Invoking the notion that there were different “senses” of “the United States,” a concurring justice articulated the reasoning in a notoriously convoluted phrase. Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” he explained, “because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”
Another case where the SCOTUS used contorted, “pretzel-logic” to reach clearly unconstitutional conclusions.
