Court Opinion

ID: 9423433
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:07:44.857593+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:44.206527
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Harlan,
whom Mr. Justice Clark, Mr. Justice Stewart, and Mr. Justice White join, dissenting.
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 con*269sider 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.” 1 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 “lan*270guage 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.”
I can find nothing in this extraordinary series of circumventions which permits, still less compels, the imposition of this constitutional constraint upon the authority of Congress. I must respectfully dissent.
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.2 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 *271restraints that should surround the judicial invalidation of an Act of Congress, even seems to confirm Perez’ soundness.
I.
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.3 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.4 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 *272legislation 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 1795.5 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.6 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 re*273ported 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.7 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.
The debates in 1817 and 1818, upon which the Court so heavily relies, are scarcely more revealing. Debate centered upon a brief bill8 which provided merely that any citizen who wished to renounce his citizenship must first declare his intention in open court, and thereafter depart the United States. His citizenship would have terminated at the moment of his renunciation. The bill was debated only in the House; no proposal permitting the involuntary expatriation of any citizen was made or considered there or in the Senate. Nonetheless, the Court selects portions of statements made by three individual Congressmen, who apparently denied that Congress had authority to enact legislation to deprive unwilling citizens of their citizenship. These brief dicta are, by the most generous standard, inadequate to warrant the Court’s broad constitutional conclusion. Moreover, it must be observed that they were in great part deductions from *274constitutional premises which have subsequently been entirely abandoned. They stemmed principally from the Jeffersonian contention that allegiance is owed by a citizen first to his State, and only through the State to the Federal Government. The spokesmen upon whom the Court now relies supposed that Congress was without authority to dissolve citizenship, since “we have no control” over “allegiance to the State . ...”9 The bill’s opponents urged that “The relation to the State government was the basis of the relation to the General Government, and therefore, as long as a man continues a citizen of a State, he must be considered a citizen of the United States.” 10 Any statute, it was thought, which dissolved federal citizenship while a man remained a citizen of a State “would be inoperative.” 11 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 *275and undesirable: Pindall of Virginia, for example, asserted that a citizen who employed its provisions would have “motives of idleness or criminality,” 12 and that the bill would thus cause “much evil.” 13 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.” 14 He even urged that “The commission of treason, and the objects of plunder and spoil, are equally legalized by this bill.”15 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.16 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 pre*276sented 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. 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.
Any wider meaning, so as to reach the questions here, wrenches the dictum from its context, and attributes to the Court an observation extraneous even to the analogy before it. Moreover, the construction given to the dictum by the Court today requires the assumption that the Court in Osborn meant to decide an issue which had to that moment scarcely been debated, to which counsel in Osborn had never referred, and upon which no case had ever reached the Court. All this, it must be recalled, is in an area of the law in which the Court had steadfastly avoided unnecessary comment. See, e. g., M‘Ilvaine v. Coxe’s Lessee, 4 Cranch 209, 212-213; The Santissima Trinidad, 7 Wheat. 283, 347-348. By any *277standard, the dictum cannot provide material assistance to the Court’s position in the present case.17
Before turning to the evidence from this period which has been overlooked by the Court, attention must be given an incident to which the Court refers, but upon which it apparently places relatively little reliance. In 1810, a proposed thirteenth amendment to the Consti*278tution was introduced into the Senate by Senator Reed of Maryland; the amendment, as subsequently modified, provided that any citizen who accepted a title of nobility, pension, or emolument from a foreign state, or who married a person of royal blood, should “cease to be a citizen of the United States.” 18 The proposed amendment was, in a modified form, accepted by both Houses, and subsequently obtained the approval of all but one of the requisite number of States.19 I have found nothing which indicates with any certainty why such a provision should then have been thought necessary,20 but two reasons suggest themselves for the use of a constitutional amendment. First, the provisions may have been intended in part as a sanction for Art. I, § 9, cl. 8;21 it may therefore have been thought more appropriate that it be placed within the Constitution itself. Second, a student of expatriation issues in this period has dismissed the preference for an amendment with the explanation that “the dominant Jeffersonian view held that citizenship was within the jurisdiction of the states; a statute would thus have been a federal usurpation of state power.” 22 This second explanation is fully substantiated by the debate in *2791818; 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” 23 in 1810, motivated by now discredited constitutional premises, cannot offer any significant guidance for solution of the important issues now before us.
