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If that means what you claim, why didn't the Court stop right there? What was that not sufficient to find the apellee a citizen?You seem to have answered your own question. Yes, the situation in the U.S. was more complex considering the laws and policies addressed by the 14'th Amendment, which pushed the Court to additional considerations.Worse, the very fact that laws had been on the books for decades, unchallenged, that denied citizenshp based on race flatly contradicts the statement the standard policy in the US was to grant citizenship to everyone born here.
That said, I don't really understand why the WKA opinion needed to be as long as it was.
Yes, and the answer is that until the 14th Amendment was passed and then finally applied for the first time (on this particular question) by the Court in Wong Kim Ark, it was NOT the case that anyone born in the US was Constitutionally a citizen. What was true, and what the Court meant (read carefully, now) was that US law generally granted citizenshp to anyone born here. But the law that did that was Congressional statute, which Congress had the authority to make law solely by reason of the Constitutional grant of authority to "make uniform rules regarding naturalization."
If the Constitution directly granted citizenshp to whomever was born here before the passage of the 14th Amendment, then why was the Amendment passed in the first place with the citizenship clause? Of course, the 14th Amendment has more to say, and so has other effects. What's the reason for its first clause? Remember, Marbury vs. Madison requires that every clause in the Constitution must have substantive effect. We are not allowed to assume the first clause of the 14th is redundant or does not change the law in some way.