Census question off table, for now
Supreme Court also backs off redistricting case in show of its impact on politics
WASHINGTON — In two rulings that bore huge implications for U.S. politics and governance, the Supreme Court handed Republicans a key victory by refusing to halt even the most extreme gerrymandered maps and potentially gave Democrats a win by at least delaying the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
The two bitterly contested cases addressed an issue fundamental to the political system itself: how that system allocates power, and ultimately, how much of a voice the American people have in selecting their leaders.
Gerrymandered maps that entrench one party in near-unbreakable power have become rampant as courts dithered over how and whether to rein them in. Now, with a green light from the justices, Republicans have an opportunity to lock in political dominance for the next decade in many of the 22 states where they control both the legislature and the governor’s office.
And the decision will almost certainly force Democrats, who control 14 statehouses, to reconsider their belated crusade against gerrymandered maps and begin drawing their own — an eat-or-be-eaten response to Republican success in gaming the redistricting process.
Thursday’s decision on gerrymandering “tears at the fabric of our democracy and puts the interests of the established few above the many,” said Eric H. Holder Jr.,
an attorney general in the Obama administration who now heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The committee’s nonprofit arm financed the lawsuit that was before the Supreme Court seeking to block North Carolina’s congressional map.
On the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, Democrats emerged with a more positive outcome — for now, at least.
Adding a citizenship question to the census could have a profound effect on U.S. politics, as the country relies on population figures from the census to divvy up seats in the House of Representatives and to draw political maps at all levels of government.
The Census Bureau has said that adding a citizenship question would lead more noncitizens and minorities to avoid being counted. Because most of these people live in predominantly Democratic areas, the undercount would weaken Democratic representation in states with large numbers of noncitizens and skew the allotment of billions of federal dollars away from those areas as well.
But by ruling that the Trump administration offered no credible reason for proposing the question, the justices placed a daunting hurdle before the government, which must print questionnaires and other 2020 census documents within months, if not weeks, to keep the head count on schedule.
The administration would have to create a new rationale for adding the question and win the approval of a skeptical district court, which ruled that its stated reason for the question — to better enforce the Voting Rights Act — was a bald contrivance hiding some other motive.
“We are disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision today,” said Kelly Laco, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, which she said “will continue to defend this administration’s lawful exercises of executive power.”
President Donald Trump tweeted that he has inquired with “the lawyers” whether the census may be delayed until the Supreme Court receives the necessary information to make a “final and decisive decision” on the matter.
“Can anyone really believe that as a great Country, we are not able the ask whether or not someone is a Citizen,” Trump’s tweet says. “Only in America!”
Groups who had opposed adding the question were pleased but cautious.
“On the census, the Trump administration’s lies went so far that even this Supreme Court had to say no,” said Michael Waldman, president of the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. “If this leads to a result with no citizenship question, that would be a very welcome outcome, and it would also preserve the status quo.”
What happens next was not immediately clear, because the department had said it must know by the summer whether the question can be added.
The Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, did not have an immediate comment.
A second census lawsuit was reopened this month in federal court in Maryland, where opponents of the question claim that new evidence proves that the question is an unconstitutional effort to discriminate against Hispanics for political gain. That proceeding, which the justices made no effort to stop Thursday, appears likely to stretch at least into late August.
In theory, the government could clear those barriers, appeal any adverse rulings and still tack the question onto the 2020 questionnaire, Cary Coglianese, a law professor who directs the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania, said Thursday. “But I struggle to see the path by which the citizenship question ends up on the 2020 census form,” he added.
In their rulings Thursday, the justices stated pointedly that their decisions were legal opinions, not political ones. “No one can accuse this court of having a crabbed view of its reach or competence,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in the partisan maps cases. “But we have no commission to allocate political power and influence in the absence of a constitutional directive.”
But the political subtext of the decisions was unmistakable among those affected by them.