The most pertinent evidence from this period upon these questions has been virtually overlooked by the Court. Twice in the two years immediately prior to its passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress exercised the very authority which the Court now suggests that it should have recognized was entirely lacking. In each case, a bill was debated and adopted by both Houses which included provisions to expatriate unwilling citizens.
In the spring and summer of 1864, both Houses debated intensively the Wade-Davis bill to provide reconstruction governments for the States which had seceded to form the Confederacy. Among the bill’s provisions was § 14, by which “every person who shall hereafter hold or exercise any office ... in the rebel service ... is hereby declared not to be a citizen of .the United States.” 24 Much of the debate upon the bill did not, of course, center on the expatriation provision, although it certainly did not escape critical attention.25 Nonetheless, I have not found any indication in the debates in either House that it was supposed that Congress was without authority to deprive an unwilling citizen of his citizenship. The bill was not signed by President Lincoln before the adjourn*280ment of Congress, and thus failed to become law, but a subsequent statement issued by Lincoln makes quite plain that he was not troubled by any doubts of the constitutionality of § 14.26 Passage of the Wade-Davis bill of itself “suffices to destroy the notion that the men who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment felt that citizenship was an ‘absolute.’ ” 27
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 . . . .”28 The same section extended these disabilities to persons who departed the United States with intent to avoid “draft into the military or naval service . . . .”29 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 *281impermissible.30 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.
Some doubt, based on the phrase “rights of citizenship,” has since been expressed31 that § 21 was intended to require any more than disfranchisement, but this is, for several reasons, unconvincing. First, § 21 also explicitly provided that persons subject to its provisions should not thereafter exercise various “rights of citizens”; 32 if the section had not been intended to cause expatriation, it is difficult to see why these additional provisions would have been thought necessary. Second, the executive authorities of the United States afterwards consistently construed the section as causing expatriation.33 Third, the section- was apparently understood by various courts to result in expatriation; in particular, Mr. Justice Strong, while a member of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, construed the section to cause a “forfeiture of citizenship,” Huber v. Reily, 53 Pa. 112, 118, and although this point was not expressly reached, his general understanding of the statute was approved by this Court in Kurtz v. Moffitt, 115 U. S. 487, 501. Finally, Congress in 1867 approved an exemption from the section’s provisions for those who had deserted after the termination of general hostilities, and the statute as adopted specifically described the disability from which exemption was given as a “loss of his citizenship.” *28215 Stat. 14. The same choice of phrase occurs in the pertinent debates.34
It thus appears that Congress had twice, immediately before its passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, unequivocally affirmed its belief that it had authority to expatriate an unwilling citizen.
The pertinent evidence for the period prior to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment can therefore be summarized as follows. The Court’s conclusion today is supported only by the statements, associated at least in part with a now abandoned view of citizenship, of three individual Congressmen, and by the ambiguous and inapposite dictum from Osborn. Inconsistent with the Court’s position are statements from individual Congressmen in 1794, and Congress’ passage in 1864 and 1865 of legislation which expressly authorized the expatriation of unwilling citizens. It may be that legislation adopted in the heat of war should be discounted in part by its origins, but, even if this is done, it is surely plain that the Court’s conclusion is entirely unwarranted by the available historical evidence for the period prior to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. The evidence suggests, to the contrary, that Congress in 1865 understood that it had authority, at least in some circumstances, to deprive a citizen of his nationality.
II.
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 *283of 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 Amendment as initially approved by the House contained nothing which described or defined citizenship.35 The issue did not as such even arise in the House debates; it was apparently assumed that Negroes were citizens, and that it was necessary only to guarantee to them the rights which sprang from citizenship. It is quite impossible to derive from these debates any indication that the House wished to deny itself the authority it had exercised in 1864 and 1865; so far as the House is concerned, it seems that no issues of citizenship were “at all involved.” 36
In the Senate, however, it was evidently feared that unless citizenship were defined, or some more general classification substituted, freedmen might, on the premise that they were not citizens, be excluded from the Amendment’s protection. Senator Stewart thus offered an amendment which would have inserted into § 1 a definition of citizenship,37 and Senator Wade urged as an alternative the elimination of the term “citizen” from the Amendment’s first section.38 After a caucus of the *284chief supporters of the Amendment, Senator Howard announced on their behalf that they favored the addition of the present Citizenship Clause.39
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,40 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.41 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.42 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 *285whom 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.
