Apparently, YOU have a reading comprehension problem. @Maj. Bill Martin
"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States,...
can you not see that there is a distinction between mere citizenship and the natural born variety?
Absolutely. The difference is whether or not you are a citizen at birth, or become a citizen through the process of naturalization. If you have to be naturalized, then you are not a natural born citizen, and therefore not eligible to be President.
According to Madison's notes on the convention there were three copies of Vattel's The Law of Nations in the room at Philidelphia, one in the original French and two English translations. That's enough for me.
Enough for what? To assume that everything de Vattel wrote was automatically incorporated into the U.S. Constitution?? They also had copies of Blackstone floating around, and probably some other legal treatises as well. When you're writing a brand new Constitution, you of course want to look at as many ideas as you can, and from there, pick and choose from each the ideas that appeal to you. There were tons of different ideas in each of those treatises, many of which contradicted each other. So why assume that they meant "natural born citizen" in the de Vattel sense rather than in the sense of English common law -- in which every single one of them had been raised?
You want to know why they likely had de Vattel? Because the federal Swiss canton system was the closest exemplar out there to the federal system they were looking to develop in the U.S., and de Vattel wrote extensively on federalism. Hell, during this period, there were exactly 13 cantons in the Swiss confederation. Even there, though, the Framers didn't adopt fully the Swiss canton system, and chose to create a stronger central government than the Swiss had. But they at least would have looked at what de Vattel wrote about it to see his arguments and ideas, even if they didn't adopt them.
Law of Nations, Book I, Ch. XIX, at §§ 212-217, is this:
§ 212: Natural-born citizens are those born in the country of parents who are citizens – it is necessary that they be born of a father who is a citizen. If a person is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.
Do yourself a favor and READ THIS!
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No, I don't have a reading comprehension problem. You provided an extensive quote from St. George Tucker, which is exactly the quote to which I was referring.
He makes no mention of de Vattel's Law of Nations in that quote, and certainly not of de Vattel's version of "natural born citizen". None. Which kind of makes sense given that he's a Blackstone guy, and therefore would have defaulted to English Common law rather than any continental law. Tucker's quote -- given that it doesn't even mention de Vattel --- cannot possibly be used to claim he's endorsing de Vattel's meaning of "natural born" over the meaning it had in English Common Law.
The default rule in American legal jurisprudence right from the founding of the country was English common law, and that law applied
unless superseded by legislative enactment. English common law cases from pre-Independence occasionally
still are cited in American courts. So the idea that we should ditch the common law meaning of "natural born" just because there were also copies of a Swiss legal treatise also floating around makes no sense. Swiss law is not the default rule in the U.S., and never has been.
And in any case -- there was no distinctions drawn even in de Vattel between being a citizen at birth, and a "natural born" citizens. The concepts were identical back then, and remain so today.