Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/387/253
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 18:25:48+00:00

Document:
Petitioner, of Polish birth, became a naturalized American citizen in 1926. He went to Israel in 1950, and in 1951 voted in an Israeli legislative election. The State Department subsequently refused to renew his passport, maintaining that petitioner had lost his citizenship by virtue of § 401(e) of the Nationality Act of 1940 which provides that a United States citizen shall "lose" his citizenship if he votes in a foreign political election. Petitioner then brought this declaratory judgment action alleging the unconstitutionality of § 401(e). On the basis of Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44, the District Court and Court of Appeals held that Congress, under its implied power to regulate foreign affairs, can strip an American citizen of his citizenship.
Held: Congress has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof. Perez v. Brownell, supra, overruled. Pp. 256-268.
(a) Congress has no express power under the Constitution to strip a person of citizenship, and no such power can be sustained as an implied attribute of sovereignty, as was recognized by Congress before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, and a mature and well considered dictum in Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 9 Wheat. 738, 827, is to the same effect. Pp. 257-261.
(b) The Fourteenth Amendment's provision that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States . . ." completely controls the status of citizenship, and prevents the cancellation of petitioner's citizenship. Pp. 262-268.
Petitioner, born in Poland in 1893, immigrated to this country in 1912 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1926. He went to Israel in 1950, and in 1951, he voluntarily voted in an election for the Israeli Knesset, the legislative body of Israel. In 1960, when he applied for renewal of his United States passport, the Department of State refused to grant it on the sole ground that he had lost his American citizenship by virtue of § 401(e) of the Nationality Act of 1940, which provides that a United States citizen shall "lose" his citizenship if he votes "in a political election in a foreign state." [n1] Petitioner then brought this declaratory judgment action in federal district court alleging that § 401(e) violates both the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and § 1, cl. 1, of the Fourteenth Amendment, [n2] which grants American citizenship to persons like petitioner. Because neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor any other provision of the Constitution expressly grants Congress the power to [p255] take away that citizenship once it has been acquired, petitioner contended that the only way he could lose his citizenship was by his own voluntary renunciation of it. Since the Government took the position that § 401(e) empowers it to terminate citizenship without the citizen's voluntary renunciation, petitioner argued that this section is prohibited by the Constitution. The District Court and the Court of Appeals, rejecting this argument, held that Congress has constitutional authority forcibly to take away citizenship for voting in a foreign country based on its implied power to regulate foreign affairs. Consequently, petitioner was held to have lost his American citizenship regardless of his intention not to give it up. This is precisely what this Court held in Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44.
Petitioner, relying on the same contentions about voluntary renunciation of citizenship which this Court rejected in upholding § 401(e) in Perez, urges us to reconsider that case, adopt the view of the minority there, and overrule it. That case, decided by a 5-4 vote almost 10 years ago, has been a source of controversy and confusion ever since, as was emphatically recognized in the opinions of all the judges who participated in this case below. [n3] Moreover, in the other cases decided with [n4] and since [n5] Perez, this Court has consistently invalidated on a case-by-case basis various other statutory sections providing for involuntary expatriation. It has done so on various grounds, and has refused to hold that citizens can be expatriated without their voluntary renunciation of [p256] citizenship. These cases, as well as many commentators, [n6] have cast great doubt upon the soundness of Perez. Under these circumstances, we granted certiorari to reconsider it, 385 U.S. 917. In view of the many recent opinions and dissents comprehensively discussing all the issues involved, [n7] we deem it unnecessary to treat this subject at great length.
id. at 58, n. 3, the majority specifically rejected the "notion that the power of Congress to terminate citizenship depends upon the citizen's assent," id. at 61.
The introduction of this article declares the opinion . . . that Congress could not declare the acts which should amount to a renunciation of citizenship; otherwise there would have been no necessity for this last resort. When it was settled that Congress could not declare that the acceptance of a pension or an office from a foreign Emperor amounted to a disfranchisement of the citizen, it must surely be conceded that they could not declare that any other act did. The cases to which their powers before this amendment confessedly did not extend are very strong, and induce a belief that Congress could not in any case declare the acts which should cause "a person to cease to be a citizen." The want of power in a case like this, where the individual has given the strongest evidence of attachment to a foreign potentate and an entire renunciation of the feelings and principles of an American citizen, certainly establishes the absence of all power to pass a bill like the present one. Although the intention with which it was introduced, and the title of the bill declare that it is to insure and foster the right of the citizen, the direct and inevitable effect of the bill, is an assumption of power by Congress to declare that certain acts when committed shall amount to a renunciation of citizenship.
