Subject: Re: Best quote from Birthright ruling
I'm sure this is brilliant, but being unable to wade through the dense legalese of the argument, to what statements in which "funeral oration" is Roberts referring to?


From my inquiry to Claude AI:


Found it — the historian was George Bancroft.

The oration: Bancroft delivered a eulogy for Lincoln, and the government’s brief (and Justice Thomas’s dissent) cited it as evidence that “primary allegiance” tied to domicile — not simple birth — was the accepted view of citizenship at the time.

The irony Roberts/CAC pointed to: the government leaned on Bancroft’s oration as their best historical evidence for a domicile-based theory, but Bancroft himself is on record elsewhere as holding the opposite view — that anyone “who first saw the light on the American soil was a natural born citizen.”  That’s the specific line the Constitutional Accountability Center’s brief flagged, and it’s part of why Roberts treated the government’s “evidence” for the domicile theory as strikingly thin — literally citing one funeral speech, from a source who arguably contradicted the point they were using it for.