; Whereas following the acquisition of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and other overseas territories in 1898, the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Insular Cases broke from its prior precedent to establish a doctrine of territorial incorporation, creating for the first time a distinction between so-called incorporated territories, where the Constitution applies in full , and unincorporated territories, where the Constitution applies only in part (Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723, 757 (2008)); Whereas the judgment of the Court in Downes v. Bidwell (182 U.S. 244 (1901)), the most prominent of the Insular Cases, was delivered by Justice Henry Billings Brown, the author of Plessy v. Ferguson’s doctrine of separate but equal , who wrote that America’s newly acquired overseas territories were inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, … and modes of thought , making it impossible to govern according to Anglo-Saxon principles ; Whereas Justice Edward White, who in a separate 3-Justice plurality developed the territorial incorporation doctrine in Downes, expressed concerns over the evils of admitting millions of inhabitants of unknown islands, peopled with an uncivilized race , who he believed would be absolutely unfit for citizenship; Whereas 4 Justices dissented in Downes, with Chief Justice Melville Fuller commenting that [g]reat stress is thrown upon the word incorporation, as if possessed of some occult meaning , and Justice John Marshall Harlan expressing that the idea of incorporation . . . is enveloped in some mystery which I am unable to unravel