[A]llegiance imports an obligation on the citizen or subject, the correlative right to which resides in the sovereign power: allegiance in this country is not due to Congress, but to the people, with whom the sovereign power is found; it is, therefore, by the people only that any alteration can be made of the existing institutions with respect to allegiance.
But, if the Constitution had intended to give to Congress so delicate a power, it would have been expressly granted. That it was a delicate power, and ought not to be loosely inferred, . . . appeared in a strong light, when it was said, and could not be denied, that to determine the manner in which a citizen may relinquish his right of citizenship, is equivalent to determining how he shall be divested of that right. The effect of assuming the exercise of these powers will be, that, by acts of Congress a man may not only be released from all the liabilities, but from all the privileges of a citizen. If you pass this bill, . . . you have only one step further to go, and say that such and such acts shall be considered as presumption of the intention of the citizen to expatriate, and thus take from him the privileges of a citizen. . . . [Q]uestions affecting the right of the citizen were questions to be regulated, not by the laws of the General or State Governments, but by Constitutional provisions. If there was anything [p261] essential to our notion of a Constitution, . . . it was this: that, while the employment of the physical force of the country is in the hands of the Legislature, those rules which determine what constitutes the rights of the citizen, shall be a matter of Constitutional provision.
[The naturalized citizen] becomes a member of the society, possessing all the rights of a native citizen, and standing, in the view of the constitution, on the footing of a native. The constitution does not authorize Congress to enlarge or abridge those rights. The simple power of the national Legislature, is to prescribe a uniform rule of naturalization, and the exercise of this power exhausts it, so far as respects the individual.
Although these legislative and judicial statements may be regarded as inconclusive and must be considered in the historical context in which they were made, [n15] any doubt [p262] as to whether prior to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment Congress had the power to deprive a person against his will of citizenship, once obtained, should have been removed by the unequivocal terms of the Amendment itself. It provides its own constitutional rule in language calculated completely to control the status of citizenship: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States. . . ." There is no indication in these words of a fleeting citizenship, good at the moment it is acquired but subject to destruction by the Government at any time. Rather the Amendment can most reasonably be read as defining a citizenship which a citizen keeps unless he voluntarily relinquishes it. Once acquired, this Fourteenth Amendment citizenship was not to be shifted, canceled, or diluted at the will of the Federal Government, the States, or any other governmental unit.
It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. . . . We desired to put this question of citizenship and the rights of citizens . . . under the civil rights bill beyond the legislative power. . . .
a party to the act dissolving the tie between the citizen and his country . . . where the statute simply prescribes the manner in which the citizen shall proceed to perpetuate the evidence of his intention, or election, to renounce his citizenship by expatriation.
To enforce expatriation or exile against a citizen without his consent is not a power anywhere belonging to this Government. No conservative-minded [p265] statesman, no intelligent legislator, no sound lawyer has ever maintained any such power in any branch of the Government. The lawless precedents created in the delirium of war . . . of sending men by force into exile, as a punishment for political opinion, were violations of this great law . . . of the Constitution. . . . The men who debated the question in 1818 failed to see the true distinction. . . . They failed to comprehend that it is not the Government, but that it is the individual, who has the right and the only power of expatriation. . . . [I]t belongs and appertains to the citizen, and not to the Government, and it is the evidence of his election to exercise his right, and not the power to control either the election or the right itself, which is the legitimate subject matter of legislation. There has been, and there can be, no legislation under our Constitution to control in any manner the right itself.
Congress having no power to abridge the rights conferred by the Constitution upon those who have become naturalized citizens by virtue of acts of Congress, a fortiori no act . . . of Congress . . . [p267] can affect citizenship acquired as a birthright, by virtue of the Constitution itself. . . . The Fourteenth Amendment, while it leaves the power where it was before, in Congress, to regulate naturalization, has conferred no authority upon Congress to restrict the effect of birth, declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship.
