- BREAKING NEWS
- Supreme Court blocks citizenship question in 2020 census for now
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked, for now, the Trump administration's plan to include a question on the 2020 census that inquires about a person’s citizenship status. The court said the administration's explanation for adding such a question is insufficient, and sent it back to the lower courts for further consideration.
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Supreme Court blocks citizenship question in 2020 census for now
By Ronn Blitzer, Adam Shaw | Fox News
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Supreme Court blocks citizenship question on 2020 census in 'significant defeat' for President Trump
The Supreme Court has ruled in a 5-4 decision that the U.S. government cannot add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano breaks down the decision.
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked, for now, the Trump administration's plan to include a question on the 2020 census that inquires about a person’s citizenship status.
The court said the administration's explanation for adding such a question is insufficient and sent it back to the lower courts for further consideration. The ruling marks a setback for the administration, though the issue is not yet resolved.
Still, while further lower-court litigation is possible, it would be very difficult for the administration to get the question on the census in time for the forms to be printed by the government’s own self-declared summer deadline.
The 5-4 court majority raised concerns about the Trump administration’s explanations for their proposal. The ruling, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, said that the court was presented "with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency’s priorities and decisionmaking process."
He added that the court "cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given."
The Supreme Court majority concluded the executive branch has broad authority to decide what goes onto the census, saying the survey routinely asks a range of questions on the form, beyond the number of people in a household. Roberts wrote that "neither respondents nor my colleagues have been able to identify any relevant, judicially manageable limits on the Secretary's decision to put a core demographic question back on the census."
But the opinion said "the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the [Commerce] Secretary gave for his decision."
He continued: "In the Secretary’s telling, Commerce was simply acting on a routine data request from another agency. Yet the materials before us indicate that Commerce went to great lengths to elicit the request from DOJ (or any other willing agency)."
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This case was one of the most closely watched cases of the court’s term, Department of Commerce v. New York, and explored exactly what led to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross deciding to include the question in the first place. The ruling comes after a ruling by the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, which said the question was improper.
SUPREME COURT SAYS FEDERAL JUDGES HAVE NO ROLE IN POLICING GERRYMANDERING, LEAVING POLITICAL MAPS IN PLACE
At issue was whether Ross acted within his authority when he added the question. More specifically, there were questions as to whether he violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which sets standards for how federal agencies make changes, or the Enumeration Clause of the Constitution, which says that congressional representatives are apportioned to states based on their populations’ “numbers” and “persons.”
Opponents of the question feared that by asking people about their citizenship status, immigrants may not want to respond and be counted in the census. This would result in official population numbers that are lower than they truly are, which in turn could yield less federal funding and fewer congressional seats in districts with high immigrant populations. Those districts tend to favor Democrats.
The four left-leaning Supreme Court justices also noted experts at the Census Bureau have said the citizenship question could lead to an undercount of as many as 6.5 million, especially in urban areas.
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The Trump administration claimed that the question is necessary because it would help with enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which deals with voting practices that discriminate based on race. The idea behind this is that having this data would help prevent the drawing of congressional maps in ways that discriminate against minority citizens of voting age.
Earlier in June, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Ross and Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt after they did not turn over documents pertaining to a committee request for records related to the addition of the citizenship question.
President Trump had invoked executive privilege to keep the records away from the House. The House has yet to take any further steps in contempt proceedings.
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There was a flurry of court activity related to the citizenship question in the days leading up to the Supreme Court’s decision.
On Monday, a U.S. District Court judge in Maryland issued a ruling stating that the question raises potential Equal Protection and civil rights issues. The same court had previously ruled that the citizenship question also violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Enumeration Clause.
The earlier ruling found that the Voting Rights Act had been used as a pretext for the citizenship question, but did not determine what the actual reason may have been. The later ruling was based on new evidence of the influence Dr. Thomas Hofeller, a political consultant who died last year, had on adding the question.
The court’s ruling discussed how Hofeller appeared to have been involved in creating the supposed pretext of the Voting Rights Act, and that Hofeller’s files include a study that shows that adding a citizenship question to the census would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
The ACLU included that ruling in Supreme Court filing asking the justices to take it into account and letting the case go back to a lower court for additional fact-finding.
On Tuesday, the government sent a letter to the Supreme Court, claiming that the Maryland District Court’s order was “based on a speculative conspiracy theory that is unsupported by the evidence and legally irrelevant.” That same day, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal granted a motion to send the case back down so that the Equal Protection and civil rights issues could be considered. The government then sent another letter, encouraging the Supreme Court to consider those additional issues.
SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN BAN ON SCANDALOUS TRADEMARKS, IN DISPUTE OVER ‘FUCT’ CLOTHING LINE
The census did include a citizenship question of sorts in the past, but not since 1950. Then, people were asked about their place of birth, and if it was outside the United States they were then asked if they had been naturalized.
Trump tweeted in April that the Census Report would be “meaningless” without the citizenship question.
Fox News’ Shannon Bream and Bill Mears contributed to this report.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sup...census-for-now
This is the biggest load of garbage ever. If it's constitutional, why do they have to have a reason that the SCOTUS approves of? This is all John Roberts' doing. He is the worst addition to the Court ever, a liberal in conservative clothing!!
BTW, the place of birth question was asked of all household members for many years. I know this because I have done a lot of genealogical study on my and my husband's families, mine in NC and his up north, and the censuses that I have most used have asked place of birth of all.
