“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.
Indeed - and seeings as how the founders were mostly natural born subjects of England - they would have been most familiar with that term.
There was nothing in English law that would differentiate a “natural born subject” and someone who was “born a subject”. Those who were born as subjects to England were, under the law, “natural born subjects”.