Your post is in reply to post #1 - and the author is discussing Article II of the Constitution.
The Constitution currently envisions only TWO ways of becoming a U.S. citizen - either one is naturalized or one is natural born.
Why do you think the term “naturalized” is used? What are they naturalizing? One is either natural, meaning the natural act of being born itself is sufficient to convey citizenship; or one is naturalized via a legal process.
Your claim was that this view of the law rendered verbiage of the Constitution superfluous - I pointed out to you that such a position is far from the truth. A view that citizens at birth are natural born citizens doesn't render Article II qualifications meaningless - it clearly disqualifies ONE type of citizen.
What type of citizen is that?
Naturalized.
“Why do you think the term ‘naturalized’ is used?”
I often wonder how birthers justify applying that term to the native born, given their insistence on a fundamental difference between natural born citizens and native born citizens. Is it merely a term of art, with no real significance? Or is being “made natural” actually what happens?
In that case, if you are “made natural” at birth, doesn’t that make you a natural born citizen? How can you be made natural at birth and not be born a natural citizen? Is it, as I theorized with another poster, that there’s a lacuna in the few seconds after birth. Like, only when you are one second old does the positive law kick in and make you natural. If there’s no lag, and being made natural coincides with being born, I don’t see how you get anything but natural born.
“Your claim was that this view of the law rendered verbiage of the Constitution superfluous - I pointed out to you that such a position is far from the truth. A view that citizens at birth are natural born citizens doesn’t render Article II qualifications meaningless - it clearly disqualifies ONE type of citizen.”
To play devil’s advocate, the retort will probably be along the lines of that making the word “natural” superfluous. That is, if it’s meant to exclude naturalized citizens it would possess the same meaning as “born citizens” without the “natural.”
To this can be shot back the fact that “natural born” was a common phrase, like for instance “trade and commerce,” which we do not take to mean that commerce is something different from trade (this pops up when people seek the definition of “commerce” to construe the Commerce Clause, and happen upon that parlance in the constitutional debates). Those two words together, “natural” and “born” always denoted “citizen from birth.” They could very well have said simply “born citizens,” but that’s not how people talked.