Because the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, and of the expatriation proposals which preceded and followed it, like most other legislative history, contains many statements from which conflicting inferences can be drawn, our holding might be unwarranted if it rested entirely or principally upon that legislative history. But it does not. Our holding, we think, is the only one that can stand in view of the language and the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, and our construction of that Amendment, we believe, comports more nearly than Perez with the principles of liberty and equal justice to all that the entire Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to guarantee. Citizenship is no light trifle [p268] to be jeopardized any moment Congress decides to do so under the name of one of its general or implied grants of power. In some instances, loss of citizenship can mean that a man is left without the protection of citizenship in any country in the world -- as a man without a country. Citizenship in this Nation is a part of a cooperative affair. Its citizenry is the country, and the country is its citizenry. The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship. We hold that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to, and does, protect every citizen of this Nation against a congressional forcible destruction of his citizenship, whatever his creed, color, or race. Our holding does no more than to give to this citizen that which is his own, a constitutional right to remain a citizen in a free country unless he voluntarily relinquishes that citizenship.
(e) Voting in a political election in a foreign state or participating in an election or plebiscite to determine the sovereignty over foreign territory.
2. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. . . ."
3. 250 F.Supp. 686; 361 F.2d 102, 105.
4. Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86; Nishikawa v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 129.
6. See, e.g., Agata, Involuntary Expatriation and Schneider v. Rusk, 27 U.Pitt.L.Rev. 1 (1965); Hurst, Can Congress Take Away Citizenship?, 29 Rocky Mt.L.Rev. 62 (1956); Kurland, Foreword: "Equal in Origin and Equal in Title to the Legislative and Executive Branches of the Government," 78 Harv.L.Rev. 143, 169-175 (1964); Comment, 56 Mich.L.Rev. 1142 (1958); Note, Forfeiture of Citizenship Through Congressional Enactments, 21 U.Cin.L.Rev. 59 (1952); 40 Cornell L.Q. 365 (1955); 25 S.Cal.L.Rev.196 (1952). But see, e.g., Comment, The Expatriation Act of 1954, 64 Yale L.J. 1164 (1955).
7. See Perez v. Brownell, supra, at 62 (dissenting opinion of THE CHIEF JUSTICE), 79 (dissenting opinion of MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS); Trop v. Dulles, supra, at 91-93 (part I of opinion of Court); Nishikawa v. Dulles, supra, at 138 (concurring opinion of MR. JUSTICE BLACK).
8. For a history of the early American view of the right of expatriation, including these congressional proposals, see generally Roche, The Early Development of United States Citizenship (1949); Tsiang, The Question of Expatriation in America Prior to 1907 (1942); Dutcher, The Right of Expatriation, 11 Am.L.Rev. 447 (1877); Roche, The Loss of American Nationality -- The Development of Statutory Expatriation, 99 U.Pa.L.Rev. 25 (1950); Slaymaker, The Right of the American Citizen to Expatriate, 37 Am.L.Rev.191 (1903).
9. 4 Annals of Cong. 1005, 102-1030 (1794); 7 Annals of Cong. 349 et seq. (1797).
10. See, e.g., Talbot v. Janson, 3 Dall. 133.
11. 31 Annals of Cong. 495 (1817).
12. Id. at 1036-1037, 1058 (1818). Although some of the opponents, believing that citizenship was derived from the States, argued that any power to prescribe the mode for its relinquishment rested in the States, they were careful to point out that "the absence of all power from the State Legislatures would not vest it in us." Id. at 1039.
13. The amendment had been proposed by the 11th Cong., 2d Sess. See The Constitution of the United States of America, S.Doc. No. 39, 88th Cong., 1st Sess., 77-78 (1964).
14. Id. at 1071. It is interesting to note that the proponents of the bill, such as Congressman Cobb of Georgia, considered it to be "the simple declaration of the manner in which a voluntary act, in the exercise of a natural right, may be performed" and denied that it created or could lead to the creation of "a presumption of relinquishment of the right of citizenship." Id. at 1068.
