just 13 years after the ratification of the Constitution, read Bayard's exposition of the Constitution and wrote him a letter correcting him on a minor point regarding Congress' authority to build postal and military roads.
Aside from that, Chief Justice Marshall said, "I do not recollect a single statement in your book which is not, in my judgment, entirely just."
The statement by Marshall strongly implies that he read the entire book. ("Brief," by the way, meant exactly that: The main body of the book is only 141 pages.)
It seems inconceivable that Chief Justice Marshall would've made such a statement without reading the entire book, and certainly the section on Presidential eligibility would have been at least as important a matter for attention as whether Congress had to ask the States for their permission before building postal and military roads.
So the judgment of the Chief Justice, apparently, is that "natural born citizen" meant "citizen by birth."
This is precisely in accordance with a number of other early authorities that say the qualification for President is that a person must be "born a citizen."
Separately, the distinguished legal expert William Rawle (also later cited by the US Supreme Court on citizenship) wrote that you didn't have to have citizen parents in order to be a natural born citizen: Birth on US soil was enough.
In fact, all major early authorities are in substantial agreement as to the meaning of natural born citizen.
And so are the results of every significant legal case on citizenship.
The meaning came from the common law rule.
It doesn't require both birth on US soil and citizen parents.
It only requires that one be born a citizen.
Therefore, both Marco Rubio (born a US citizen by virtue of birth in the US to non-citizen parents) and Ted Cruz (born a US citizen by virtue of birth abroad to a citizen parent) are natural born citizens, and eligible to the Presidency.