“The Framers saw no divided loyalty in someone of foreign parentage being born and raised in the US. If they were raised outside of the US, then they obviously believed the voters could judge for themselves.”
Source/quotes please. Directly from the Framers. [This is the first I’ve heard of someone speaking from inside the minds of the Framers, who knows exactly what they were thinking and why they thought it, etc. If it’s not complete projection or supposed mindreading, then surely you have quotes to back it up.] Thank you in advance.
It is obvious from the legal language they used - “natural born citizen”, which is a term that was used in law back then interchangeably with “natural born subject”. In the years prior and right after the Constitution was written, the Mass legislature bounced back and forth between the terms in their citizenship laws and proceedings.
NBC wasn’t something pulled out of thin air. It was used interchangeably with natural born subject, and NBS has a well established legal meaning: born within the realm. The WKA decision discusses it at great length.
NBC did NOT come from Vattel. The first translation of Vattel to use that term was made 10 years AFTER the Constitution. Nor was NBC a term made up out of thin air.
Many of the men who wrote the Constitution were lawyers, as were most of the members of the legislatures that ratified the Constitution. When lawyers use a legal term in a legal document, it is safe to assume they are using its known legal meaning. And as the WKA decision wrote:
“It thus clearly appears that, by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the Crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, the jurisdiction of the English Sovereign, and therefore 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.
III. 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.”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0169_0649_ZO.html
Let me repeat for emphasis:
“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.”