It appears to me that that second comma makes the next phrase (“at the time … Constitution”) apply to both of the preceding phrases (“No person … Citizen” and “or … States”). The Constitution was adopted on 17 Jun 1788 when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it, so under this interpretation there have only been 11 legitimate presidents: Washington (#1), Adams Sr (#2), Jefferson (#3), Madison (#4), Monroe (#5), Aams Jr (#6), Jackson (#7), Van Buren (#8), Harrison (#9), Polk (#11), and Taylor (#12). All other people who have held the office were born after 17 Jun 1788, and therefore obviously were not citizens on that date.
Presumably punctuation rules of them time rendered this reading incorrect, but I still find it amusing…
Even if the plain text punctuation demanded that reading, you would still have the “absurdity” rule that the plain text doesn’t control when it demands an absurd result.
And to say that the founders would have demanded a hard cut off date of June 17, 1788 as the date in which no President could be born after would be an absurdity because in time nobody alive could be eligible to be President. So that reading is straight out.
I wouldn’t assume that there necessarily was very much in the way of “punctuation rules” at the time. People punctuated in a way that seeme to them to work; that’s all.
Punctuation developed as an aid to reading aloud, at a time when most texts of any importance had to be read aloud, if only because so few people could read. It’s main function was to indicate were you could or should pause, in a way that would help to bring out the sense of the text. But it wasn’t driven entirely by sense; in a long passage you have to pause somewhere or you’ll run out of breath, so we have to put a punctuation mark somewhere, even if the sense doesn’t demand it. conversely in a very short sentence you might not mark a phrase with punctuation marks even though, in a longer sentence, you would mark that phrase. All this led to a certain laxity, or flexibility, about where punctuation marks should or shouldn’t go, and to some extent it was a matter of taste.
It used to be the rule that, when it came to interpreting Acts of Parliament, the punctuation was to be ignored. There were two justifications for this:
First, what gave the statute legal force was not approval by Parliament, or even assent by the monarch. These things were both necessary, but what actually brought into effect was proclamation, which involved the statute being read aloud by heralds. And of course those hearing the statute read aloud can only guess how it is punctuated. They need to understand it without reference to the punctuation.
The second justification was that the legislation considered by parliament was set in type after it has been enacted and assented to by the King’s Printer, and he made the decisions about how to lay it out and punctuate it, so the layout and punctuation was not part of what was enacted by Parliament or assented to by the monarch. Until quite late on the texts that were actually laid in Parliament when proposed legislation was being debated and voted on were handwritten, and lacked all but the most basic punctuation.
While these justifications might have been somewhat weaker by the late 18th, I think that as regards legal texts the attitude that punctuation does not determine meaning was still prevalent. So I don’t think the argument that the meaning of this Article of the Constitution was determined by the placement of the comma would have found much traction at the time.
I thought the Constitution was inscribed by The Hand of Jehovah atop Mount Sinai.