Judge David Tapp opened the opinion not with the Code but with a history lesson: the 1848 treaty ending the Mexican War, the discovery of gold on the American River, and California’s admission to the Union as the thirty-first state on September 9, 1850. The detour had a point. California has been a state for more than 175 years, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause leaves no room for a standalone “Californian” who is somehow not also a citizen of the United States. As the court framed it, Kim could not claim to be a Californian by birth without also being a U.S. citizen, because the former cannot be true without the latter.

From there the result wrote itself. The court dismissed under RCFC 12(b)(6), holding the theory legally frivolous under a long line of authority rejecting the state-citizen-only dodge, including Lonsdale v. United States, 919 F.2d 1440, 1448 (10th Cir. 1990), which called the argument “completely lacking in legal merit and patently frivolous,” and the regulation that settles the question, 26 C.F.R. §1.1-1(c), defining who is a citizen for federal tax purposes. Leave by the court to amend was denied as futile, since no additional facts can cure a defect that is purely a legal issue. A tidy reminder for the next person who walks in convinced that a Form 1040X and a letter to SSA1 can rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment.