07-04-2019, 10:55 PM
(06-18-2019, 09:05 PM)HairOfTheDog Wrote: June Rulings Pending
- Census Citizenship Questions -- Department of Commerce v. New York: State and local governments are challenging the Trump administration's plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Census Bureau's own experts have warned that adding the question will lead to a serious and uneven undercount of the population, with potentially profound political consequences.
Follow-up:
The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s decision to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census, finding that the administration’s explanation for the question appeared to be “contrived.”
Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in ruling against the Trump administration. The ruling sends the case back to a federal district court in New York for further consideration, but it leaves the Trump administration little time to make a new case for the citizenship question because the government must soon begin printing materials to carry out the decennial census.
Many federal funding programs are calculated using data from the once-a-decade census. The country’s 435 congressional seats are also apportioned based on census data.
The Constitution requires the U.S. government to count every person living in the United States every ten years. (Adding a question pertaining to citizenship, especially in today's political climate, could discourage undocumented immigrants from getting counted and lead to a population under-count and unrepresentative congressional seat counts in diverse regions of the country.)
But, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other Trump officials have argued that adding a citizenship question, which hasn’t been in the full decennial census for over 50 years, will help the federal government enforce the Voting Rights Act.
The court’s 5-4 decision held that Ross came into office determined to add a citizenship question to the census, and appeared to invent the argument about enforcing the Voting Rights Act much later.
“It is rare to review a record as extensive as the one before us when evaluating informal agency action— and it should be. But having done so for the sufficient reasons we have explained, we cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given,” Roberts wrote.
In two separate dissents, conservative justices argued the court’s decision trampled on the executive branch.
Ref: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic...17942.html