15. The dissenting opinion here points to the fact that a Civil War Congress passed two Acts designed to deprive military deserters to the Southern side of the rights of citizenship. Measures of this kind passed in those days of emotional stress and hostility are by no means the most reliable criteria for determining what the Constitution means.
16. Cong.Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2768-2769, 2869, 2890 et seq. (1866). See generally, Flack, Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment 88-94 (1908).
So long as a citizen does not expressly dissolve his allegiance and does not swear allegiance to another country his citizenship remains in statu quo, unaltered and unimpaired.
18. Proposals of Representatives Pruyn of New York (id. at 1130) and Van Trump of Ohio (id. at 1801, 2311).
19. While Van Trump disagreed with the 1818 opponents as to whether Congress had power to prescribe a means of voluntary renunciation of citizenship, he wholeheartedly agreed with their premise that the right of expatriation belongs to the citizen, not to the Government, and that the Constitution forbids the Government from being party to the act of expatriation. Van Trump simply thought that the opponents of the 1818 proposal failed to recognize that their mutual premise would not be violated by an Act which merely prescribed "how . . . [the rights of citizenship] might be relinquished at the option of the person in whom they were vested." Cong.Globe, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 1804 (1868).
It is a subject which, in our opinion, ought not to be legislated upon. . . . [T]his comes within the scope and character of natural rights which no Government has the right to control and which no Government can confer. And wherever this subject is alluded to in the Constitution -- . . . it is in the declaration that Congress shall have no power whatever to legislate upon these matters.
21. 15 Stat. 223, R.S. § 1999.
22. Some have referred to this part. of the decision as a holding, see, e.g., Hurst, supra, 29 Rocky Mt.L.Rev. at 779; Comment, 56 Mich.L.Rev. at 1153-1154; while others have referred to it as obiter dictum, see, e.g., Roche, supra, 99 U.Pa.L.Rev. at 26-27. Whichever it was, the statement was evidently the result of serious consideration, and is entitled to great weight.
23. Of course, as THE CHIEF JUSTICE said in his dissent, 356 U.S. at 66, naturalization unlawfully procured can be set aside. See, e.g., Knauer v. United States, 328 U.S. 654; Baumgartner v. United States, 322 U.S. 665; Schneiderman v. United States, 320 U.S. 118.
Almost 10 years ago, in Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44, the Court upheld the constitutionality of § 401(e) of the Nationality Act of 1940, 54 Stat. 1169. The section deprives of his nationality any citizen who has voted in a foreign political election. The Court reasoned that Congress derived from its power to regulate foreign affairs authority to expatriate any citizen who intentionally commits acts which may be prejudicial to the foreign relations of the United States, and which reasonably may be deemed to indicate a dilution of his allegiance to this country. Congress, it was held, could appropriately consider [p269] purposeful voting in a foreign political election to be such an act.
The Court today overrules Perez, and declares § 401(e) unconstitutional, by a remarkable process of circumlocution. First, the Court fails almost entirely to dispute the reasoning in Perez; it is essentially content with the conclusory and quite unsubstantiated assertion that Congress is without "any general power, express or implied," to expatriate a citizen "without his assent." [n1] Next, the Court embarks upon a lengthy, albeit incomplete, survey of the historical background of the congressional power at stake here, and yet, at the end, concedes that the history is susceptible of "conflicting inferences." The Court acknowledges that its conclusions might not be warranted by that history alone, and disclaims that the decision today relies, even "principally," upon it. Finally, the Court declares that its result is bottomed upon the "language [p270] and the purpose" of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; in explanation, the Court offers only the terms of the clause itself, the contention that any other result would be "completely incongruous," and the essentially arcane observation that the "citizenry is the country and the country is its citizenry."
There is no need here to rehearse Mr. Justice Frankfurter's opinion for the Court in Perez; it then proved and still proves to my satisfaction that § 401(e) is within the power of Congress. [n2] It suffices simply to supplement Perez with an examination of the historical evidence which the Court in part recites, and which provides the only apparent basis for many of the Court's conclusions. As will be seen, the available historical evidence is not only inadequate to support the Court's abandonment of Perez, but, with due regard for the [p271] restraints that should surround the judicial invalidation of an Act of Congress, even seems to confirm Perez' soundness.
