If Congress passed a bill written in a language other than English, would it be valid? Suppose Congress passed a bill written in Spanish and the President signed it. Everything about the bill and the procedures by which it was written and passed were completely normal, other than the language. (Assume everyone in Congress, as well as the President, is fluent in Spanish.) Would the fact that the law is written in a language other than English have any effect on its enforceability, other than the practical difficulties caused by many people not understanding it?
It would indeed be valid and legally enforceable. The Constitution places no limits on what languages bills must be written in. The Constitution specifically allows each house of Congress to make its own rules for how it passes bills, so, even if a house of Congress had a rule requiring its bills to be in English (which they don't, as far as I know,) they could simply change the rules and then pass the bill. From a practical standpoint, though, enforceability would also require courts to be able to discern Congress' intent from the bill. As such, unless we're expanding the assumption to &quot;the vast majority of the U.S., including the courts in all parts of the country, are now fluent in Spanish,&quot; then it's exceedingly unlikely that Congress actually would pass a substantive bill in a language other than English. Even without assuming all of Congress were fluent, it's possible that they could pass a resolution in Spanish as a gesture, but they would almost certainly not pass a substantive bill in Spanish (or any other language than English) due to the enforceability problems it would cause with courts (and, if relevant, regulatory agencies, etc.) Aside from the courts needing to be able to understand the normal meanings of the words in Spanish, there would also be the problem of the complete lack of any legal history of Spanish words in U.S. law (or even in common law in general.) Much of legal interpretation is steeped in history of what particular words have meant (and/or been ruled by courts to mean) in past laws. Throwing all of that legal history out the window by switching to another language would be quite problematic when trying to craft a bill on any substantive subject matter. Suffice it to say that crafting the definitions section for such a bill would be quite a task. So, yes, it would technically be legal and it would indeed be the law, but doing it with any substantive subject matter (without assuming that most of the population now understands Spanish) would be so problematic for enforceability in practice that they wouldn't actually consider doing it.
As user6726 notes in an answer, the page you link to derives from 26 USC 7701. However, it does not reproduce the text accurately. There, "United States person" is defined at section 7701(a)(30), and it notably lacks anything corresponding to "any other person that is not a foreign person." It's possible that that language is motivated by some court decision, but it's also possible that someone just added it for the sake of symmetry with the definition of "foreign person" without thinking about the logical paradox that it might create. Looking at section 7701, I don't see any explicit mention of US non-citizen nationals. It appears that such a person who does not live in one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia falls under the definition of nonresident alien at 7701(b)(1)(B) even though such a person is explicitly not an alien under the Immigration and Nationality Act. I do not see any regulations correcting this oversight, but I suppose that in practice such people are indeed treated as US citizens. I don't know enough about the classification of nonhuman legal persons as foreign or domestic to have any ideas about whether there are similar ambiguities there.
Your assumption is incorrect -- the Bill of Rights proper does not apply to the states, and pre-14th Amendment only bound the federal government. See Barron v. Baltimore, 32 US 243. States could do whatever they wanted, subject to federal legislation on the matters given to the federal government and subject to their own constitutions. After the Civil War, the federal government was much less OK with so-called "black codes," restricting the rights of freedmen based on explicitly racial distinctions, with not even a fig leaf of justification that it applied to all citizens. The federal government could prevent federal discrimination, but no tools existed to prevent state discrimination. Hence, the 14th Amendment, which bound the states to adopt certain standards in their lawmaking and let Congress take action against those that didn't.
Some jurisdictions do that. Others don't (see, for example, the Dutch national identity card). My New York driver's license is in all caps, and I rather suspect that it's a holdover from the days in which licenses were processed using a computer system that had only upper-case characters. But that's just a guess. The real answer is that the premise of the question is incorrect.
There are a number of areas in which the US states can pass laws only to the extend that they do not conflict with Federal laws passed by Congress. When a federal law clearly says that states may not pass laws on a given subject, the issue is clear. When it specifically invites state laws, the issue is also clear. But when a Federal law imposes certain regulations in a given area, it may not be clear if a state may go beyond the Federal requirements. Sometimes it can. For example, there is a Federal Minimum Wage. But states are free to impose higher minimum wage levels, and some have done so. So when a court decision or legal article says &quot;Congress having occupied the field&quot; it means that a set of Federal laws is intended to be a compelte regulation of a given area, and states may not add additional regulations of their own in that area. I am not sure what rules apply to disclosure of information by the Capitol police.
