Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we continue our series on the major end-of-term Supreme Court decisions with a review of the Citizenship question census case.
The U.S. conducts a census every 10 years, with the next one coming up in 2020. This survey of the public is configured to identify, among other data, where people are within the country so that the government can provide adequate services for the populations in each region. The census also results in legislators being apportioned to states according to the relative population in those areas.
The goal of the government in conducting the census is to try and get the most accurate data and population count possible, yet after the Trump Administration took office, the Department of Commerce moved to add an interesting question to the census that has not been used since 1950. That question is whether the respondent and their family members are U.S. citizens.
The criticism of this question is that with the strong push of the current administration in the immigration field, that the citizenship question would make many non-citizens decline to respond to the census. With this skew of the population being heavily Latino and/or democrat, such a dampening of census response would inflate the relative numbers in republican districts and perhaps allow for more gerrymandering and electoral map favoritism of the republican party. The question was challenged as improper in the courts.
The court review has always been focused on whether the administration has a legitimate, important reason for adding this citizenship question. The administration and the Department of Justice claimed it needed citizenship information to help enforce the Voting Rights Act. However, the Trump administration has not shown much interest in enforcing the act over the past couple years, and the requested addition of the citizenship question predates any involvement from the Department of Justice on this issue.
In other words, the Trump administration appeared to be falsifying the reasoning for the citizenship question. Justice Roberts joined the liberal justices in a 5-4 majority decision of the Supreme Court last week upholding the challenge to stop this question being added to the census, sending the case back to the Commerce Department census agency for further handling. Although a new proposal could be made with new reasoning to consider the citizenship question, that seems unlikely since census forms need to start being printed no later than September or October, which is right around the corner.
Roberts was openly critical of the administration in his opinion, noting that the reasoned explanation requirement applied to administrative law is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, so that they can be scrutinized by courts and the public. Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the entire purpose of this enterprise. Judicial review demands something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.
The Bottom Line is: it was posited that John Roberts may become a new swing justice on the court with the departure of Anthony Kennedy last term, and this citizenship question census case shows that he can and will join with his more liberal colleagues when justified. That's an interesting development for the future of this Court. But this census action, much like some other actions of the Trump administration that have been previously stricken down by the Supreme Court, was not carefully reasoned or applied and that left fatal flaws for the court to identify easily. If the Trump administration had legitimate reason to add this census question, they did a poor job of explaining it in court.
Next week, we'll finish our current series on the Supreme Court term with a look at swing justices and whether there are actually 3 swing justices now instead of 1.
----------------------------------
Do you have a question? Send it in!
Thanks for reading. Please provide feedback and legal-themed questions as segment suggestions to me on Twitter @BuckeyeFitzy
No comments:
Post a Comment