The narrow, essentially definitional purpose of the Citizenship Clause is reflected in the clear declarations in the debates that the clause would not revise the prevailing incidents of citizenship. Senator Henderson of Missouri thus stated specifically his understanding that the “section will leave citizenship where it now is.”43 Senator Howard, in the first of the statements relied upon, in part, by the Court, said quite unreservedly that “This amendment [the Citizenship Clause] which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is ... a citizen of the United States.”44 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.45 *286Howard was a member of the Senate when both bills were passed, and had actively participated in the debates upon the Enrollment Act.46 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.
There is, however, even more positive evidence that the Court’s construction of the clause is not that intended by its draftsmen. Between the two brief statements from Senator Howard relied upon by the Court, Howard, in response to a question, said the following:
“I take it for granted that after a man becomes a citizen of the United States under the Constitution he cannot cease to be citizen, except by expatriation or the commission of some crime by which his citizenship shall be forfeited.”47 (Emphasis added.)
It would be difficult to imagine a more unqualified rejection of the Court’s position; Senator Howard, the clause’s sponsor, very plainly believed that it would leave unimpaired Congress’ power to deprive unwilling citizens of their citizenship.48
*287Additional confirmation of the expectations of the clause’s draftsmen may be found in the legislative history, wholly overlooked by the Court, of the Act for the Relief of certain Soldiers and Sailors, adopted in 1867. 15 Stat. 14. The Act, debated by Congress within 12 months of its passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, provided an exception from the provisions of § 21 of the Enrollment Act of 1865 for those who had deserted from the Union forces after the termination of general hostilities. Had the Citizenship Clause been understood to have the effect now given it by the Court, surely this would have been clearly reflectecj. in the debates; members would at least have noted that, upon final approval of the Amendment, which had already obtained the approval of 21 States, § 21 would necessarily be invalid. Nothing of the sort occurred; it was argued by some members that § 21 was imprudent and even unfair,49 but Congress evidently did not suppose that it was, or would be, unconstitutional. Congress simply failed to attribute to the Citizenship *288Clause the constitutional consequences now discovered by the Court.50
Nonetheless, the Court urges that the debates which culminated in the Expatriation Act of 1868 materially support its understanding of the purposes of the Citizenship Clause. This is, for several reasons, wholly unconvincing. Initially, it should be remembered that discussion of the Act began in committee some six months after the passage of the Relief Act of 1867, by the Second Session of the Congress which had approved the Relief Act; the Court’s interpretation of the history of the Expatriation Act thus demands, at the outset; the supposition that a view of the Citizenship Clause entirely absent in July had appeared vividly by the following January. Further, the purposes and background of the Act should not be forgotten. The debates were stimulated by repeated requests both from President Andrew Johnson and from the public that Congress assert the rights of naturalized Americans against the demands of their former countries.51 The Act as finally adopted was thus intended “primarily to assail the conduct of the British Government [chiefly for its acts toward naturalized Americans resident in Ireland] and to declare the right of naturalized Americans to renounce their native allegiance”;52 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 *289interstitial comments, that they understood Congress to have authority to expatriate unwilling citizens,53 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.
Nevertheless, the Court, in order to establish that Congress understood that the Citizenship Clause denied it such authority, fastens principally upon the speeches of Congressman Van Trump of Ohio. Van Trump sponsored, as one of many similar amendments offered to the bill by various members, a proposal to create formal machinery by which a citizen might voluntarily renounce his citizenship.54 Van Trump himself spoke at length in support of his proposal; his principal speech consisted chiefly of a detailed examination of the debates and judicial decisions pertinent to the issues of voluntary renunciation of citizenship.55 Never in his catalog of relevant materials did Van Trump even mention the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment;56 so far as may be seen from his comments on the House floor, Van Trump evidently supposed the clause to be entirely immaterial to the issues of expatriation. This is completely characteristic of the debate in both Houses; even its draftsmen and principal supporters, such as Senator Howard, permitted the Citizenship Clause to *290pass unnoticed. The conclusion seems inescapable that the discussions surrounding the Act of 1868 cast only the most minimal light, if indeed any, upon the purposes of the clause, and that the Court’s evidence from the debates is, by any standard, exceedingly slight.57
There is, moreover, still further evidence, overlooked by the Court, which confirms yet again that the Court’s view of the intended purposes of the Citizenship Clause is mistaken. While the debate on the Act of 1868 was still in progress, negotiations were completed on the first of a series of bilateral expatriation treaties, which “initiated this country’s policy of automatic divestment of citizenship for specified conduct affecting our foreign relations.” Perez v. Brownell, supra, at 48. Seven such treaties were negotiated in 1868 and 1869 alone; 58 each was ratified by the Senate. If, as the Court now suggests, it was “abundantly clear” to Congress in 1868 that the Citizenship Clause had taken from its hands the power of expatriation, it is quite difficult to understand why these conventions were negotiated, or why, once nego*291tiated, they were not immediately repudiated by the Senate.59
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.” 60 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, *292as 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, restric*293tion 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.
I believe that Perez was rightly decided, and on its authority would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

 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 uncoereed 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.

 It is useful, however, to reiterate the essential facts of this case, for the Court’s very summary statement might unfortunately cause confusion about the situation to which §401 (e) was here applied. Petitioner emigrated from the United States to Israel in 1950, and, although the issue was not argued at any stage of these proceedings, it was assumed by the District Court that he “has acquired Israeli citizenship.” 250 F. Supp. 686, 687. He voted in the election for the Israeli Knesset in 1951, and, as his Israeli Identification Booklet indicates, in various political elections which followed. Transcript of Record 1-2. In 1960, after 10 years in Israel, petitioner determined to return to the United States, and applied to the United States Consulate in Haifa for a passport. The application was rejected, and a Certificate of Loss of Nationality, based entirely on his participation in the 1951 election, was issued. Petitioner’s action for declaratory judgment followed. There is, as the District Court noted, “no claim by the [petitioner] that the deprivation of his American citizenship will render him a stateless person.” Ibid.

 See generally Tsiang, The Question of Expatriation in America Prior to 1907, 25-70; Roche, The Expatriation Cases, 1963 Sup. Ct. Rev. 325, 327-330; Roche, Loss of American Nationality, 4 West. Pol. Q. 268.

 Roche, The Expatriation Cases, 1963 Sup. Ct. Rev. 325, 329. Although the evidence, which consists principally of a letter to Albert Gallatin, is rather ambiguous, Jefferson apparently believed even that a state expatriation statute could deprive a citizen of his federal citizenship. 1 Writings of Albert Gallatin 301-302 (Adams ed. 1879). His premise was presumably that state citizenship was primary, and that federal citizenship attached only through it. See Tsiang, supra, at 25. Gallatin’s own views have been described as essentially “states’ rights”; see Roche, Loss of American Nationality, 4 West. Pol. Q. 268, 271.

 See 4 Annals of Cong. 1004 et seq.

 The discussion and rejection of the amendment are cursorily reported at 4 Annals of Cong. 1028-1030.

 The sixth section is set out at 7 Annals of Cong. 349.

 The bill is summarized at 31 Annals of Cong. 495.

 31 Annals of Cong. 1046.

 31 Annals of Cong. 1057.

 Ibid. Roche describes the Congressmen upon whom the Court chiefly relies as “the states’ rights opposition.” Loss of American Nationality, 4 West. Pol. Q. 268, 276.

 31 Annals of Cong. 1047.

 31 Annals of Cong. 1050.

 31 Annals of Cong. 1059.

 Ibid.

 31 Annals of Cong. 1051.

 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.

 The various revisions of the proposed amendment may be traced through 20 Annals of Cong. 530, 549, 572-573, 635, 671.

 Ames, The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States during the First Century of Its History, 2 Ann. Rep. Am. Hist. Assn. for the Year 1896, 188.

 Ames, supra, at 187, speculates that the presence of Jerome Bonaparte in this country some few years earlier might have caused apprehension, and concludes that the amendment was merely an expression of “animosity against foreigners.” Id.,, at 188.

 The clause provides that “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

 Roche, The Expatriation Cases, 1963 Sup. Ct. Rev. 325, 335.

 Ibid.

 6 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents 226.

 See, e. g., the comments of Senator Brown of Missouri, Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., 3460.

 Lincoln indicated that although he was “unprepared” to be “inflexibly committed” to “any single plan of restoration,” he was “fully satisfied” with the bill’s provisions. 6 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents 222-223.

 Roche, The Expatriation Cases, 1963 Sup. Ct. Rev. 325, 343.

 13 Stat. 490. It was this provision that, after various recodi-fications, 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.

 13 Stat. 491.

 Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2d Sess., 642-643, 1155-1156.

 Roche, The Expatriation Cases, 1963 Sup. Ct. Rev. 325, 336.

 13 Stat. 490.

 Hearings before House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on H. R. 6127, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., 38.

