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Page Number: 18

14 

MASLENJAK v. UNITED STATES 

Opinion of the Court 

U. S. 251, 265 (1946) (“The most elementary conceptions of
justice and public policy require that the wrongdoer shall 
bear the risk of the uncertainty which his own wrong has
created”).

Section 1425(a) is best read to take those exigencies and 
equities into account, by enabling the Government (as just 
described)  to  rest  on  disqualifications  that  a  thwarted
investigation  predictably  would  have  uncovered.    A  yet-
stricter causal requirement, demanding proof positive that
a disqualifying fact would have been found, sets the bar so
high  that  “we  cannot  conceive  that  Congress  intended” 
that  result.  Kungys,  485  U. S.,  at  777  (opinion  of  Scalia, 
J.).  And  nothing  in  the  statutory  text  requires  that  ap-
proach.  While  §1425(a)  clearly  imports  some  kind  of
causal or means-end relation, see supra, at 5–9, Congress
left that relation’s precise character unspecified.  Cf. Bur-
rage v. United States, 571 U. S. ___, ___ (2014) (slip op., at
10) (noting that courts have not always construed criminal
statutes  to  “require[ ]  strict  but-for  causality,”  and  have 
greater  reason  to  reject  such  a  reading  when  the  laws  do 
not use language like “results from” or “because of ”).  The 
open-endedness  of  the  statutory  language  allows,  indeed
supports, our adoption of a demanding but still practicable
causal standard. 

Even  when  the  Government  can  make  its  two-part
showing, however, the defendant may be able to overcome
it.  Section  1425(a)  is not  a  tool  for  denaturalizing  people
who, the available evidence indicates, were actually quali-
fied  for  the  citizenship  they  obtained.    When  addressing 
the civil denaturalization statute, this Court insisted on a 
similar  point:  We  provided  the  defendant  with  an  oppor-
tunity  to  rebut  the  Government’s  case  “by  showing,
through a preponderance of the evidence, that the statutory 
requirement  as  to  which  [a  lie]  had  a  natural  tendency 
to produce a favorable decision was in fact met.”  Kungys, 
485 U. S., at 777 (opinion of Scalia, J.) (emphasis deleted);