Not much evidence is available from the period prior to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment through which the then-prevailing attitudes on these constitutional questions can now be determined. The questions pertinent here were only tangentially debated; controversy centered instead upon the wider issues of whether a citizen might under any circumstances renounce his citizenship, and, if he might, whether that right should be conditioned upon any formal prerequisites. [n3] Even the discussion of these issues was seriously clouded by the widely accepted view that authority to regulate the incidents of citizenship had been retained, at least in part, by the several States. [n4] It should therefore be remembered that the evidence which is now available may not necessarily represent any carefully considered, still less prevailing, viewpoint upon the present issues.
Measured even within these limitations, the Court's evidence for this period is remarkably inconclusive; the Court relies simply upon the rejection by Congress of [p272] legislation proposed in 1794, 1797, and 1818, and upon an isolated dictum from the opinion of Chief Justice Marshall in Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 9 Wheat. 738. This, as will appear, is entirely inadequate to support the Court's conclusion, particularly in light of other and more pertinent evidence which the Court does not notice.
The expatriation of unwilling citizens was apparently first discussed in the lengthy congressional debates of 1794 and 1795, which culminated eventually in the Uniform Naturalization Act of 1795. [n5] 1 Stat. 414. Little contained in those debates is pertinent here. The present question was considered only in connection with an amendment, offered by Congressman Hillhouse of Connecticut, which provided that any American who acquired a foreign citizenship should not subsequently be permitted to repatriate in the United States. Although this obscure proposal scarcely seems relevant to the present issues, it was apparently understood, at least by some members, to require the automatic expatriation of an American who acquired a second citizenship. Its discussion in the House consumed substantially less than one day, and, of this debate, only the views of two Congressmen, other than Hillhouse, were recorded by the Annals. [n6] Murray of Maryland, for reasons immaterial here, supported the proposal. In response, Baldwin of Georgia urged that foreign citizenship was often conferred only as a mark of esteem, and that it would be unfair to deprive of his domestic citizenship an American honored in this fashion. There is no indication that any member believed the proposal to be forbidden by the Constitution. The measure was rejected by the House without a reported [p273] vote, and no analogous proposal was offered in the Senate. Insofar as this brief exchange is pertinent here, it establishes, at most, that two or more members believed the proposal both constitutional and desirable, and that some larger number determined, for reasons that are utterly obscure, that it should not be adopted.
The Court next relies upon the rejection of proposed legislation in 1797. The bill there at issue would have forbidden the entry of American citizens into the service of any foreign state in time of war; its sixth section included machinery by which a citizen might voluntarily expatriate himself. [n7] The bill contained nothing which would have expatriated unwilling citizens, and the debates do not include any pronouncements relevant to that issue. It is difficult to see how the failure of that bill might be probative here.
Any statute, it was thought, which dissolved federal citizenship while a man remained a citizen of a State "would be inoperative." [n11] Surely the Court does not revive this entirely discredited doctrine, and yet, so long as it does not, it is difficult to see that any significant support for the ruling made today may be derived from the statements on which the Court relies. To sever the statements from their constitutional premises, as the Court has apparently done, is to transform the meaning these expressions were intended to convey. Finally, it must be remembered that these were merely the views of three Congressmen; nothing in the debates indicates that their constitutional doubts were shared by any substantial number of the other 67 members who eventually opposed the bill. They were plainly not accepted by the 58 members who voted in the bill's favor. The bill's opponents repeatedly urged that, whatever its constitutional validity, the bill was imprudent [p275] and undesirable. Pindall of Virginia, for example, asserted that a citizen who employed its provisions would have "motives of idleness or criminality," [n12] and that the bill would thus cause "much evil." [n13] McLane of Delaware feared that citizens would use the bill to escape service in the armed forces in time of war; he warned that the bill would, moreover, weaken "the love of country so necessary to individual happiness and national prosperity." [n14] He even urged that "The commission of treason, and the objects of plunder and spoil, are equally legalized by this bill." [n15] Lowndes of South Carolina cautioned the House that difficulties might again arise with foreign governments over the rights of seamen if the bill were passed. [n16] Given these vigorous and repeated arguments, it is quite impossible to assume, as the Court apparently has, that any substantial portion of the House was motivated wholly, or even in part, by any particular set of constitutional assumptions. These three statements must, instead, be taken as representative only of the beliefs of three members, premised chiefly upon constitutional doctrines which have subsequently been rejected, and expressed in a debate in which the present issues were not directly involved.
