Not a State

by bam

About four and a third million people live under the American flag, hold American passports, and elect nobody who can vote on the floor of either house of Congress. This course asks the question underneath that sentence: what is the legal status of a place that is under United States sovereignty and is not a state, and how did it get that status? It starts inside a farm statute, because that is where the category is easiest to see without argument. The Hatch Act pays for agricultural research and requires a state to match every federal dollar; one paragraph of that statute, headed "Exception for insular areas and the District of Columbia", drops the requirement to half for Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands and the District, and lets the Secretary of Agriculture waive even that. Read the definitions section and the reason is plain: those four are exactly the members of the statute's own list of "States" that are not states. From there the course goes to the source of the category. In 1901 a divided Supreme Court decided a tax case about oranges and held that Puerto Rico was "a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States within the revenue clauses of the Constitution", and Justice White supplied a distinction the Constitution never mentions, between territories that have been incorporated into the Union and territories that have not. In 1922 the Court held that even the right to a jury trial does not follow the flag into an unincorporated territory, and that granting citizenship in 1917 had not changed the island's status. Both cases are still law, and both are under open attack from the bench: Justice Gorsuch has written that they rest on "a rotten foundation" and rest instead on racial stereotypes, and the course quotes him and the judges who agree with him at length. Then it works the consequences, one at a time and from the documents. American Samoa is the sharpest case in the subject: people born there are United States nationals and not United States citizens, and when three of them sued for citizenship the parties opposing them included their own territorial government and their own member of Congress, who argued that a court thousands of miles away should not impose citizenship on an unwilling people and put communal land tenure at risk. The course names who holds which position and refuses to settle it. It then counts the representation that exists and the representation that does not, contrasts the District of Columbia, which pays federal income tax and casts three electoral votes under the Twenty-Third Amendment, teaches the Supplemental Security Income case the Supreme Court decided in 2022 and the fiscal oversight board Congress placed over Puerto Rico's elected government in 2016, and reports Puerto Rico's status votes with their blank ballots, boycotts and turnout disputes attached. It ends with the sources themselves, so that every number in it can be checked by the person who took it.