[Uncle Sham]

You are claiming that they gave us a good read as to how they understood the term natural born citizen in the Act of 1790. You then state that they needed to pass an amendment to change the meaning that had been safely placed into the Constitution. The Act of 1790 was not an amendment, so the description they gave has no effect on what the original interpretation might have been. That they eliminated their 1790 description with the 1795 one indicates that perhaps the 1790 version did not reflect their original meaning of the term.

Congress certainly has the power to change Acts of Congress. It could very well have been that they revised the Act of 1790 because the description they had placed in it did not match what their original intent was and wanted to remove/correct their mistake. They may have come to the conclusion that Congress did not have the authority to re-define the term natural born citizen without an amendment process and thus removed it from the Act.

My point is that you cannot look at just the 1790 Act for guidance on this issue. Both Acts and the change made in reference to the term natural born citizen to just citizen together tell us something very important.

[cynwoody]

The Act of 1790 was not an amendment, so the description they gave has no effect on what the original interpretation might have been.

It's convincing evidence of what they thought it meant, and, therefore, how the Constitution should be interpreted. It shoots down de Vattel, etc. SCOTUS frequently engages in such lines of reasoning.

The fact that the 1795 act does not use the term NBC does not mean they were contradicting the 1790 act with respect to NBC. They could easily have written "citizen, but shall not be deemed to be natural born." But they did not. And, even if they had, they don't get to change their mind about the meaning of the Constitution without going through the amendment process.