The last piece of evidence upon which the Court relies for this period is a brief obiter dictum from the lengthy opinion for the Court in Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 9 Wheat. 738, 827, written by Mr. Chief Justice Marshall. This use of the dictum is entirely unpersuasive, for its terms and context make quite plain that it cannot have been intended to reach the questions presented [p276] here. The central issue before the Court in Osborn was the right of the bank to bring its suit for equitable relief in the courts of the United States. In argument, counsel for Osborn had asserted that, although the bank had been created by the laws of the United States, it did not necessarily follow that any cause involving the bank had arisen under those laws. Counsel urged by analogy that the naturalization of an alien might as readily be said to confer upon the new citizen a right to bring all his actions in the federal courts. Id. at 813-814 [argument of counsel omitted from electronic version]. Not surprisingly, the Court rejected the analogy, and remarked that an act of naturalization "does not proceed to give, to regulate, or to prescribe his capacities," since the Constitution demands that a naturalized citizen must in all respects stand "on the footing of a native." Id. at 827. The Court plainly meant no more than that counsel's analogy is broken by Congress' inability to offer a naturalized citizen rights or capacities which differ in any particular from those given to a native-born citizen by birth. Mr. Justice Johnson's discussion of the analogy in dissent confirms the Court's purpose. Id. at 875-876.
This second explanation is fully substantiated by the debate in [p279] 1818; the statements from that debate set out in the opinion for the Court were, as I have noted, bottomed on the reasoning that, since allegiance given by an individual to a State could not be dissolved by Congress, a federal statute could not regulate expatriation. It surely follows that this "obscure enterprise" [n23] in 1810, motivated by now discredited constitutional premises, cannot offer any significant guidance for solution of the important issues now before us.
Twelve months later, and less than a year before its passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress adopted a second measure which included provisions that permitted the expatriation of unwilling citizens. Section 21 of the Enrollment Act of 1865 provided that deserters from the military service of the United States "shall be deemed and taken to have voluntarily relinquished and forfeited their rights of citizenship and their rights to become citizens. . . ." [n28] The same section extended these disabilities to persons who departed the United States with intent to avoid "draft into the military or naval service. . . ." [n29] The bitterness of war did not cause Congress here to neglect the requirements of the Constitution, for it was urged in both Houses that § 21 as written was ex post facto, and thus was constitutionally [p281] impermissible. [n30] Significantly, however, it was never suggested in either debate that expatriation without a citizen's consent lay beyond Congress' authority. Members of both Houses had apparently examined intensively the section's constitutional validity, and yet had been undisturbed by the matters upon which the Court now relies.
The evidence with which the Court supports its thesis that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to lay at rest any doubts of Congress' inability to expatriate without the citizen's consent is no more persuasive. The evidence consists almost exclusively of two brief and general quotations from Howard [p283] of Michigan, the sponsor of the Citizenship Clause in the Senate, and of a statement made in a debate in the House of Representatives in 1868 by Van Trump of Ohio. Measured most generously, this evidence would be inadequate to support the important constitutional conclusion presumably drawn in large part from it by the Court; but, as will be shown, other relevant evidence indicates that the Court plainly has mistaken the purposes of the clause's draftsmen.
The debate upon the clause was essentially cursory in both Houses, but there are several clear indications of its intended effect. Its sponsors evidently shared the fears of Senators Stewart and Wade that, unless citizenship were defined, freedmen might, under the reasoning of the Dred Scott decision, [n40] be excluded by the courts from the scope of the Amendment. It was agreed that, since the "courts have stumbled on the subject," it would be prudent to remove the "doubt thrown over" it. [n41] The clause would essentially overrule Dred Scott and place beyond question the freedmen's right of citizenship because of birth. It was suggested, moreover, that it would, by creating a basis for federal citizenship which was indisputably independent of state citizenship, preclude any effort by state legislatures to circumvent the Amendment by denying freedmen state citizenship. [n42] Nothing in the debates, however, supports the Court's assertion that the clause was intended to deny Congress its authority to expatriate unwilling citizens. The evidence indicates that its draftsmen instead expected the clause only to declare unreservedly to [p285] whom citizenship initially adhered, thus overturning the restrictions both of Dred Scott and of the doctrine of primary state citizenship, while preserving Congress' authority to prescribe the methods and terms of expatriation.