Thursday, June 27, 2019 10:45 AM
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed President Donald Trump a stinging defeat, ruling that his administration gave a "contrived" explanation for its plan to include a contentious citizenship question in the 2020 census in a decision that will make it difficult to add the query to the population survey.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 5-4 ruling and joined the court's four liberals in the majority, upholding part of a federal judge's January decision barring the question in a victory for a group of states including New York and immigrant rights organizations that had challenged the plan.
Critics have called the citizenship question a Republican ploy to scare immigrants into not taking part in the decennial population count and engineer an undercount in Democratic-leaning areas with high immigrant and Latino populations. That would benefit non-Hispanic whites and help President Donald Trump's party gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures, the critics said.
Trump said he will see if the census, which the U.S. Constitution requires be carried out every 10 years, can be delayed.
"I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter," Trump wrote on Twitter.
Trump's administration has told the courts that its rationale for adding the question was to better enforce a law that protects the voting rights of racial minorities. Critics called that rationale a pretext, with the Supreme Court's majority embracing that theory.
Roberts said that under a U.S. law called the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal government is required to give a reasoned explanation for its actions. Roberts said the sole stated rationale - enforcement of the Voting Right Act - "seems to have been contrived" and was "more of a distraction."
"We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency's priorities and decision-making process," Roberts wrote.
"Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise," Roberts added.
As part of the ruling issued on the last day of the court's current term, the justices sent the issue back to the Commerce Department for it to decide whether to provide a different rationale for requiring people taking part in the census to declare whether they are citizens.
The clock is ticking, with the administration previously saying that census forms needed to be printed in the coming days. A determination from a federal agency normally would take weeks or months.
"There is really no time. And if the administration tries to rush it that is clearly a red flag," said Dale Ho, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the challengers.
Jason Torchinsky, a lawyer and Republican redistricting strategist, said the deadline could be extended to the fall, which would enable the Supreme Court to review the new decision.
"They don't need to redo the entire administrative process, they just need to better justify what they did, in a way that can satisfy the Supreme Court," Torchinsky said.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco said the administration is disappointed by the Supreme Court's decision. "The Department of Justice will continue to defend this administration's lawful exercises of executive power," Laco said in a statement.
The census, required by the U.S. Constitution, is used to allot seats in the U.S. House and distribute some $800 billion in federal funds. Opponents have said the question would instill fear in immigrant households that the information would be shared with law enforcement, deterring them from taking part.
Further muddying the waters, there is also ongoing litigation in lower courts over recently unearthed evidence that the challengers have said reveals an illegal discriminatory motive by the administration for adding the question, which the high court could yet weigh in on.
The court ruled against the challengers in a separate 5-4 vote, with all the conservative justices in the majority, that the U.S. Constitution does not in theory prevent the administration or a future one from adding a citizenship question.
In a dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that adding a citizenship question is "legally sound" and described the ruling against Trump as "an aberration."
The Republican president's administration had appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts blocked the inclusion of the census question.
SETBACK FOR TRUMP
The ruling marked the first major setback for Trump in a ruling in a case argued at the Supreme Court, although both of Trump's appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, voted in favor of his administration. Roberts was joined by liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The Supreme Court had handed Trump some major victories since he took office in 2017, in particular a June 2018 ruling upholding his travel ban targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries. The court in January also let Trump's policy barring many transgender people from the U.S. military go into effect.
Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled on Jan. 15 that the Commerce Department's decision to add the question violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Federal judges in Maryland and California also have issued rulings to block the question's inclusion, saying it would violate the Constitution's mandate to enumerate the population every 10 years.
Furman said the evidence showed that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross concealed his true motives for adding the question and that he and his aides had convinced the Justice Department to request a citizenship question.
Citizenship has not been asked of all households since the 1950 census, featuring since then only on questionnaires sent to a smaller subset of the population.
The Census Bureau's own experts estimated that households corresponding to 6.5 million people would not respond to the census if the citizenship question were asked.
While only U.S. citizens can vote, non-citizens comprise an estimated 7 percent of the population.
Evidence surfaced in May that the challengers said showed that the administration's plan to add a citizenship question was intended to discriminate against racial minorities.
Documents created by Republican strategist Thomas Hofeller, who died last year, showed that he was instrumental behind the scenes in instigating the addition of the citizenship question. He was an expert in drawing electoral district boundaries that maximize Republican chances of winning congressional elections.
Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that asking census respondents whether they are American citizens "would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats" and "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" in redrawing electoral districts based on census data.
Hofeller suggested the voting rights rationale in the newly disclosed documents.
The Trump administration called the newly surfaced evidence "conspiracy theory."
Most people living in the United States will be asked to fill out the census, whether online or on paper, by March 2020.
https://www.newsmax.com/headline/sup.../27/id/922306/
- BREAKING NEWS
- Trump seeks 2020 census delay after Supreme Court blocks citizenship question
President Trump vowed Thursday to try delaying the 2020 census after the Supreme Court blocked, for now, his administration's plan to include a question that inquires about citizenship status.
Click here for more.- For more news, please go to FoxNews.com and watch Fox News Channel.
I WILL WRITE MY CITZENSHIP IN ON MY FORM AND ALL AMERICAN'S SHOULD DO THE SAME!!!
SEND THEM THE MESSAGE...WE WILL BE COUNTED AND WE WANT ILLEGALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY AND NOT ONE DIME OF OUR TAX MONEY TO "REPRESENT" THEM!