TL;DNR: Madison, Hamilton, Justice Harlan &amp; Justice Scalia agree with you. Justice Black does not. You raise an interesting question. As you point out, the Qualifications Clause, Art I, § 2.1, (those who vote for the House of Representatives “in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature”) gives states the power to establish voter qualifications. Yet 18 U.S.C. § 611, passed as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, (the IIRIRA) makes it illegal for most aliens to vote in federal elections. What gives? First, the IIRIRA is purely symbolic. It literally has no effect on who can vote in the US. For almost a century, every state has prohibited aliens from voting in state elections. Under the Qualifications Clause, this means no aliens can vote in federal elections. (Before WWI, many states allowed aliens to vote.) Second, some people argue Congress has control over voter qualifications under the "Elections Clause," Art. I, § 4.1, which gives Congress the power to regulate the "Times Places and Manners of holding elections." Like Dale M, these people read, "Manners of holding elections” to include the qualifications for voting. This reading of the Elections Clause is inconsistent with several of the sources of constitutional authority Americans typically consult, including the text, the intent of the Founder and precedent. All of these support the “Qualifications Clause” reading of the Constitution. 1) Constitutional Text: Reading the Elections Clause as giving Congress control over voter qualifications, renders the Qualifications Clause almost completely meaningless. Yet everyone agrees the Constitution should be read so that all its parts mean something – no part should be rendered superfluous. 2) Intent of the Founders: When the Founders debated voting qualifications, they were clearly worried that politicians would manipulate the electoral rules to favor them. The Founders believed the Qualifications Clause kept both national and state politicians from stacking the electoral deck. First, by giving the power of deciding who could vote to the states, the Clause prevented national politicians from choosing their own electorate. Secondly, by requiring the states to use the same qualifications for voters in state and national elections, the Clause prevented state politicians from manipulating the rules in national elections. As for the Electoral Clause, in Federalist 60, Hamilton was clear who controlled voter qualifications: “The qualifications of the persons who may choose or be chosen…are unalterable by the [federal] legislature…” 3) Precedent and practice: For most of our history, people acted consistently with Hamilton’s statement. They tolerated a wide variation in who was allowed to vote across states. As noted above, many of those states specifically allowed aliens to vote. (And, starting in 1787 with the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, Congress passed a series of laws allowing aliens to vote in territories.) When Americans did make nationwide changes to voting qualifications, they did so by amending the Constitution. There are only a handful of Supreme Court decisions involving federal control over voting qualifications. In 1970 the Supreme Court upheld a federal law changing the voting age to 18. The opinion of the Court, written by Justice Black, relied on the Elections Clause to say that Congress had the power to change voting requirements. None of the other Justices shared Black's views on the Elections Clause. Instead, they agreed with Justice Harlan, who said, “nothing” in the Constitution, “lends itself to the view that voting qualifications in federal elections are to be set by Congress.” (These Justices used the Equal Protection Clause as the basis for federal control over voter qualifications.) Since then, no Justice has followed Justice Black. Instead, they have followed Justice Harlan. For example, in 2013, Justice Scalia, (in an opinion joined by Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Kennedy, Roberts, and Sotomayor) said, “the Elections Clause empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them.” From this evidence, I’d say you were right to be puzzled about the constitutional authority for the IIRIRA. A federal law preventing aliens from voting in federal elections undermines the text of the constitution by rendering the Qualifications Clause superfluous, goes against the clear intent of the Founders, and is inconsistent with 200+ years of history and precedent. It only survives because it has no practical effect on voting in the US.
Congress cannot be sued for enacting a law. Period. The courts do not have the power to punish Congress for passing a law, they cannot forbid Congress from passing a law, they have no say over what the wording of a law can be. Only Congress has the power to determine what laws they pass. The courts do, of course, have the power to interpret and even strike down a law that they deem to be unconstitutional. This is the essence of constitutional separation of powers.
Very few terms have a single "legal" definition or meaning that applies to all laws, and can be looked up as if in a dictionary. Rather, when a specific meaning is needed in connection with a particular law, that law will include a definition. But that definition will often not apply to the use of the same term in other laws or other contexts. Here I suspect that the OP has found the definition section of a US Federal law regulating commercial transport in interstate commerce. Obviously in such a law, those terms would be defined in the context of commercial transport. That does not mean that the same meanings will be applied in other laws. Driver's licenses and other traffic and motor vehicle regulations are largely matters of state law in the US. Definitions from a federal law, or indeed any law but that state's Motor Vehicle Code (or whatever a given state calls such a body of law) will simply not be relevant. The argument sketched in the question simply does not follow.