Henderson had been present at the Senate's consideration both of the Wade-Davis bill and of the Enrollment Act, and had voted at least for the Wade-Davis bill. [n45] [p286] Howard was a member of the Senate when both bills were passed, and had actively participated in the debates upon the Enrollment Act. [n46] Although his views of the two expatriation measures were not specifically recorded, Howard certainly never expressed to the Senate any doubt either of their wisdom or of their constitutionality. It would be extraordinary if these prominent supporters of the Citizenship Clause could have imagined, as the Court's construction of the clause now demands, that the clause was only "declaratory" of the law "where it now is," and yet that it would entirely withdraw a power twice recently exercised by Congress in their presence.
accordingly, very little of the lengthy debate was in the least pertinent to the present issues. Several members did make plain, through their proposed amendments to the bill or their [p289] interstitial comments, that they understood Congress to have authority to expatriate unwilling citizens, [n53] but ,in general, both the issues now before the Court and questions of the implications of the Citizenship Clause were virtually untouched in the debates.
Further, the executive authorities of the United States repeatedly acted, in the 40 years following 1868, upon the premise that a citizen might automatically be deemed to have expatriated himself by conduct short of a voluntary renunciation of citizenship; individual citizens were, as the Court indicated in Perez, regularly held on this basis to have lost their citizenship. Interested Members of Congress, and others, could scarcely have been unaware of the practice; as early as 1874, President Grant urged Congress in his Sixth Annual Message to supplement the Act of 1868 with a statutory declaration of the acts by which a citizen might "be deemed to have renounced or to have lost his citizenship." [n60] It was the necessity to provide a more satisfactory basis for this practice that led first to the appointment of the Citizenship Board of 1906, and subsequently to the Nationality Acts of 1907 and 1940. The administrative practice in this period was described by the Court in Perez; it suffices here merely to emphasize that the Court today has not ventured to explain why the Citizenship Clause should, so shortly after its adoption, have been, under the Court's construction, so seriously misunderstood.
It seems to me apparent that the historical evidence which the Court in part recites is wholly inconclusive, [p292] as indeed the Court recognizes; the evidence, to the contrary, irresistibly suggests that the draftsmen of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend, and could not have expected, that the Citizenship Clause would deprive Congress of authority which it had, to their knowledge, only recently twice exercised. The construction demanded by the pertinent historical evidence, and entirely consistent with the clause's terms and purposes, is instead that it declares to whom citizenship, as a consequence either of birth or of naturalization, initially attaches. The clause thus served at the time of its passage both to overturn Dred Scott and to provide a foundation for federal citizenship entirely independent of state citizenship; in this fashion it effectively guaranteed that the Amendment's protection would not subsequently be withheld from those for whom it was principally intended. But nothing in the history, purposes, or language of the clause suggests that it forbids Congress in all circumstances to withdraw the citizenship of an unwilling citizen. To the contrary, it was expected, and should now be understood, to leave Congress at liberty to expatriate a citizen if the expatriation is an appropriate exercise of a power otherwise given to Congress by the Constitution, and if the methods and terms of expatriation adopted by Congress are consistent with the Constitution's other relevant commands.
The Citizenship Clause thus neither denies nor provides to Congress any power of expatriation; its consequences are, for present purposes, exhausted by its declaration of the classes of individuals to whom citizenship initially attaches. Once obtained, citizenship is, of course, protected from arbitrary withdrawal by the constraints placed around Congress' powers by the Constitution; it is not proper to create from the Citizenship Clause an additional, and entirely unwarranted, restriction [p293] upon legislative authority. The construction now placed on the Citizenship Clause rests, in the last analysis, simply on the Court's ipse dixit, evincing little more, it is quite apparent, than the present majority's own distaste for the expatriation power.
