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18 

TRUMP v. NEW YORK 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

Framers’  understanding  of  that  field,  his  treatise  simply 
cannot bear the weight the Government puts on it.  Vattel’s 
work  discussed  international  law,  not  the  United  States’ 
scheme for apportionment among the States, an issue not 
intrinsically related to the law of nations nor one for which 
founding-era thinkers drew on Vattel.  The Apportionment
Clause emerged from an extensive and uniquely American
debate  over  both  State  representation  and  taxation.    The 
final language tied the two together, such that the burdens
of taxation would flow in proportion to the benefits of rep-
resentation.  See Brief for Historians of the Census as Amici 
Curiae  6–11.  And  however  influential  Vattel  may  have 
been for other topics, the Federal Government did not begin
to  restrict  immigration  into  the  United  States  until  after 
the  Civil  War.  See  Brief  for  State  of  California  et al.  as 
Amicus  Curiae  17.    While  the  Government  offers  isolated 
works from a different body of law—regarding a word that
does not appear in the constitutional text—the better guide
to the Constitution’s meaning is the specific historical evi-
dence about domestic apportionment, as well as the decades
of consistent practice that comports with the Clause’s plain 
terms. 

Second, and more importantly for this case, the Framers’ 
intent is not our focus.  Instead, the question is the meaning 
of the statute enacted in 1929.  Even if the Government’s 
sources  evince  some  ambiguity  over  the  meaning  of  the 
Constitution’s census provisions in 1787 or 1868—a doubt-
ful proposition—the historical record had resolved it by the
time of the 1929 Act.  There is simply no basis for thinking 
that when Congress enacted the statute that mirrored the 
constitutional language it was intending to depart so fun-
damentally from the procedures that had been consistently 
applied up to that point.

Apart  from  the  historical  evidence,  the  Government  of-
fers  little  more  than  its  assertion  that  excluding  aliens 
without  lawful  status  makes  good  policy  sense.  As  the