Scalia, J., dissenting
sons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States”—even though a passport provides evidence of citizenship and so helps enforce this guarantee abroad. Including the power to exclude persons from the territory of the United States, see Art. I, § 9, cl. 1 even though passports are the principal means of identifying citizens entitled to entry. Including the powers under which Congress has restricted the ability of various people to leave the country (fugitives from justice, for example, see 18 U. S. C. § 1073)—even though passports are the principal means of controlling exit. Including the power to “make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States,” Art. IV, § 3, cl. 2—even though “[a] passport remains at all times the property of the United States,” 7 FAM § 1317 (2013). The concurrence's stingy interpretation of the enumerated powers forgets that the Constitution does not “partake of the prolixity of a legal code,” that “only its great outlines [are] marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects [left to] be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves.” McCulloch, 4 Wheat., at 407. It forgets, in other words, “that it is a constitution we are expounding.” Ibid.
Defending Presidential primacy over passports, the concurrence says that the royal prerogative in England included the power to issue and control travel documents akin to the modern passport. Ante, at 42. Perhaps so, but that power was assuredly not exclusive. The Aliens Act 1793, for example, enacted almost contemporaneously with our Constitution, required an alien traveling within England to obtain “a passport from [a] mayor or . . . [a] justice of [the] peace,” “in which passport shall be expressed the name and rank, occupation or description, of such alien.” 33 Geo. III, ch. 4, § 8, in 39 Eng. Stat. at Large 12. The Aliens Act 1798 prohibited aliens from leaving the country without “a passport . . . first obtained from one of his Majesty's principal
