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16 

TRUMP v. NEW YORK 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

the  interpretation  reflected  in  the  memorandum,  after
nearly 100 years of a contrary and consistent position, is yet 
another strong indication that the Government’s reading of
the statute is wrong.  See Montana v. Wyoming, 563 U. S. 
368, 387 (2011).

To summarize: The text of the 1929 Act is concerned with 
usual residence, not immigration status.  The history, both
before and after the legislation, has for decades been in ac-
cord  with  that  straightforward  interpretation.    And  all 
three branches of Government, when facing the exact ques-
tion presented in this case, have uniformly arrived at the 
same result. 

B 
In the face of this evidence, the Government principally
relies on scattered historic sources from the founding era, 
which it argues imbue the words of the statute with a more
restrictive meaning.  The Government’s argument relies on 
two assumptions.  First, the Framers intended for the con-
stitutional language “whole number of free persons” to be 
read  as  synonymous  with  the  word  “inhabitant,”  a  legal 
term of art the Government believes excludes those who are 
in the country in violation of the law.  Second, when Con-
gress carried forward the constitutional text into the 1929
Act, it understood those words to have that narrower mean-
ing.

There are defects in both links of this chain.  First, the 
argument is not convincing with respect to the widely ac-
cepted meaning of the Constitution, either in the founding
era or at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. 
In Franklin, we understood the term “inhabitant” as com-
parable  to  the  concept  of  “usual  residency,”  which,  as  the
analysis above demonstrates, does not turn on immigration 
status.  505 U. S., at 804–805.  The historical evidence put
forward by the Government does not undermine that result. 
Many of the Government’s sources simply show that the