 See, e. g., the remarks of Senator Hendricks, Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 1st Sess., 661.

 The pertinent events are described in Flack, Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment 83-94.

 Id., at 84.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2560.

 Wade would have employed the formula "persons bom in the United States or naturalized under the laws thereof” to measure the section’s protection. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2768-2769.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2869. The precise terms of the discussion in the caucus were, and have remained, unknown. For contemporary comment, see Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2939.

 Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2768.

 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 Antislavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment 71-93.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 3031. See also Flack, The Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment 93. In the same fashion, tenBroek, supra, at 215-217, concludes that the whole of § 1 was “declaratory and confirmatory.” Id., at 217.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2890. See also the statement of Congressman Baker, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., App. 255, 256. Similarly, two months after the Amendment’s passage through Congress, Senator Lane of Indiana remarked that the clause was “simply a re-affirmation” of the declaratory citizenship section of the Civil Rights Bill. Fairman, Does the Fourteenth Amendment Incorporate the Bill of Rights? 2 Stan. L. Rev. 5, 74.

 Senator Henderson participated in the debates upon the Enrollment Act and expressed no doubts about the constitutionality of § 21, Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2d Sess., 641, but the final vote upon the measure in the Senate was not recorded. Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2d Sess., 643.

 See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 2d Sess., 632.

 Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 2895.

 The issues pertinent here were not, of course, matters of great consequence in the ratification debates in the several state legislatures, but some additional evidence is nonetheless available from them. The Committee on Federal Relations of the Texas House of Representatives thus reported to the House that the Amendment’s first section “proposes to deprive the States of the right ... to *287determine what shall constitute citizenship of a State, and to transfer that right to the Federal Government.” Its “object” was, they thought, “to declare negroes to be citizens of the United States.” Tex. House J. 578 (1866). The Governor of Georgia reported to the legislature that the “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.” Ga. Sen. J. 6 (1866). See also the message of Governor Cox to the Ohio Legislature, Fairman, supra, 2 Stan. L. Rev., at 96, and the message of Governor Fletcher to the Missouri Legislature, Mo. Sen. J. 14 (1867). In combination, this evidence again suggests that the Citizenship Clause was expected merely to declare to whom citizenship initially attaches, and to overturn the doctrine of primary state citizenship.

 Senator Hendricks, for example, lamented its unfairness, declared that its presence was an “embarrassment” to the country, and asserted that it “is not required any longer.” Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 1st Sess., 660-661.

 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.

 Tsiang, supra, n. 3, at 95. President Johnson emphasized in his Third Annual Message the difficulties which were then prevalent. 6 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents 558, 580-581.

 Tsiang, supra, at 95. See also 3 Moore, Digest of International Law 579-580.

 See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 968, 1129-1131.

 Van Trump’s proposal contained nothing which would have expatriated any unwilling citizen, see Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 1801; its ultimate failure therefore cannot, despite the Court’s apparent suggestion, help to establish that the House supposed that legislation similar to that at issue here was impermissible under the Constitution.

 Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 1800-1805.

 It should be noted that Van Trump, far from a “framer” of the Amendment, had not even been a member of the Congress which adopted it. Biographical Directory of the American Congress 1774-1961, H. R., Doc. No. 442, 85th Cong., 2d Sess., 1750.

 As General Banks, the Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, carefully emphasized, the debates were intended simply to produce a declaration of the obligation of the United States to compel other countries “to consider the rights of our citizens and to bring the matter to negotiation and settlement”; the bill’s proponents stood “for that and nothing more.” Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 2315.

 The first such treaty was that with the North German Union, concluded February 22,1868, and ratified by the Senate on March 26, 1868. 2 Malloy, Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements between the United States and other Powers 1298. Similar treaties were reached in 1868 with Bavaria, Baden, Belgium, Hesse, and Württemberg; a treaty was reached in 1869 with Norway and Sweden. An analogous treaty was made with Mexico in 1868, but, significantly, it permitted rebuttal of the presumption of renunciation of citizenship. See generally Tsiang, supra, at 88.

 The relevance of these treaties was certainly not overlooked in the debates in the Senate upon the Act of 1868. See, e. g., Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., 4205, 4211, 4329, 4331. Senator Howard attacked the treaties, but employed none of the reasons which might be suggested by the opinion for the Court today. Id., at 4211.

 7 Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents 284, 291. See further Borchard, Diplomatic Protection of Citizens Abroad §§319, 324, 325.