It is appropriate to note at the outset what appears to be a fundamental ambiguity in the opinion for the Court. The Court at one point intimates, but does not expressly declare, that it adopts the reasoning of the dissent of THE CHIEF JUSTICE in Perez. THE CHIEF JUSTICE there acknowledged that "actions in derogation of undivided allegiance to this country" had "long been recognized" to result in expatriation, id. at 68; he argued, however, that the connection between voting in a foreign political election and abandonment of citizenship was logically insufficient to support a presumption that a citizen had renounced his nationality. Id. at 76. It is difficult to find any semblance of this reasoning, beyond the momentary reference to the opinion of THE CHIEF JUSTICE, in the approach taken by the Court today; it seems instead to adopt a substantially wider view of the restrictions upon Congress' authority in this area. Whatever the Court's position, it has assumed that voluntariness is here a term of fixed meaning; in fact, of course, it has been employed to describe both a specific intent to renounce citizenship and the uncoerced commission of an act conclusively deemed by law to be a relinquishment of citizenship. Until the Court indicates with greater precision what it means by "assent," today's opinion will surely cause still greater confusion in this area of the law.
Similarly, the Court can obtain little support from its invocation of the dictum from the opinion for the Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 703. The central issue there was whether a child born of Chinese nationals domiciled in the United States is an American citizen if its birth occurs in this country. The dictum upon which the Court relies, which consists essentially of a reiteration of the dictum from Osborn, can therefore scarcely be considered a reasoned consideration of the issues now before the Court. Moreover, the dictum could conceivably be read to hold only that no power to expatriate an unwilling citizen was conferred either by the Naturalization Clause or by the Fourteenth Amendment; if the dictum means no more, it would, of course, not even reach the holding in Perez. Finally, the dictum must be read in light of the subsequent opinion for the Court, written by Mr. Justice McKenna, in Mackenzie v. Hare, 239 U.S. 299. Despite counsel's invocation of Wong Kim Ark, id. at 302 and 303, the Court held in Mackenzie that marriage between an American citizen and an alien, unaccompanied by any intention of the citizen to renounce her citizenship, nonetheless permitted Congress to withdraw her nationality. It is immaterial for these purposes that Mrs. Mackenzie's citizenship might, under the statute there, have been restored upon termination of the marital relationship; she did not consent to the loss, even temporarily, of her citizenship, and, under the proposition apparently urged by the Court today, it can therefore scarcely matter that her expatriation was subject to some condition subsequent. It seems that neither Mr. Justice McKenna, who became a member of the Court after the argument but before the decision of Wong Kim Ark, supra, at 732, nor Mr. Chief Justice White, who joined the Court's opinions in both Wong Kim Ark and Mackenzie, thought that Wong Kim Ark required the result reached by the Court today. Nor, it must be supposed, did the other six members of the Court who joined Mackenzie, despite Wong Kim Ark.
13 Stat. 490. It was this provision that, after various recodifications, was held unconstitutional by this Court in Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86. A majority of the Court did not there hold that the provision was invalid because Congress lacked all power to expatriate an unwilling citizen. In any event, a judgment by this Court 90 years after the Act's passage can scarcely reduce the Act's evidentiary value for determining whether Congress understood in 1865, as the Court now intimates that it did, that it lacked such power.
See, e.g., the comments of Senator Johnson of Maryland, Cong.Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2893. It was subsequently acknowledged by several members of this Court that a central purpose of the Citizenship Clause was to create an independent basis of federal citizenship, and thus to overturn the doctrine of primary state citizenship. The Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 74, 95, 112. The background of this issue is traced in tenBroek, The Anti-slavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment 71-93.
prominent feature of the first [section] is, that it settles definitely the right of citizenship in the several States, . . . thereby depriving them in the future of all discretionary power over the subject within their respective limits, and with reference to their State Governments proper.
Similarly, in 1885, this Court construed § 21 without any apparent indication that the section was, or had ever been thought to be, beyond Congress' authority. Kurtz v. Moffitt, 115 U.S. 487, 501-502.

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