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Page Number: 14.0

6 

UNITED STATES v. VAELLO MADERO 

THOMAS, J., concurring 

Distrust 33 (1980); McConnell 167; K. Roosevelt, Forget the 
Fundamentals: Fixing Substantive Due Process, 8 U. Pa. J.
Const. L. 983, 997 (2006).

In  sum,  the  text  and  history  of  the  Fifth  Amendment’s
Due Process Clause provide limited support for reading into
that provision an equal protection guarantee. 

II 

Even if the Due Process Clause has no equal protection 
component, the Constitution may still prohibit the Federal 
Government  from  discriminating  on  the  basis  of  race,  at 
least with respect to civil rights.  While my conclusions re-
main tentative, I think that the textual source of that obli-
gation may reside in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizen-
ship  Clause.  That  Clause  provides:  “All  persons  born  or 
naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdic-
tion  thereof,  are  citizens  of  the  United  States  and  of  the 
State wherein they reside.”  Amdt. 14, §1, cl. 1.  As I sketch 
out briefly below, considerable historical evidence suggests
that  the  Citizenship  Clause  “was  adopted  against  a 
longstanding political and legal tradition that closely asso-
ciated the status of ‘citizenship’ with the entitlement to le-
gal equality.”  R. Williams, Originalism and the Other De-
segregation  Decision,  99  Va.  L. Rev.  493,  501  (2013) 
(Williams);  see  also  A.  Amar,  Intratextualism,  112  Harv. 
L. Rev. 747, 768–769 (1999).  Thus, the Citizenship Clause 
could provide a firmer foundation for Bolling’s result than 
the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. 

A 
In  the  years  before  the  Fourteenth  Amendment’s  adop-
tion, jurists and legislators often connected citizenship with
equality.  Namely, the absence or presence of one entailed 
the absence or presence of the other.  See Williams 513–515 
(discussing  political  discourse  during  the  1820s).    By  the