This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
The Trump administration wants to change the U.S. Census by adding a question about citizenship status, and the Supreme Court’s five Republican-appointed justices seemed to signal yesterday that they would approve the change.
It’s an alarming situation, for three main reasons:
1. The Trump administration has lied.
Wilbur Ross, President Trump’s commerce secretary, who oversees the Census Bureau, told blatant falsehoods when explaining why he wanted to add the question. Ross claimed that his motivation was protecting the voting rights of African-Americans, a claim that makes no sense given the administration’s numerous other efforts to restrict voting rights. Three federal judges on lower courts have dismissed Ross’s explanation.
The administration’s real motivation is obvious. A citizenship question would reduce the response rate of immigrants, both legal and illegal, and thus reduce the political power of racially diverse states, which tend to lean Democratic.
2. The Roberts court would be playing politics.
There are clear legal reasons for the court’s Republican-appointed justices to be skeptical of Ross’s moves. Conservative judges, including some on the Supreme Court, often rule against bureaucrats who try to exercise powers that Congress did not intend them to have, as Ross has done here.
Yet the questions the justices asked during yesterday’s oral arguments suggest the five Republican appointees on the court are going to side with the Trump administration anyway. It would be a distressingly transparent example of judges acting as partisan legislators rather than as disinterested judges — and it’s the exact opposite of the legal philosophy Chief Justice John Roberts claims to hold.
[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
The case’s “real test is of the Supreme Court’s integrity and politicization,” the Georgetown law professor William Buzbee wrote in The Times this week. “If the court’s conservatives dodge the troubling facts and violations of law in this case, then their political stripes will be revealed.” CNN’s Joan Biskupic, author of a recent Roberts biography, said the case would affect “the court’s reputation as a neutral player.”
3. The census would be less accurate.
Census Bureau officials have conceded that the citizenship question could cause as many as 6.5 million people to go uncounted. That number would include both undocumented immigrants and United States citizens who are Hispanic, all of whom might be afraid of harassment by federal agents.
A census that ignored these residents would be problematic in multiple ways. It could affect the drawing of districts for both Congress and state legislatures, as well as federal spending. Corporate executives and social scientists would also suffer, because they rely on census data for research. “The private sector, like the government, uses the wealth of information generated by the census to make critical business decisions,” David Kenny, the chief executive of the research company Nielsen, wrote this week.
For more, see Emily Bazelon’s Times Magazine article from last year; Vox’s Dara Lind’s explanation of the legal questions; and the Twitter feed of NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang, who has been covering the citizenship question story for months.
If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | The Three Big Problems With Trump’s Census
Opinion | The Three Big Problems With Trump’s Census
This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
The Trump administration wants to change the U.S. Census by adding a question about citizenship status, and the Supreme Court’s five Republican-appointed justices seemed to signal yesterday that they would approve the change.
It’s an alarming situation, for three main reasons:
1. The Trump administration has lied.
Wilbur Ross, President Trump’s commerce secretary, who oversees the Census Bureau, told blatant falsehoods when explaining why he wanted to add the question. Ross claimed that his motivation was protecting the voting rights of African-Americans, a claim that makes no sense given the administration’s numerous other efforts to restrict voting rights. Three federal judges on lower courts have dismissed Ross’s explanation.
The administration’s real motivation is obvious. A citizenship question would reduce the response rate of immigrants, both legal and illegal, and thus reduce the political power of racially diverse states, which tend to lean Democratic.
2. The Roberts court would be playing politics.
There are clear legal reasons for the court’s Republican-appointed justices to be skeptical of Ross’s moves. Conservative judges, including some on the Supreme Court, often rule against bureaucrats who try to exercise powers that Congress did not intend them to have, as Ross has done here.
Yet the questions the justices asked during yesterday’s oral arguments suggest the five Republican appointees on the court are going to side with the Trump administration anyway. It would be a distressingly transparent example of judges acting as partisan legislators rather than as disinterested judges — and it’s the exact opposite of the legal philosophy Chief Justice John Roberts claims to hold.
[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
The case’s “real test is of the Supreme Court’s integrity and politicization,” the Georgetown law professor William Buzbee wrote in The Times this week. “If the court’s conservatives dodge the troubling facts and violations of law in this case, then their political stripes will be revealed.” CNN’s Joan Biskupic, author of a recent Roberts biography, said the case would affect “the court’s reputation as a neutral player.”
3. The census would be less accurate.
Census Bureau officials have conceded that the citizenship question could cause as many as 6.5 million people to go uncounted. That number would include both undocumented immigrants and United States citizens who are Hispanic, all of whom might be afraid of harassment by federal agents.
A census that ignored these residents would be problematic in multiple ways. It could affect the drawing of districts for both Congress and state legislatures, as well as federal spending. Corporate executives and social scientists would also suffer, because they rely on census data for research. “The private sector, like the government, uses the wealth of information generated by the census to make critical business decisions,” David Kenny, the chief executive of the research company Nielsen, wrote this week.
For more, see Emily Bazelon’s Times Magazine article from last year; Vox’s Dara Lind’s explanation of the legal questions; and the Twitter feed of NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang, who has been covering the citizenship question story for months.
If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
Source: Read Full Article