Trump v. Barbara · ¶494

Wong Kim Ark’s fallback argument is no better than the first. The opinion speculates that Congress might have thought that “not subject to any foreign power” trimmed the birthright-citizenship rule too much and that this accounts for Congress’s use of different language in the Fourteenth Amendment. Id., at 688. That suggestion flies in the face of all the reasons previously mentioned why the citizenship tests in the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment must be understood to be substantively identical.

slip opinion, revised 7/01/26
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