[gusty]

A voice of reason. Its about time we stick a fork into this natural born citizen thing. All it does is make our side look like a bunch of nutters. Since the 1880’s (anybody born before 4/4/1776 I presume is dead by then) there is only two kinds of citizens, those born in the US whose parents are not foreign diplomats thus eligible to be President, and those born outside the US and naturalized sometime in their life eligible for Congress but not President. There is no third or fourth kind, despite what the nutters insist on.

[Jeff Winston]

There are definitely those of us who are ready to stick a fork into the natural born citizen thing. But there are others who insist on keeping it alive, and what's more, who act as if it's obvious that their nonsense is correct, and anyone who doesn't believe it is a traitor.

So they'll go on, making our side (as you say) look like a bunch of nutters. And on. And on.

Even Minor v. Happersett, the Court case they're so fond of quoting, listed the alternative to being a natural born citizen as being an alien or a foreigner.

In the same passage (the one that birthers twist), the Court noted that "there have been doubts" regarding the citizenship of children of foreigners born on US soil. When they did this, they made plain that they weren't necessarily including the children of resident aliens in the "aliens or foreigners" group, and they weren't necessarily leaving them out of the natural born citizens group. In fact, they told us they weren't going to address the issue:

At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens.

Those doubts were eventually addressed by Wong Kim Ark, in spite of birthers' claims to the contrary.